The "Old" Market House the day before it was razed in 1878. The spire of the former Second Presbyterian Church can be seen in the background. The sign above the "Volunteer Printing Office" can also be seen on the roofline of the brick building to the rear of the market. This Market House was built in 1836 and razed in 1878. The stereoscopic view similar to this photo is found at 01105C#02. It may have been the original negative and Line made a copy negative from it that he copyrighted. (Photo ID# 01103A).
Carlisle father and son die of the same disease on the same day of the week in the same building four years apart.
On Saturday afternoon, August 20, 1870, John Early left the Franklin House Hotel. He crossed South Hanover Street and “walked to Inhoff’s grocery store to transact some business. While he was talking to Mr. Inhoff, he groaned, sank to the floor, drew two breaths, and died.”1 He was 59 years old.
His body was taken to Dr. Bender’s office across the street. The coroner and a jury were summoned for an inquest. After hearing the evidence, they pronounced that John Early had died of a “visitation of God.” The Coroner found quite a bit of money, a gold watch, and other articles in Early’s room at the National Hotel where he boarded. Undertaker A. B. Ewing delivered the body to Early’s son-in-law’s residence on North Pitt Street where it was packed in ice until Early’s relatives could arrive. For several years In the 1860s Mr. Early ran the Warm Springs Hotel in Perry County, and later the National Hotel at the corner of South Hanover and Walnut streets in Carlisle. He was buried in Carlisle’s Ashland Cemetery.
The circumstances of the death of Mr. Early’s son Simon on Saturday January 10, 1874, shocked Carlisle’s residents. According to an account in the Carlisle Weekly Herald, Simon Early and several men were sitting in the Singer sewing machine room in the Volunteer newspaper printing office building on Liberty Ave. by the Market House. Early and the men were talking when Early “complained of a severe pain about the heart and requested George Spangler to accompany him to his residence in Mr. C. Inhoff’s building…Before reaching the house he sank to the pavement and was carried into the house. He expired a very few minutes thereafter.”2 Simon Early, an agent for Singer Sewing Machines, was 37 years old when he died. He was a charter member of the Knights of the Mystic Chain and left a widow, a son, and a daughter to mourn him.
The newspaper commented that “the sudden death of [Simon’s] father, John Early, which occurred Saturday, August 20, 1870, in the same building, and not more than twenty feet from the spot where his son died, is still fresh in the minds of our citizens. It is quite a striking coincidence that father and son should both die from the same disease, on the same day of the week, and in the same building.”3
John Early, his wife Susan who died six months before him, and Simon and his wife Eliza are all buried in Carlisle’s Ashland Cemetery.
For several decades during the second half of the 19th century, William Egolff and his sisters Elizabeth and Barbara operated a boarding house in Carlisle in the three-story brick building at No. 7-11 North Hanover street.
1 Carlisle Weekly Herald, August 25, 1870.
2 Carlisle Weekly Herald, January 15, 1874.
3 Ibid.