As many are probably aware, Carlisle was chosen to be the County seat of Cumberland County after much debate in 1751. The Penn family had plans for the town drawn up that same year. The Penn plan for Carlisle "consisted of 312 lots, each sixty feet by two hundred and forty feet. The original boundaries of the town were North, South, East and West Streets. The lots were numbered consecutively, running from South to North. Lot #1 was at the corner of South and West Streets, and the lots ran from West Street to North Street. The corner of West and North Streets was Lot #8. Thus, the lot on the side of #1 was not #2, but #9."1
This is a study of two of those original lots-#300 and #308 and of some of the people who lived there over the last two and one-half centuries. In 1990 eight families reside in the six houses that are located on the corner of East High Street and East Street. This paper includes the history of the homes on lot #308 which face East High Street, but not the six homes facing East Street that are a part of the original lot #308.
The lots were "sold for a nominal sum of money beginning in 1751. A ticket was given [to] the owner obligating the purchaser to 'improve his land' by some building (usually twenty feet square, of stone, brick or square timber) within a period of two to five years, or surrender his right to the lot purchased. "2
By 1753 a colonial fort, long mistakenly called "Lowther," was being constructed on what is now the square to protect the colonists of the area primarily from warring Indians. Documentation suggests that approximately fifty-five log cabins were constructed during the summer of that same year. Hickory and oak were the primary woods used for the square timbered homes.3 Foundations for log homes and a few stone houses erected were most likely constructed from limestone from a deep quarry near the center of town, approximately where the 1960 courthouse stands.4
For the first colonists the five decades between 1751 and 1800 held challenge, fear, and excitement. In 1753 an Indian Conference was held in Carlisle involving Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Norris, Richard Peters, and approximately thirty-five Indian chiefs from Six Nations. The friendship treaty and the entire Indian Conference had little effect, as the next decade proved to be the most bloody for the settlers of the town as families were scalped, houses burned, and anyone was at risk while working in the fields.5
Cumberland county, which forms the eastern portion of the great Cumberland Valley, is made up, as we ordinarily know it, of three geological formations, viz: the slate on the north, the limestone in the center, and the sand or pinelands on the south. It is drained lengthwise by the Conodoguinet and the Yellow Breeches creeks.