 Today we are invited to Neutrona P.A. to see one of the homes built by Penn Salt Company for their workers returning from the Civil War, right around 1865. The Neutrona Comes Together Association is working hard to preserve this structure and turn it into a local museum. If you're not familiar with the city of Neutrona, it's probably most famous, or should I say infamous, for producing DDT, which was extremely harmful for the environment and spurred Rachel Carson to write a book called Silent Spring. The good news is that the environment is healing and there have even been evil eggs found in the area again. Join us as we explore the small slice of local history. We're inside a Penn Salt Company house in Neutrona, Pennsylvania. I think in the 1970s they opened it up to employees to actually buy the houses. So at one point the last owners was a husband and wife with six children and they lived in this, you can see it's just like sort of like three small rooms and the bedrooms are upstairs under the eaves and we got a letter from one of the women that lived here and she said it was the happiest time in her life. She loved living here in Neutrona. All the workers who worked upon Salt were paid with Penn Salt dollars and they had to actually rent Penn Salt houses and buy at the company store with Penn Salt dollars. So all the money you spent went back into the company. Now the houses were built in 1850. There's two types of Penn Salt houses in Neutrona. There's the Brick House which were original built in 1850 but these houses were built for returning Civil War veterans so right after like 1865. This one was like lacking a fireplace mantle but there was an exact house about three doors down that had fallen down. So I sort of crawled into the wreckage and got this original mantle. I think of all the like Christmas stockings that were on here for the last like 150 years. Well an interesting thing if you know the painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic where the guy is standing with the pitchboard, this is like the exact replica of that house. This actually was what it looked like originally. This is a supporting wall even though it's like a three quarters of an inch thick. This is what it basically looked like. It was insulated by newspaper so when we were sort of remodeling we were peeling back the newspaper layers like through the 40s, 30s, 40s. We got really to this turn of the century and right around the Civil War were some of the original newspapers and you can see we sort of kept this wall so we have something that's historically correct but as you can see the peeled layers here and all the termite holes. So we're probably going to put a coat of varnish or something of this to sort of preserve it but this is really the only wall that is totally original to the house. Or it would be a really great space for art classes or yoga classes or you know having children's artwork or something so this could really be a really breathing living museum. If you'd like to donate you can go online and they turn it comes together and there should be information there on our website. Do you believe a family of six actually lived up here?