Two women trudged alongside the American soldiers through 350 miles of uninhabited primeval wilderness in Maine, following a faulty map of an unmarked route to Quebec. The terrain with its hills and deep ravines, the rivers, rapids and ponds with their bogs and marshes, and the forest with its fallen trees and rotting debris were obstacles that would have challenged the best of woodsmen.
James Hamilton, Jr. (1793 - 1873), was born in and was a lifelong resident of Carlisle. His father was a wealthy attorney and James followed in his footsteps after graduating from Dickinson College. Beyond law, James was also interested in education, science, and history, and became an active philanthropist in support of those interests.
When one thinks of the past, crime is not the first thing that jumps to one's mind; it would probably be the last thing, if thought about at all. Today when one thinks of crime, one thinks of muggings, robbery, murder-the same things that took place then. The most common crime then was assault & battery.
Nellie Clayton Cornman was born in Carlisle, and Robert Tempest in Philadelphia. Music was their common bond, but in personality and temperament they were complete opposites. Both were born in 1868 and were 39 years old when they met.
In January of 1883, an eleven-year-old boy from the Laguna pueblo in New Mexico Territory wrote a letter from the Carlisle Indian School to someone back home. Here is the letter:
So many of us go through life without thinking of the bigger picture- what can we do to better our communities after we are gone? I would like today to discuss Mary Wheeler King and to say to you that here is a friend who thought very carefully how she would influence future generations.
Toward the end of WWII, the Pine Grove Furnace POW Interrogation Camp was used to house Japanese prisoners. One of those prisoners, Yoshikuni Masuyama, wrote a memoir of of his war time experiences after the war. This was later transcribed by his wife, Fumie Masuyama. Subsequently, the memoir was retold in English by his daughter Miyuki Hegg.
When a man sleepwalks and falls out of his hotel window on the second floor, that's odd. When two men sleepwalk and fall out of the windows of their rooms on the second floor of the same hotel, that's very odd. But when three men in three years sleepwalk and fall out of their windows on the second floor of the same hotel, that's a mystery.
Lenore Embick Flower's History of Pine Grove Furnace was first presented in 1933 and is now in a 4th edition printed by the Cumberland County Historical Society. This seminal history of the local iron industry contains an apparent error: Flower's confusion about the destruction of the ironmaster's mansion at Pine Grove Furnace.
Original narratives recounting the experiences of local citizens during the Confederate occupation of Carlisle in late June and early July of 1863 are always of interest to staff and patrons at CCHS. Our much-used collection of contemporary accounts, particularly those that describe the shelling of the town, is a perennial favorite of students writing history essays, reporters setting up Civil War-related stories, and history buffs in general.