Index of Cumberland County Birth, Wedding, Divorce & Obituary Newspaper Records - 2003
This index runs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2003.
Middlesex: An All-American Truck Stop
Spinning off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the Carlisle exit, the road-weary traveler might easily forget the considerably developed and congested 1.2- mile section of US Route 11 which serves as the only link between the Turnpike and Interstate 81, known locally as the "Miracle Mile." Presiding over this busy commercial strip is a distinctive red, white and blue truck stop called the "All American Travel Plaza." A place popular with tourists, truck drivers, college students, and even President Bill Clinton, who parked his campaign bus there in 1992, the All American serves as a testament to our nation's continuing legacy of commerce and mobility. Here, like a Western "boom town" of old, a bona fide community has grown around this truck stop where these two modern superhighways converge.
Antedating the All American Travel Plaza, the "Miracle Mile" commercial strip, Interstate 81 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, however, was the small agricultural village of Middlesex. As a result of America's increased dependence upon the overland motorized transport of goods, Middlesex has been transformed over the past 60 years into what some estimate is the second most heavily traveled truck intersection in the United States.
Middlesex ultimately owes its transformation to its location in the Cumber land Valley. Said William H. Everett, a long time resident, whose family operated a truck stop on Route 11 in the early 1960s, "There are certain natural funnels for truck traffic caused by physical geography." Everett suggests, for example, that the confluence of lnterstates 65, 80, 90, and 94 in Gary, Indiana, is our country's busiest truck intersection because commerce between the Northeast, Upper Midwest and Western states must travel that route in order to skirt the Great Lakes.1
Beyond the Cumberland Valley it was not the Great Lakes that hindered travel and commerce, but the Allegheny Mountains. Upon leaving the flat, arable plain of the Valley, the west-bound traveler faces the Alleghenies, part of the Appalachian chain of highlands running from New Brunswick to Alabama. "By 1730 the westward movement of population .. . had reached the foothills of the Alleghenies, and, being hindered by the mountain barrier from advancing farther in that direction," wrote one historian in 1931, "was deflected southward along the line of least resistance into the valleys of Maryland and Virginia .... "2
Instead of traversing the Alleghenies to the west, the early settlers were deflected into the natural "funnel" created by the Cumberland Valley, which extends in a southerly direction from the Susquehanna River at Harrisburg to the Potomac River. By the time George Washington was a young man in the late 1750s, a dirt wagon road, dubbed the "Great Road to Virginia," had been opened, connecting what was to become Harrisburg with Carlisle and other points south to the Potomac. Later, in 1816, this highway became the "Harrisburg Turnpike," with a toll house in Middlesex itself.3 In 1925 the Harrisburg Pike was designated "US Route 11" when it was incorporated into a prototype interstate highway system by the Federal Government.4 Eventually, by 1972, the superhighway known as Interstate 81 would be completed to parallel old Route 11 through Cumberland County. Although the topography of the Cumberland Valley placed Middlesex in a propitious location for north and south interstate traffic even from the earliest pioneer days, commerce over the Alleghenies to the west remained challenging and infrequent. Then in 1759, during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), British Brigadier John Forbes constructed a road over the mountains which originated south of Carlisle at Chambersburg and terminated within striking distance of strategic Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio River. Utilizing the road he had built, Forbes attacked and defeated the French decisively. Many decades later, the fort would grow into the industrial city of Pittsburgh.