Historians, engineers, and buffs of all walks of life can and should cheer the new work of Dr. Paul Gill, professor of history at Shippensburg State University. For a title he has borrowed a phrase from Rudyard Kipling's A Song of the English and for illustrations photographs from the Society 's extensive collection.
The book, wrapped in a four color dust jacket which reproduces Harold Etter's painting of Burgher's Bridge and Mill, climbs to high ground first broken in 1905 by Squire John D. Hemminger, whose brief work on bridges was a paper read to the Society, and published as a 180-inch article in the Carlisle Sentinel. The bulk of the source material is a handwritten supplement found among Hemminger's papers, together with a file of photographs snapped in 1933 by an unidentified person who, at the request of the County Commissioners, took four pictures of all bridges existing at that time.
A persuasive case could be made that New Kingstown should properly be named "Junkintown. " Consider, Joseph Junkin was the first settler. His home, before settling in Silver Spring Township near Stoney Ridge was a farm which lay on both sides of a line in Ireland separating County Down and County Antrim. Leaving Ulster about 1736, he settled at first in Chester County where he married a Scot, Elizabeth Wallace. They took up 500 acres of land in Cumberland County.