Latest news with #Harford
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Yahoo
Lightning strike causes Harford house fire, kills two dogs
HARFORD, Md. (DC News Now) — Two dogs have died after a Harford home burst into flames after being struck by lightning Friday, according to the Maryland State Fire Marshal. The Jarrettsville Volunteer Fire Company, Harford County Department of Emergency Services, and surrounding fire departments responded at 6:10 p.m. to reports of a house fire in the 2300 block of Shuster Road. Person dead after tree falls on person's car in Fort Hunt Heavy flames and thick smoke were billowing from the home as the fire rapidly spread throughout the house. Fire crews used numerous tankers, heavy machinery, and assistance from the home's fire sprinklers. Firefighters say the flames most likely started in the attic, caused by a lightning strike. Surrounding neighbors claimed they saw, heard, and felt a lightning strike. According to firefighters, no one was home at the time of the fire, but two dogs were killed. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Harford woman preserves community history at Soldier's Orphan's School
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways May 6—HARFORD — The history of Harford is rich and goes back over 200 years. Due to the hard work of some of the town's passionate community members, much of that history can still be observed today! The institution that became the foundation of the Civil War Soldier's Orphan's School began in 1817 when Caleb Richardson Jr. established the Franklin Academy in his home. In 1832, the school had expanded to the Franklin Academy and Franklin Hall was built. In 1850 the school became an accredited university. Then in 1865, the state took over the property for a school for children orphaned by the Civil War. Today, the Soldier's Orphan's School is one of the few remaining orphan schools still standing in Pennsylvania and two of the original buildings, including Franklin Hall, are a local museum housing civil war relics and memorabilia from the Harford community. Two people who were influential in preserving this local history was Alan and Margery (Empet) Rhodes. Alan's father, Glenn Rhodes, and his wife, Leda (Adams), were both born in Harford and were familiar with the school when it was still a functioning orphans' school. In 1948, Glenn bought the Orphan's School Farm and the two buildings that are still in existence today. Glenn continued farming on the land and in 1959, his son, Alan and his wife, Margery (Empet), bought the property. They expanded the farm eventually using the buildings for their capon business. Glen and Leda had a passion for local history and instilled this passion in Alan. In 1987, the Rhodes sold part of their farm and the historic buildings to the Harford Historical Society. Margery and Alan thought the buildings should be restored and in 1990, the Harford Historical Society took on the project of preserving the buildings and creating a museum. The buildings were old and work had to be done to make everything safe and usable, but the people of Harford came together to put their skills to work. Roger Whitaker Sr., Anson Tiffany, Clifford Jones, Max Jones, Arthur Empet, Spencer Empet, Garfield Williams. Ed Vanderford, Kenneth Laurie, Charlotte Squiers, Robert Squiers, Donna Salensky, and Masters Concrete began to repair foundations, reinforce and replace windows, conduct roof and chimney repair, add insulation, and plaster and paint walls and ceilings. The final finishing of the woodwork was done by Ivie Simons, Betty Laurie, Charlotte Squiers, Clifford Jones, Max Jones, and John Schultz. After many hours of volunteer work, the building was ready and the museum was opened. It still stands today as a memorial to the Franklin Academy, Harford University, and the Soldier's Orphan's School. But Alan and Margery Rhodes were not finished. As Margery dug into old histories, she discovered there was much more to the orphans' school than just the two buildings that had been restored. She began walking the grounds, examining the sites of old stone walls and foundations, and taking careful measurements of placement and distance between the buildings. She also read Pennsylvania State Government superintendent reports and found out names of buildings and which buildings were adjacent to others. Her research enabled her to locate the walkways between the buildings and the boys' and girls' privies. To make this history come alive, Margery began designing a scaled model of the old school for future generations. Soon her husband, children, and grandchildren were involved in the project. To reward the children, Margery carefully plotted the hours and days that the children worked in a notebook which is still kept by her daughter, Linda, today. Her husband added to the realism of the project by collecting twigs to add trees with gnarled trunks. He cut piles of pine shavings into tiny strips to duplicate the clapboard construction. He built the wooden walkways, designed a waving flag with ropes and a mechanism to raise and lower it, cut toothpicks for the sills of the small windows, and reproduced a cross barred wooden fence placed according to an old picture of the school. According to Margery's notebook, the entire project took 550 hours. Today, you can enjoy this model by listening to a recording which explains many of the details of the model. On Saturday, May 10, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Harford Historical Society will be holding its monthly used book sale at the Soldier's Orphan's School. The museum will also be open at this time. Come by to find some good books, and enjoy the preservation of history completed by so many of Harford's residents.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Yahoo
Funeral home owner who left corpse in hearse for a over a year pleads guilty
