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.
Some ventured even further, and Pennsylvanians were among those who in the 1850's participated in the settlement not only of the new states of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota but also of the newly opened lands in the northeastern quarter of Kansas Territory. In Kansas, some sought opportunity in thriving new towns like Lawrence and Leavenworth, where they also became embroiled in the savage political struggles between pro- and anti-slavery forces.
In March of 1857, with both factions increasingly resorting to violence as elections approached for the territorial legislature that would determine whether Kansas would be a slave or "free-soil" state, some dozen men went out from Carlisle to take part in the struggle. Their expedition was organized by Andrew Galbraith Ege, of the family that had owned several forges in the county, notably the Carlisle Iron Works at Boiling Springs. Galbraith Ege had been educated in Maryland, and after his marriage in 1834 had moved to a large farm at Taneytown, south of Gettysburg. After serving in the Mexican War with the rank of colonel, he moved in 1854 with his family and slaves to St. Joseph, Missouri, where he bought a large tract of land. Two years later he moved across the river into Kansas Territory and began acquiring land.1 He then returned to Carlisle and recruited the young men, each of whom staked out 160 acres and built a cabin. When the territorial elections were held, they all armed themselves with revolvers and bowie knives, went to the local voting place, and made sure that unqualified and underage persons did not vote. Ege was a supporter of the slave interest, but unlike many in that faction, apparently he was determined that the elections be honestly conducted. After the elections, which were narrowly won by the free-soil advocates, the Carlisle contingent remained on their lands until the Land Office opened, after which most of them turned their lands (for which they had paid $1.25 an acre) over to Ege and returned to Pennsylvania.2
Ege's was not the only expedition from the Cumberland Valley to Kansas that spring. Several carloads of passengers bound for Kansas and other western destinations left Harrisburg in March, and five more left in April.
When Galbraith Ege was in Carlisle in 1856, he had declared of Kansas that "in richness of soil and all the elements to constitute a wealthy and prosperous State," it could not be surpassed by any other section of the country. In May the next year a correspondent who signed himself "Oakville" began a series of letters in the Herald describing his tour of Missouri, Nebraska, and northeastern Kansas. He concluded that Kansas was much preferable to Nebraska as a place for settlement. Its climate was milder, and it was not as subject to high winds. It had both timber and coal; Nebraska had neither. Nebraska might have some good soil, bur he saw "no poor soil in Kansas at all. Kansas is settling up a great deal more rapidly than Nebraska, and by more enterprising men [;] it is the great centre of attraction ... [June 6, 1857]"
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