Three published works have dealt with routes through the area of Cumberland County which is west of Carlisle. In 1904 a Shippensburg attorney, John R. Miller, wrote Reminiscences of the Walnut Bottom Road. Five years later a Carlisle surveyor, John D. Hemminger, published Old Roads of Cumberland County.
Linda Witmer's chronicle of the Carlisle Indian School makes one feel that he was really there and knew some of the students personally. The story begins with the journey of seventy-two shackled Indian prisoners to St. Augustine, Florida in 1875 under Richard Henry Pratt, the transfer of most of them three years later to Hampton, Virginia, and the establishment of the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle in 1879.
In 1793 President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol. This event initiated the construction of a building which the statesmen and political leaders of the day hoped would be a grand monument to the democratic ideals of the young nation. To the extent that this first national government building in the Capital City achieved its lofty objective was due to the creativity and vision of Benjamin Latrobe. He served as architect of the United States Capitol from 1803 to 1813 and again from 1815 to 1817.
The James Wilson chair on exhibit at the Cumberland County Historical Society is a large, classical Chippendale chair, perhaps too big for all of us, Wilson's cultural descendants, to sit in. For not only was James Wilson a big man physically, he was a big man politically. Indeed, during his time, it may surely be said that he was an oversized American in every significant respect.
Sarah Mather Deeter was a prototype for a mid-19th- mid-20th century middle class woman. The daughter of an enterprising couple, she was a good student in school, studied voice, married a singer, kept house and reared a family of five children in Mechanicsburg, a fairly typical, largely middle-class town in central Pennsylvania.
The building of the first Susquehanna River bridge from Harrisburg to Cumberland County brought about the beginning of the first west shore community, Wormleysburg. When Cumberland County was established in 1750, the west shore for "five or six miles back from the river" since 1736 had already been reserved by the Penn family for the use of the Shawnee Indians. However, the Indians moved on to the west.