After 13 years of presenting the Summer Speakers Series at the Anna Mary Williamson Library and Museum, we are taking the show just up the road a bit.
The 2025 Summer Speakers Series will be held at the Richardson House, on the corner of W. Maple and S. Bellevue Avenues in Langhorne Borough.

All presentations will be held on Tuesday evenings and will begin at 7:30 PM.
A $5 per person donation at the door is requested to support the LCA Student Scholarship Fund.  Light refreshments will be served.

August 12:  New Life for Historic Recipes:  A Domestic Cook Book (1866) by Malinda Russell is the oldest known published cookbook written by an African American woman. This new edition includes a foreword by scholar Rafia Zafar as well as an introduction by food historian Janice Bluestein Longone that contextualizes Russell’s cookbook. Born in Tennessee and descended from Virginia freemen, Russell decided to move to Liberia at the age of 19. When her money for the trip was stolen, she ended up stranded in Lynchburg, Virginia, and began working as a cook and companion, traveling with ladies as a nurse. After living there for only four years, her husband died and she moved with her son to Tennessee where she kept a boarding house and then went on to run a pastry shop. After a second dramatic robbery in 1864, Malinda moved to Paw Paw, Michigan, because she had heard it was the “garden of the west” and published a cookbook “with the intention of benefiting the public” as well as supporting herself.  Local food historian Mercy Ingraham was involved in analyzing these 19th-century recipes and making them work for 21st-century kitchens and ingredients.  She will share her experience with this project.