Perhaps if a symbol were to be chosen for historians, it would be an owl. The wise old owl, who listens more than he speaks, just as the historian is supposed to observe and study before he publishes his essay into the past. Yet, upon reading historical essays, one begins to sense that historians might more appropriately march beneath the sign of the parrot. History, which began as the most inquisitive of arts, often degrades into repeating accepted wisdom, and the received tradition replaces individual inquiry.
In the history of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is a seemingly minor item illustrating this phenomenon. One learns that when in 1856 Solomon Perry Gorgas founded in Mechanicsburg a college for women and named it for Washington Irving,1 the venerable old storyteller bestowed upon the new college an autographed set of his collected works. Washington Irving, one also learns, was never able to attend to his duties as a trustee of the college, and, so, this donation of books became the college's only link with the great man. This anecdote charms, perhaps beguiles, and if one is a romantic and compulsively curious sort who loves books, one might be inclined to ask what happened to those books. The result of that asking would have amused Washington Irving himself.
Washington Irving is remembered as a jolly, red-faced raconteur, the first American acclaimed in Europe for his writing. Born to British parents in New York in 1783, he received a liberal but desultory education, read law, and practiced briefly on Wall Street. Instead, he turned to satire, his first and most famous being Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809). Neither writing nor the law at first paid the bills, so "[l]ike most young lawyers with little law and less clients, he began to dabble in local politics."2 Although Irving was by temperament and background a Federalist of Hamiltonian stripe, he worked in Democratic politics, the only game in town, when bosses such as Aaron Burr and DeWitt Clinton even then practiced the wily factionalism later symbolized by Tammany Hall. Irving, though, preferred moving in fashionable circles and delighting in the witty society of Dolley Madison, George Bancroft, and Albert Gallatin, in Philadelphia, New York, and London.
Weary of grimy urban electioneering and drab provincialism, Irving toured Europe from 1815 to 1832, finding, as he had hoped, a gold mine of the picturesque and exotic. He wrote of the charms of English country life, drew upon German folklore, and recounted tales of mediaeval Spain. Worth noting here is "The Legend of the Engulfed Convent;" the Spanish convent disappeared, but the·singing of the sisters could still be heard centuries later.3
Irving received diplomatic appointments, first to Spain, then to England, under presidents James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and John Tyler. Actually, his ambassadorial role was in reverse; he brought the perceived romance of the Old World to the New. In so doing, his reputation grew on both continents. In 1831 the Encyclopaedia Americana, under the entry "United States (Literature)," listed "this accomplished writer" twice-the only author so designated- under the subheadings "Romantic Fiction" and "History and Biography," the latter for his life of Christopher Columbus ( 1828).4 The encyclopaedia does not, however, have a separate entry for Irving; the only American writers so treated—other than statesmen or ministers of the Gospel—are two Pennsylvanians, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown and the historian David Ramsay. From abroad came praise from Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens.
Naturally Irving's fame spread into Pennsylvania. Bayard Taylor of Kennett Square, poet and world traveler, went to the Middle East and dedicated his Lands of the Saracen to Irving, who "more than any other American author" had "revived the traditions, restored the history, and illustrated the character of that brilliant and heroic people."5 In 1837 Irving accepted honorary membership in the Goethean Literary Society of Marshall College (now Franklin and Marshall) and also in the Union Philosophical Society of Dickinson College.6
The advancement of civilization demands a full development of the minds of our girls. The day when the boy is to be educated and the girl neglected has, like other relics of barbarism, passed into history.
Roy Harold Stone (22 June, 1914-18 November, 2007), universally known as Harold, often as Stoney, was a barber in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He worked as a barber from his days as an apprentice at age fourteen until his retirement at age ninety-two.1