Planet Smethport
“A Virtual, Historical Walking Tour of Smethport”

Ross Porter’s Smethport Geography class has created a virtual internet walking tour of Smethport and near by communities in McKean County. According o these students, we are “building and immense puzzle in which we are fitting historic photos, post cards, biographies, geographies, histories, news paper clippings and oral histories & interviews, obituaries, artifacts & memorabilia to form a huge portrait puzzle of the magnificent area. The pieces do not come in a box. They are hidden in attics, shoe boxes, albums, and of course, in our local museums. It is our job to find them and put them back together to build this giant puzzle!”

The project allows visitors to the web site to become “time travelers.” “Through the magic of the internet, we can now weave the past into a single, connected unit in a way never possible in the past. This is not a book; it’s a creation that records and recreates our past so we virtually can time travel through our streets and through our history and then back to our present. The scenes within the site are linked to a CURRENT PHOTO of the same location.”

Click the screenshot above for a larger image.

Students involved with the site are also building a special, animated 3-D section presenting Smethport as it appeared in 1861. The animations create the effect of walking around certain important buildings in town in order to visualize them as did the 1861 citizens of Smethport.

Pennsylvania Department of Education Standards is used as guidelines for the construction and maintenance of the site. The

standards apply to history, writing, geography, and technology.

The Smethport Area Chamber of Commerce invites you to put on your magic walking shoes and take an historical voyage of Smethport at www.smethporthistory.org.

All aboard!