Mount Holy Springs is situated at a gap in the South Mountain, approximately six miles south of Carlisle.
Miss Alice Mullin, daughter of Charles H. Millin, owner of the Mt. Holly Paper Mill was appointed by President Taft in 1911 to succeed Harry Butorff as the postmaster of Mount Holly at a yearly salary of $1500.1 She assumed her duties on April 1st with her sister Miss Evelyn as her assistant. 2
On the evening of February 2, 1914, the residents of Mount Holly went to sleep unaware that robbers were afoot. The robbers broke into the Mount Holly Post Office sometime in the late evening or early morning of February 3, and blew open the safe. In order to muffle the sound of the explosion, they broke into Mullin's summer kitchen and stole bedding, which they wrapped around the safe. They were rewarded for their efforts with between $80 and $100 as well as postage stamps from the safe, but they had no way of knowing that Miss Mullin, who was boarding at the Holly Inn, had taken $400 with her she left the Post Office that day.3
Money may not have been the only things the robbers were after that evening. It was supposed that they tried to steal chickens from Rev. D. M. Aller. He was awakened by his wife at about two o'clock in the morning by a noise. He ran out into the yard and chased a thief who dropped the bag of chickens and the hatchet he was carrying. The newspaper commented "Chickens are too precious in the sight of a minister not to make strenuous efforts to keep them."4
In 1916, two years after the 1914 robbery, the Mount Holly Post Office was robbed again. Just as the robbers had done in the 1914 robbery, they did not bother to pull down the window shades or turn off the lights in the office that were kept on at night. The door on the safe they blew up in 1914 had been replaced with a large double door, and it took three blasts to blow it off. They took what they wanted from the safe and then walked up Chestnut Street to the railroad.
What was different this time was they they were seen. The three ladies that resided next to the post office, the two Misses Craighead and their sister Mrs. Philip Harman, saw the whole thing from their upstairs bedroom window. They were too afraid to telephone the police or to make any noise for fear that robbers would harm them. They said that there were three or four men, two of them kept guard outside while the other man was inside blowing up the safe.
Miss Mullin, the postmistress, heard the explosion from her house across the street and called Dr. Snyder, the druggist, and Mr. Rickabaugh, but since it was about one o'clock in the morning, they thought whatever it was could wait until the morning. Mount Holly's lone policeman, John Wolf, went off duty at midnight, and he didn't have a telephone in his house. The town constable slept through it. The robbery was not discovered until six o'clock in the morning by the assistant post mistress. The newspaper editor suggested that "the thieves will never be apprehended as was the case with the 'visitors' in the same office two years ago. At that time the safe in the Philadelphia and Reading freight station in Carlisle was also robbed in much the same fashion as that at Holly. The perpetrators of this job also were never caught."4
Miss Minerva White and her mother, Matilda Vickers, came to Mt. Holly from Virginia in 1859. Minerva worked for several years in the paper mills in Mt. Holly, but about 1870 she and her mother took charge of the toll gate and ran a small store.1 After her mother’s death in 1885, Minerva continued to operate the Mt. Holly toll gate for another 19 years.
1 The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle, February 24, 1911, 6.
2 The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle, March 30, 1911, 4.
3 The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle, February 3, 1914, 2.
4 The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle, February 3, 1914, 2; The Carlisle Evening Herald, February 3, 1914.
5 The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle, February 2, 1916, 2.