This booklet is a handy introduction to colonial calligraphy. With clarity and concision Harriet Stryker-Rodda, noted American genealogist, outlines how to read manuscripts two and three centuries old. This brief but comprehensive work will prove useful to the genealogist at whom it is aimed as well as to other researchers into America's past.
Louis Auchincloss, Woodrow Wilson. (New York: Viking, 2000) 128pp, hardback, $19.95 (ISBN 0-670-88904-0)
Katharine Mary Drexel (26 November, 1858-3 March, 1955) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She enjoyed a life of comfort and privilege before deciding to use her inherited wealth to establish a new religious order within the Roman Catholic Church. For her life and work, she has been formally recognized by her Church as one of its saints.
Beneath Saint Patrick's Church on East Pomfret Street in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, are the mortal remains of Peter Helbron. He was a German Capuchin priest, his parish being in Westmoreland County. His subterranean presence in Cumberland County raises obvious questions, and those questions lead to a glimpse into the daily life of a country priest in early nineteenth-century America. This paper will look at Father Helbron's life, with special attention to the inventory of his estate.
It seems to be an axiom of geography that settlements arise along rivers and heavy trade routes. One has only to consider the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, or Rome, Paris, or London. In many ways Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century was similar more to an ancient or medieval land than to anything of the twentieth century.
Henry George Ganss (22 February, 1855-25 December, 1912) was a Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as well as a musician and historian. For twenty years he served as pastor of Saint Patrick’s parish in Carlisle, and then he became pastor of Saint Mary’s parish in Lancaster.
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 April 6, 1784, in the county courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the fledgling Dickinson College met and asked two of its members, John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, to devise a seal for the college.
He could be an unlikable man-loud, arrogant, vulgar; but he was also civicminded and generous to his workers; and he deserves to be remembered. He was, from the last decade of the nineteenth to the third decade of the twentieth century, one of the most prominent businessmen in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In any era he would have been a colorful character, a volatile yet romantic man who made his fortune from shoes and flowers.
Some time ago I attempted to read Marianne Moore's poems as clues to local history. I noted that Moore (1887-1972) spent her formative years in Carlisle, Pennsylvania: From 1896 to 1918, that is, from ages nine to thirty-one, she lived, studied, and taught in Carlisle. For much of four years (1905-1909) she was in college at Bryn Mawr, for three months after college she worked in New York for Melvil Dewey (of decimal system fame), but otherwise, Moore was in Carlisle.