DENVER (AP) — The Colorado funeral home owner accused of leaving a woman's corpse in the back of a hearse for over a year and improperly stashing the cremated remains of at least 30 people pleaded guilty in court Monday to one count of corpse abuse and one count of theft. Miles Harford's guilty plea in Denver follows years of other gruesome funeral home cases in Colorado, including one where the owners were accused of storing nearly 200 bodies in a decrepit building and giving families fake cremated remains. Harford, 34, faced a dozen counts including forgery, theft and four counts of abuse of a corpse, which prosecutors described as treating bodies or remains 'in a way that would outrage normal family sensibilities.' The plea agreement dismisses the rest of the counts, but the judge said the agreement requires that all victims be named within the two charges Harford pleaded guilty to, and that he would be liable for restitution including for the dismissed counts. Harford was arrested a year ago after the body of a woman named Christina Rosales, who died of Alzheimer's at age 63, was found in the back of a hearse, covered in blankets, along with cremated remains of other people stashed throughout Harford's rental property, including in the crawlspace. Harford is represented by lawyers from the state public defender's office, which does not comment on its cases to the media. There were no other details in the court hearing on the charges, including how much money was taken from victims or how corpses were abused. The funeral home cases over the years prompted lawmakers to pass sweeping new regulations of the funeral home industry in Colorado last year, which previously had little oversight. The sentencing is scheduled for June 9. ___ Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Associated Press
14-04-2025
- Associated Press
Funeral home owner who left corpse in hearse for a over a year pleads guilty
DENVER (AP) — The Colorado funeral home owner accused of leaving a woman's corpse in the back of a hearse for over a year and improperly stashing the cremated remains of at least 30 people pleaded guilty in court Monday to counts of corpse abuse and theft. Miles Harford's guilty plea in Denver follows years of other gruesome funeral home cases in Colorado, including one where the owners were accused of storing nearly 200 bodies in a decrepit building and giving families fake cremated remains. Harford, 34, faced a dozen counts of forgery, theft and abuse of a corpse, which prosecutors described as treating bodies or remains 'in a way that would outrage normal family sensibilities.' The plea agreement dismissed the rest of the charges, but the judge said the agreement requires that all victims be named within the two charges Harford pleaded guilty to, and that he would be liable for restitution including for the dismissed counts. Harford was arrested a year ago after the body of a woman named Christina Rosales, who died of Alzheimer's at age 63, was found in the back of a hearse, covered in blankets, along with cremated remains of other people stashed throughout Harford's rental property, including in the crawlspace. Harford is represented by lawyers from the state public defender's office, which does not comment on its cases to the media. There were no other details in the court hearing on the charges, including how much money was taken from victims or how corpses were abused. The funeral home cases over the years prompted lawmakers to pass sweeping new regulations of the funeral home industry in Colorado last year, which previously had little oversight. The sentencing is scheduled for June 9. ___ Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Telegraph
19-03-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Five years on, we're only just starting to understand how much lockdown damaged our children
Far more illuminating, yet arguably even more depressing, was Monday's analysis of the long-term impacts of lockdown, particularly on children. On Woman's Hour we heard about babies not learning to point or wave; in the trio of reports titled Lockdown's Legacy, children, teachers and medics lined up to lay bare just how scarring that period of isolation was for the young; on Start the Week we learnt that adults whose mental health suffered in lockdown have largely recovered – but children haven't. 'We had this haloed image of kids doing Joe Wicks videos in the garden and sitting doing their homework,' said one doctor, 'but for many children that was just not the case.' Those children, he said, are the ones we should worry about. Later he spoke of seeing 'Victorian levels of abuse and neglect' when lockdown restrictions eased. The day was a parade of anecdotes about stunted development, poor educational attainment, malnutrition, mental health epidemics, spiralling standards of behaviour and a lost generation. We heard statements such as, 'Many believe this [lack of social development in reception-aged children] is because of Covid-19' and, 'It's clear a year out of traditional schooling will have lasting impacts', and while it was all largely convincing you yearned for a bit of roughage in your diet: where was the data to support all this? Step forward the excellent More or Less, Tim Harford's wonderfully clear-eyed, no bulls--t programme that sloughs away anecdote and asks what the numbers are actually telling us. It gave Monday's day of programming a spine of steel. It was, and I mean this as a compliment, quite boring at times. Harford was not about to allow an eye-catching statistic to go unchallenged or a strong statement to be uninspected. He wanted to know what damage we did to our young when, with the lockdown, we sought to protect the adults – the 'intergenerational transfer of harms' as Harford called it. It was bleak. For children who started school in 2020, there's an appreciable drop in learning attainment, just as there was for older primary-aged children (though the data showed the pupils could recover that loss). Absence has rocketed – 10.5 per cent of children missed 10 per cent or more of school days in 2019. In 2023, it was more than 21 per cent. Suspensions have doubled. The truly depressing aspect was how lockdown acted as an 'amplifier', with more affluent children coping well, while the disadvantaged suffered even more. 'A decade of progress in closing the educational attainment gap was wiped out,' said one academic. 'We should never, ever have closed the schools,' said a teacher. More or Less's refusal to supply easy headlines – on lockdown's impact on university students: 'We just don't know yet' – makes it all the more powerful when it finds hard evidence. Throughout the day we heard emotive stories about young people's mental health, and while they were affecting you wondered what the true picture was. More or Less had data to show it's every bit as bad as the anecdotes suggest, and it's getting worse: 'The figures are a gut-punch.' One in 10 young people showed signs of a mental health illness before the pandemic. Now it's one in five – and rising. Radio 4 gave us all sorts of perspectives on lockdown and, in the main, the farmers, parents, teachers, artists and Icelandic concert pianists have managed to roll with the punches. For the young, however, it came at an enormous cost. And we're only just beginning to learn how much.
