John N Thomas
John Thomas served in Company K of the 4th U.S.C.T. He died on February 7th, 1881, and is buried in Lincoln Cemetery, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Carlisle
Jesse G. Thompson
Jesse G. Thompson was born around 1844, in Carlisle Pennsylvania, to parents Benjamin and Mary Thompson. In 1850 he was the youngest child in his household at six years old, with three older siblings named William, Richard, and Jane.1 In 1860 he was sixteen years old and working as a laborer, with two younger siblings named George and Mary.2 Thompson enlisted into Company A of the 32nd U.S.C.T. as a private, on February 17, 1864, in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.
Brigadier-General William Thompson
In Carlisle’s Old Graveyard at the corner of East South and South Bedford Streets is located an eight foot Celtic cross commemorating the burial place of Brigadier-General William Thompson.
Jim Thorpe – Athlete, Activist
James Francis Thorpe was born in 1887 to Hiram Thorpe and Charlotte Vieux in a one-room cabin near Prague, Oklahoma. Hiram was a farmer and Charlotte, a Pottawatomie Indian, a descendant of the last great Sauk and Fox chief Black Hawk, a noted warrior and athlete.
The “Tractobile”: How Carlisle Almost Eclipsed Detroit as an Automotive Center
Carlisle was an optimistic town on the move in the early 1900’s and as the new century dawned it was welcomed with “Such a clanging of bells, blowing of whistles, shooting of guns, etc., as was never heard before, even on mornings of the glorious fourths.”12
A Train Ride Through Carlisle in 1920: A Reminiscence and Description
Today we will board an N-gauge passenger train in Harrisburg and travel through Carlisle 20 miles west of Harrisburg. This trip will be illustrated by using this 3' by 7' model of 1920 Carlisle. In 1920 tracks for Cumberland Valley Railroad passenger trains ran in the center of Main Street, now called High Street. These tracks were laid in 1837 and were in continuous use until 1936. The passenger station was located on the northwest corner of Main and North Pitt Streets.
Trains and Trolleys In and Out of Carlisle
Editor's Note: The late George M . Diffenderfer in 1972 '"womped' together for his own amazement, " as he wrote (and for his friends' amusement, one might add), a 126-page "compilation of nostaligia" that he titled “I Believe in Yesterday." Notes and vignettes of persons, places, and events, principally in Carlisle, that he remembered from his boyhood before World War I, the manuscript is remarkably detailed, personal, impressionistic, and often gossipy.
Transportation, Competition, and the Growth of a Town: Carlisle, 1750-1860
Rapid improvements in modes of transportation occurred during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. These innovations altered the structure of the United States demographically, causing some population centers to flourish, others to die, and still others to be born. Major cities, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, competed to build more extensive and efficient transportation systems to the hinterlands so that they could become the dominate outlets for the goods of the rural areas. Small towns in the interior of Pennsylvania which became entangled in this transportation web, such as Carlisle, prospered as a result of this competition.
A Traveller in Cumberland County, 1807
Fortescue Cuming (1 762-1828) was one of the many travellers who passed through Cumberland County in the half century after 1785, and was one of those who kept and published a full account of the journey. A native of County Tyrone, Ireland, he had come to America after 1784 and been a resident of Connecticut since 1792. In 1806 he purchased land in the western country of the United States and the following year set out to the Ohio and Mississippi to inspect it.
A Traveller in Cumberland County, 1844
Commander (as he then was) Charles Wilkes, U.S.N. (1798- 1877) travelled through Cumberland County to Harrisburg in August 1844. He described the towns and countryside he passed through, noted institutions like churches and the county jail, and passed ten days in Carlisle, where he was agreeably entertained by the gentry and by officers at Carlisle Barracks.