1997 Summer, Volume 14, Issue 1

The Artificial Swan, the Elephant, and the One Hundred Educated Canaries: Public Performance in Cumberland County 1800-1870

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was no simple matter for professional performers to get to the Cumberland Valley, and local newspaper coverage of entertainment is so sketchy that we can only guess at how often theatrical companies, musical groups, or other entertainers included Carlisle, Shippensburg, Chambersburg, and other towns on their itineraries.

The Carlisle Deluge, 1779, Revisited

We report here that evidence for the 1779 Carlisle Deluge still exists. In the Summer, 1996 issue of Cumberland County History, Whitfield J. Bell described what he called the Carlisle Deluge. Bell used primary sources, mainly a letter from David Rittenhouse to Benjamin Franklin, to describe how, on the night of August 19, 1779, a thunderstorm with copious rain opened a gash on the south side of North (Blue) Mountain east of Flat Rock and northwest of the present Bloserville. Rocks and trees were carried down the mountain.

Ida G. Kast, Cumberland County's First Woman Attorney

On August 1, 1893, Ida G. Kast, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, an instructor in Irving College in that town, in a letter to the Board of Examiners for Law Students requested permission to appear before the Board for preliminary examination to be registered as a law student. At the bottom of her letter it was noted "that the above Ida G. Kast is a person of good moral character and social standing."

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.

Women's Voices at the Picnic: Programs at Williams Grove in the 1890s

On August 21, 1897, The Farmers' Friend and Grange Advocate, a Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, newspaper, carried an advance notice about events at the Interstate Picnic and Exhibition that had been held annually for more than twenty years at Williams Grove on the eastern border of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. On "Suffrage Day" that year, the announcement read: