There was a time when Cumberland County had no Republican party. It was born of the 1850s struggle between slavery and free labor that produced the Civil War. The party itself helped bring about war, for it was exclusively northern and "free soil", determined to stop slavery's spread. Merely by winning the presidency and Congress in 1860, the Republicans provoked seven southern states to secede, with four to follow upon the war's outbreak.
John Cantilion was a tall, handsome soldier when he stepped into Ordnance Sergeant Lewis Leffman's office at Fort Niagara. The old sergeant was somewhat of a legend in the Niagara area. He had fought with Wellington's Hanovian forces at Waterloo in 1815. Shortly after he joined the British army and shipped to Canada. His next assignment was to have been the disease-plagued islands in the south, so he arranged an early departure to Hancock Barracks, Sackets Harbor, New York, where he enlisted at twenty seven in the United States Army, 30 August 1829.
America has been traditionally seen as the "land of opportunity" where anyone who is willing to work hard enough can become rich. Indeed, it was on this basis that generations of immigrants were lured to America in the belief that they could build a better life for themselves here. During the 1920s, however, many Americans thought that they had found a way to become rich without having to work hard by investing in the stock market.
In October 1988 the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of construction on Pennsylvania's first super-highway. October 1990 will mark the similar anniversary of the turnpike 's official opening to traffic. Probably few of those who travel the turnpike today are aware that the route was originally planned as a railroad and that after two years of construction in the 1880's, the project lay abandoned for fifty-three years before the Turnpike Commission revived it.
This paper was originally presented at the Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The paper, slightly modified for Cumberland County History, is presented here.
An unusual letter from George Boyer Vashon (1824-1878), a noted African American attorney, educator, and poet, who was a native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was recently discovered in the Mary Wager Fisher Papers in the Special Collections Library at Duke University, Wager (as she then was)1 , an American journalist, was particularly active in the movement for education of freedmen. The letter, written in response to a request by Wager for biographical information, provides details of the education and accomplishments of an outstanding individual.
There are two different types of success in the world of politics. Some men succeed as statesmen, and others as politicians. Statesmen usually adopt innovative and sometimes unpopular methods in order to promote what they see as the public good. Politicians, on the other hand, feel that their duty is to further the interests of those whom they represent, and to work to satisfy their constituents.
In order to understand the early years of the German Lutheran and Reformed churches in Cumberland County, we need to know something about the beginnings of these two churches in colonial Pennsylvania and also about the pattern of the county's early settlement.
Geronimo is one of the most famous figures in the history of the American West. To the Apaches he was a war shaman, or medicine man, respected for the great mystical power he possessed. To his enemies, the Mexicans and the Americans, he was a vicious and fearless warrior. His name became a battle cry that struck terror into the hearts of those who heard it.
Surrounded by the perfectly-aligned, white marble sentinel headstones of almost one-quarter million American war veterans, explorers, historical figures, and national leaders, Chief Warrant Officer Eugene Robert Orth's mortal remains rest in Section 35, Grave 3523 of the Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, encircled by the graves of an Army Master Sergeant from North Carolina and a Private First Class from Virginia, a Coast Guard Captain from Massachusetts and a Navy Lieutenant Commander from Pennsylvania.