A Corridor of Fear

In the summer of 2012, supported by funds from the Chesapeake Conservancy, Meredyk and another student, Bethany Dunn ’14 worked on a mapping project on the main stem of the Susquehanna River between Harrisburg and Sunbury.  This project was very ambitious: to map the river not as a continuous geographical feature but rather as a segmented and complex corridor of fear.  The mid-eighteenth century saw the multiple murders of both Indians and settlers along the river, the most notorious of these being the Paxton Boys massacre of the Susquehannock Indians at Conestoga and the Frederick Stump murders on Middle Creek.  Meredyk  set out to represent the increasingly racialized politics of the Pennsylvania Backcountry, again drawing on manuscript maps, archival materials, journals, letters, and broadsheets to map the complexity of human experience.  This draft is currently the subject of Meredyk’s Honors thesis in Geography at Bucknell University.