A landmark in Carlisle, the “Mansion House Hotel” operated on the south west corner of West High and Pitt streets from the late 1830s until the 1920s. Inns on that site had housed travelers since the days of the Revolutionary War. The first tavern on the site was kept by James Pollock in the eighteenth century.
Dorothea McKenzie, the daughter of a Quaker ironmaster, became a widow at the age of 38, never remarried, and, until her death, ran a genteel boarding house in Carlisle with the help of her slaves. Dorothea’s father, Thomas Maybury, established the Green Lane Forge in the Perkiomen Valley in what is now Montgomery County, Pennsylvania as well as the Hereford Furnace. Her mother, Sophia Rutter, was a descendant of Pennsylvania ironmaster, Thomas Rutter.[1]
“Kriss Kringle’s Head Quarters” and “The Temple of Fancy,” declared Monyer’s newspaper advertisements.1 Monyer’s store was an emporium of delights for children. Its glass cases displayed candy toys, bon-bons, chocolates, fruit drops, and colorful hard candies.
Shortly before 1840, John Cassilus Neff1 and his family settled in Carlisle where he opened his practice as a dentist.2 During the 1840s, Dr.
Margaretta, her husband, John Cassilus Neff1 and their children, settled in Carlisle in 1838. Dr. Neff set up a practice as a dentist, and his wife, Margaretta, opened a millinery shop, both at No. 7 Harper's Row. Mrs.
Mrs. Ross, as her name was written on the “Applyers of Lots” in Carlisle in 1751, may have been the wife of John Ross, keeper of the Blue Rock Ferry in Hempfield Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who according to court records, turned his wife Elizabeth out of his house in 1737. In 1741, he was ordered to pay her 3 shillings and 6 pence per week for her support.
In 1899, Chinaman Sing Gee, planning to make a trip to China, sold his laundry business at 120 West High Street to Lewie Sing for $160. Lewie paid Sing Gee $100 and agreed to pay him the balance when he returned from China.
Born in 1882, Smith learned to play the cornet in 1896 at the age of 14.
The provincial town of Carlisle was fortunate to have among its mist for a short period a political theorist and talented lawyer, James Wilson. Born in 1742 at Carskerdo near St. Andrews, Scotland, Wilson studied at St. Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Emigrating to America in1765, he first took a tutoring job at the College of Philadelphia. Next Wilson studied law under John Dickinson...