For many of us who love exploring Camp Michaux, it is a marriage of insatiable curiosity with a rich and deserving history. to those who seek with tenacity and have a bit of luck on their side, Camp Michaux slowly reveals its secrets. Each time I return, I’m filled with child-like anticipation and hope.
Few things have stood out as more quintessential of an American small town than its barbershop, and fictional representations of those towns, whether Mayberry or Mitford, have been sure to portray the local barber, an affable and steadfast character. For generations of loyal customers, a barber named Harold Stone seemed to be a permanent institution in a small town that The Wall Street Journal had once called “the middle of nowhere.”
On Monday, April 10, 1865, news of the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia reached Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In response to this event one of the town’s newspapers, the American Volunteer, exclaimed, “Thank God! [T]he fearful and bloody rebellion that has desolated our land for over four long years, costing, as it did, hundreds of thousands of lives, thousands of millions of treasure, is, so far as fighting is concerned, over.”1 Lee’s surrender signaled an end to the fighting between the United States and the Southern Confederacy.