1996 Winter, Volume 13, Issue 2

Forty-Three Baltimore Street

The history of a remarkable African-American family in Pennsylvania begins, in a sense, with a two-story frame house at 43 Baltimore Street in Carlisle. The builders of the house, Jonas and Mary Kee, came into Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century from Maryland and Virginia respectively. Their daughter, Margaret, married William James Andrews, whose forebears were in Shippensburg as early as 1790. The Andrews were the second generation to inhabit the house.

Middlesex: An All-American Truck Stop

Spinning off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the Carlisle exit, the road-weary traveler might easily forget the considerably developed and congested 1.2- mile section of US Route 11 which serves as the only link between the Turnpike and Interstate 81, known locally as the "Miracle Mile." Presiding over this busy commercial strip is a distinctive red, white and blue truck stop called the "All American Travel Plaza."

A Traveller in the County: 1810

Cumberland County and Valley before the 1830s was one of the principal avenues to the American West. A steady procession of naturalists, farmers with their families and flocks, European reporters on American democracy, investors and speculators in land, fortune hunters and ne'er-do-wells came up from Philadelphia, crossed the Susquehanna, and, many of them, passed through Carlisle and Shippensburg over the mountains to Bedford, Pittsburgh, and the fertile lands of Ohio.

Why Hampden?

In 1995 Hampden Township observed its sesquicentenary, causing one to wonder why it is called Hampden. While there is no documentary proof, it can with some confidence be concluded that it bears the name of a little known, almost forgotten hero of the English Civil War. Cumberland County's standard histories-Wing, Beers, Donehoo, and Godcharles-dutifully note the formation of the township in January, 1845, but none inquires into the name it bears. The county's prothonotary records the actions in civil court creating the township, but such transcripts offer no reason for the name.