Book Review: At a Place Called the Boiling Springs
At a Place Called the Boiling Springs. Edited by Richard L. Tritt and Randy Watts. Illustrated, 247 pp. Boiling Springs Sesquicentennial Publications Committee, 1995. $35, cloth.
At a Place Called the Boiling Springs. Edited by Richard L. Tritt and Randy Watts. Illustrated, 247 pp. Boiling Springs Sesquicentennial Publications Committee, 1995. $35, cloth.
Taverns of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1840. By Merri Lou Schaumann. Illustrated, 250 pp. Carlisle: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1994. $34.95.
Our story begins at eleven o'clock in the morning on July 17, 1866, when 24 Cumberland County physicians arrived at the Court House in Carlisle. This was the largest gathering of physicians in the county up to that time and, in addition to seven doctors from Carlisle, included practitioners from Shippensburg, Newville, Mechanicsburg, New Cumberland, West Fairview, and a number of other smaller points in the county.
A visitor returns to a familiar scene to refresh his memory, he looks for once familiar landmarks, and he notes, with approval or regret, whatever changes have come about. An armchair revisitation to Fort Loudoun has been on the whole reassuring. Since I wrote about it sixteen years ago, the fort has not been neglected.
Commander (as he then was) Charles Wilkes, U.S.N. (1798- 1877) travelled through Cumberland County to Harrisburg in August 1844. He described the towns and countryside he passed through, noted institutions like churches and the county jail, and passed ten days in Carlisle, where he was agreeably entertained by the gentry and by officers at Carlisle Barracks.
There is no mystery about the name Carlisle Springs, and no research is required to learn its origin. What other name would anyone give to a sulphur spring of medicinal properties located only five miles from the county seat of Cumberland County? What is of special interest, however, is that Carlisle Springs was one of many springs, baths, and spas that flourished as popular resorts for health and recreation in the United States in the second third of the nineteenth century.
The prominent McCormick family dynasty of Harrisburg was founded by James McCormick, the only son of William McCormick of East Pennsborough township, Cumberland County. Though a great deal has been written concerning the vast financial empire erected by James McCormick in nineteenth century Harrisburg, little attention has been paid to his father, a moderately situated yeoman farmer and distiller, who met his untimely end in a farm accident during the opening decade of the nineteenth century.