Editor's Note: The late George M . Diffenderfer in 1972 '"womped' together for his own amazement, " as he wrote (and for his friends' amusement, one might add), a 126-page "compilation of nostaligia" that he titled “I Believe in Yesterday." Notes and vignettes of persons, places, and events, principally in Carlisle, that he remembered from his boyhood before World War I, the manuscript is remarkably detailed, personal, impressionistic, and often gossipy.
The oldest town in the Cumberland Valley, straddling the border between Franklin and Cumberland counties in the rolling foothill system of the Appalachian Mountains of south central Pennsylvania, the Borough of Shippensburg is laid out in a grid pattern. The town's major east-west thoroughfare is King Street, an old Indian path, and along this two-lane road, also designated U.S. Route 11, has long lain much of its commercial district.
Rapid improvements in modes of transportation occurred during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. These innovations altered the structure of the United States demographically, causing some population centers to flourish, others to die, and still others to be born. Major cities, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, competed to build more extensive and efficient transportation systems to the hinterlands so that they could become the dominate outlets for the goods of the rural areas. Small towns in the interior of Pennsylvania which became entangled in this transportation web, such as Carlisle, prospered as a result of this competition.
Fortescue Cuming (1 762-1828) was one of the many travellers who passed through Cumberland County in the half century after 1785, and was one of those who kept and published a full account of the journey. A native of County Tyrone, Ireland, he had come to America after 1784 and been a resident of Connecticut since 1792. In 1806 he purchased land in the western country of the United States and the following year set out to the Ohio and Mississippi to inspect it.
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.
François Andre Michaux, botanist and silviculturist, a traveller in America, and author of a work on the forest trees of North America, first came to America in 1787 with his father, Andre, who established two nurseries in the young United States and proposed an exploration of the Missouri River and the American West in 1793, ten years before the expedition of Lewis and Clark.
Joshua Gilpin, a well-to-do merchant, manufacturer, and capitalist of Philadelphia and Delaware, travelled through Cumberland County from Chambersburg to Harrisburg in 1809 on his way home from a business and pleasure trip to western Pennsylvania. As was his custom on journeys of this kind, he made a record of observations and events. Although not notably different in content from those of other travellers on the same road at the same time, its relevant portion is nonetheless worth reprinting as a source of information about the county at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855), an English journalist, lecturer, reformer, and sometime Member of Parliament, was a tireless traveler and the author of books on observations and experiences in the Middle East, Europe, and America. He spent four years in the United States, producing a total of eight stout volumes on the Northern or Free States (3v., 1841), the Slaves States (2v., 1842), and the Eastern and Western States (3 v., 1842).
Cumberland County and Valley before the 1830s was one of the principal avenues to the American West. A steady procession of naturalists, farmers with their families and flocks, European reporters on American democracy, investors and speculators in land, fortune hunters and ne'er-do-wells came up from Philadelphia, crossed the Susquehanna, and, many of them, passed through Carlisle and Shippensburg over the mountains to Bedford, Pittsburgh, and the fertile lands of Ohio.
Carlisle, the town, is widely known. Its place in history is secured by the accomplishments of many famous residents, institutions and events. It has earned many accolades over the centuries but there is one unique honor bestowed upon the community that is little known and that is the fact that the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad named one of their tugboats Carlisle.