1998 Winter, Volume 15, Issue 2

Coming to Kansas: Details of the Trip and Location of a Pennsylvania Colony

Reprinted from Kansas City Times in the Carlisle Mirror; April 19, 1878. The tide of emigration that has set in like a flood since the first opening of spring has become a matter of general comment, but so far nothing has been definitely known regarding the settlement of the various parties that have passed through Kansas City farther than that they nearly all settled in the State of Kansas.

Harrisburg's Civil War Patriot and Union: Its Conciliatory Viewpoint Collapses

By the autumn of 1864, the editors of Harrisburg's daily Patriot and Union had written themselves into journalistic trouble. Their staunchly Democratic newspaper was read throughout the Commonwealth, but especially in Dauphin, Cumberland, and Perry counties. In its columns, they advocated a conciliatory approach toward the South. Then the Confederates raided Chambersburg, showed no bent for conciliation, burned the heart of the town.

Penn Township in Kansas

Editorial Note. This list of Kansas emigrants from Penn Township, Cumberland County, was made by Dr. S.M. Whistler. It was printed in Carlisle Herald, April 4, 1878, and reprinted the next day in the Carlisle Mirror; from which it is reprinted here.

Pennsylvania's Redcoats

Every American schoolchild was taught of the humiliating defeat of General Braddock's British redcoats by the French and Indians at the battle of the Monongahela; and the able Pennsylvania colonial military historian William A. Hunter on these pages told the tale of the bedraggled withdrawal of the remnants of Braddock's task force down the Cumberland Valley to Philadelphia in August 1755.

The Third Pennsylvania Colony to Kansas, 1878

Forty years after he emigrated from Pennsylvania to Kansas in 1872 Jacob Sackman wrote an historical and genealogical account of a later group of pioneers and their settlements, filled with several score names of settlers. Under the tide "The Third Pennsylvania Colony," it was printed in the Wilson World (Ellsworth County, Kansas) of September 24, 1914. With several editorial omissions and modern paragraphing, it is reprinted here from a copy provided by Clarke Garrett.{Editor's Note}.

Wasu, Student at the Carlisle Indian School

Editorial Introduction. Mary Jane (Rippey) Heistand was born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1856 of a family long settled in that town and part of the county. In 1878 she married Lieutenant Henry O.S. Heistand, who had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in that same year. She accompanied him to the West, where he was stationed at the Poplar Creek Indian Agency in Montana Territory and at Forts Abraham Lincoln and Yates in Dakota Territory.

We are Not in the Cumberland Valley Any More, Toto! The Great Migration to Kansas in the 1870's

Since Cumberland County was first settled, the Cumberland Valley has been a stopping-place for many people on the way to somewhere else, whether it was on down the Valley to Virginia and Kentucky, or, later, into the Ohio Country. In the decades before the Civil War, migration was continuous. As some people moved in, others moved out. Place names like New Carlisle, Ohio and Mechanicsburg, Indiana bear witness to the Cumberland Valley origins of many of the first settlers of the fertile prairies of the Midwest.