Founded in 1751 by Proprietor Thomas Penn, the town of Carlisle was erected to meet the mounting social, political, and economic needs of the ever-increasing number of people settling the rich agricultural hinterlands of Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley. Once established, Carlisle served as both the official political and judicial seat of the newly-formed county of Cumberland and as one of the major social and economic focal points of backcountry Pennsylvania—acting as a major transit point for many westward-bound travellers. Situated along one of the most frequented overland routes to the Ohio country, the town of Carlisle marked one of several symbolic terminus points on the Pennsylvania frontier at which the westward-bound traveler departed from the more "civilized" methods of transport by wagon or coach and embarked on a journey into the often uncertain wilderness of the Allegheny Mountains via packhorse.1
Thus, as Cumberland's county seat, as a local marketing and service center for the farmers of the Cumberland Valley, and as one of the more important towns linking the eastern port cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore with the commerce of the west, Carlisle attracted considerable social, economic, and intellectual attention during the eighteenth century. Many local residents, foreign-born travellers, and westward-bound settlers took time from their daily labors to reflect in writing upon Carlisle's "place" in the larger world of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. While these observations were very personal and, at times, quite contradictory, most of these writers shared a common vision of the town that was highly idealistic, if not wholly mythical. Most writers simply overlooked or ignored Carlisle's "urban" realities and instead emphasized its pastoral and natural qualities. Eighteenth-century Carlisle was typically portrayed as a socially serene and economically prosperous "country" town set harmoniously in the midst of an all abundant wilderness.
Not surprisingly, the town had been founded on the kind of high hopes that fostered the growth of such an idyllic image. Thomas Penn had finally chosen Carlisle as the site for Cumberland's county seat based not only on the practical asset of its favorable location, but, even more importantly, on what he and his advisors saw as the location 's promise of future material wealth and physical abundance. In his instructions to lay out the town in 1751, Governor James Hamilton echoed the hopeful thoughts of Penn when he noted that there was "said to be about it [Carlisle] a wholesome, dry, limestone Soil, good, air, and abundance of vacant land well covered with a variety of Wood."2 Thus even before the town was formally established, Carlisle had already attained a pastoral and highly idealistic "aura" as a place that possessed all of the natural qualities necessary for the creation of a socially productive and economically lucrative frontier town.
Once the town was laid out and actually settled, writers continued to promote a highly idyllic image of what was really an undeniably small, fledgling, and still grubby frontier town. Carlisle was blessed with fertile soils and vast supplies of oak and hickory woods, limestone, and water from the eastwardly situated Letort Spring.3 Carlisle had all those materials so needed by a young and growing town-lumber and stone for the construction of buildings and the water and fertile soil needed to support farming and industry. From all indications, the young town of Carlisle remained very much in harmony with its natural world.
ln 1943 February 17 dawn found a hundred or more students shivering in overcoat and muffler weather as they stood about at the Pennsylvania Railroad Depot in Carlisle. About two score were going to war. Half a century later those who survived could recall only Whit Bell from the faculty, but Ralph Schecter must have been there as well, for the single cheerful element that morning was his Dickinson College band.