Southampton Township was formed in 1783. It rests at the south-west corner of Cumberland County and is bordered by Franklin and Adams Counties. The southern part of the township nestles against South Mountain and is currently zoned for Woodlands Conservation in order to preserve the forests.
On Saturday evening, February 27, 1836, a number of Irishmen and their descendants living in Carlisle and the surrounding area met at the Mansion House on West High Street to plan a St. Patrick’s Day celebration to honor the birth of the patron saint of Ireland.
Recently published by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is a 216-page, new edition of its popular Guide to the State Historical Ma1kers of Pennsylvania. The compiler is George R. Beyer, a Commission historian who manages the marker program. Another state historian, Harold Myers, has written introductions to the twelve sections of the book which correspond with the dozen geographical regions into which the Commonwealth is divided for the marker purposes.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) has overseen a program to recognize important historical sites throughout the Commonwealth since 1946. Prior to that, a program existed that identified historical sites with a plaque.
Born in 1837, George H. Stewart Sr. was educated in Shippensburg and then Milnwood Academy. He became a businessman early on in his life and his first venture was working a mercantile business in Shippensburg from 1851-1869.
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, temperance movements were prominent in Cumberland County.
The oldest town in the Cumberland Valley, straddling the border between Franklin and Cumberland counties in the rolling foothill system of the Appalachian Mountains of south central Pennsylvania, the Borough of Shippensburg is laid out in a grid pattern. The town's major east-west thoroughfare is King Street, an old Indian path, and along this two-lane road, also designated U.S. Route 11, has long lain much of its commercial district.
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.
François Andre Michaux, botanist and silviculturist, a traveller in America, and author of a work on the forest trees of North America, first came to America in 1787 with his father, Andre, who established two nurseries in the young United States and proposed an exploration of the Missouri River and the American West in 1793, ten years before the expedition of Lewis and Clark.