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Robert Whitehill and the Struggle for Civil Rights

“Every man in Cumberland County is a rioter at heart,” lamented Governor John Penn the year he ordered his family’s land in Lower Manor subdivided and sold. The concurrence of his remark and his order to sell may have been mere chance, but young Penn in this instance established himself as seer and prophet. When he used the word “rioter” he spoke of the seething Scotch-Irish, who were virtually the only group then living in the County.

The Sadler/Levinson Curtilage

The need for a dormitory to house Dickinson School of Law students was recognized as early as 1898, twenty years before the Law School moved from its original home in Emory Hall, located at the corner of South West and West Pomfret Streets, into its current home in Trickett Hall on South College Street in Carlisle.

Sale of a Wife by her Husband at Carlisle

Wife-sale was never acknowledged officially but seems to have been an ingenious (if sexist) answer to a bad marriage among the less respectable parts of society in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries England and America. Divorce at the time was out of reach for all those who could not afford great expense but were willing to see their reputations ruined in a lengthy court trial. 

Samuel Postlethwaite: Trader, Patriot, Gentleman of Early Carlisle

Largely overlooked in local histories, Samuel Postlethwaite deserves a prominent place on a list of early Cumberland County notables. A frontier trader, he helped supply the Continental Army in the American Revolution and played an active role in Cumberland County’s government and social institutions during the early days of the American Republic. In the 1790’s, he served in the Pennsylvania legislature as the senator from Cumberland County.

Sarah's Story

Sarah Mather Deeter was a prototype for a mid-19th- mid-20th century middle class woman. The daughter of an enterprising couple, she was a good student in school, studied voice, married a singer, kept house and reared a family of five children in Mechanicsburg, a fairly typical, largely middle-class town in central Pennsylvania.

Select Brotherhoods: The Shippensburg Black and White Freemasons, 1858-1919

"The decisive measure of the man is how he acts in public."  Snow was falling on the square at King and Railroad Streets, the center of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 20 February 1858. The economic focus of town had gradually moved four blocks west from King and Queen Streets since the railroad had brought passenger service in 1837.

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