Index of Cumberland County Birth, Wedding, Divorce & Obituary Newspaper Records - 2003
This index runs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2003.
Samuel Roger Smith and the Development of Grantham
Grantham in Upper Allen Township is best known as the home of Messiah College. Both the village and the college are very much a product of the creative energy of Samuel Roger Smith, a farm boy become educator and industrialist.
Smith was born in 1853 near Derry Church on a farm now incorporated in the town of Hershey. While still in his teens he taught school for several years, later took a business course at the Eastman National Business College at Poughkeepsie, New York, and may have studied some medicine at Columbia College. Following failure in a milling business that he briefly owned in Lebanon County, he and his wife moved to a house on Reilly Street in Harrisburg. While Samuel found work with a drug company, his wife, Elizabeth, began to make noodles in her kitchen for sale to her neighbors.
Her small enterprise quickly became a success. Smith left the drug business and joined his wife in the kitchen. Their noodle production soon outgrew their house on Reilly Street. After a move to a larger house on the corner of Boas and Linn, the family purchased an even more commodious residence on Twelfth Street and built a small factory below it on Cameron.
The Smiths understood sales psychology. One of their methods in the earlier years of production was to send their children into the area stores to ask for Smith's noodles. If a store owner did not stock the noodles, the children's request suggested that they should start dealing in the product. Perhaps the packaging also helps to explain the growing sales: the noodles were put into attractive, one-pound boxes nicely wrapped in cream-colored paper carrying the Smiths' name and a head-and-shoulders picture of Smith with his handsome, flowing beard.
The growth of the business cannot be precisely charted since none of its papers have survived. A letterhead from one of the later years of the firm gives 1881 as the founding date; the year is probably the one in which the family began to sell noodles from the house on Reilly Street. The same letterhead states that the business was incorporated in 1887; undoubtedly that date is the year in which it officially took the name of the S. R. Smith Company and began to sell stock. The dates, in any event, suggest the rapid economic recovery of the family. By 1909 the business had so greatly expanded, both in sales and in variety of products, that Smith moved out of town and built a large, modern plant at Grantham, some ten miles to the southwest of Harrisburg.
In the meantime the Smiths, originally of the United Zion's Children Church, had become involved with the Brethren in Christ Church in opening in the city an orphanage and retirement home (now Messiah Village near Mechanicsburg). The family joined the denomination in 1896. Smith rapidly rose in church circles to become an influential member of boards and committees; from 1899 to his death in 1916, he served as secretary to General Conference, the governing body of the denomination.
Smith used his great influence among his fellow churchmen to persuade them to establish a school with an emphasis on training for mission work and evangelism, but also offering some secular subjects, including a high school program. Chartered in 1909, the school, first called Messiah Bible School and Missionary Training Home (now Messiah College), opened for classes in September of 1910. Smith was president and classes met in his house on Twelfth Street. Enrollment, initially of twelve students, by the end of the year had increased to thirty-seven. Already, by January 1911, Smith and the trustees had decided that the school should follow the noodle factory to Grantham.
Grantham lay very much in the country. Except for two small villages in the vicinity--Shepherdstown and Bowmansdale--the surrounding area was farmland.
At the turn of the century, Grantham itself consisted only of a few buildings. Most conspicuous among them was a mill, originally constructed in 1790 although rebuilt several times, known in later years as Levi Hartzler's Eureka Mill. According to a county history published in 1879, the mill at that time was "second to no other building in the township, either in the number of burrs or in its water-power.” For years, farmers for miles around had brought their grain to be ground at this mill. The miller's house (since stuccoed) lay across the road at the top of the hill. A large frame house and barn, for years known as the Shelley farm, stood east of the mill. Beside the mill a large, handsome stone house (now owned by Robert Griswold) had been built by a stonemason and his wife--Reuben and Minerva Miller--one of several stone houses the two had constructed in the area by their own hands. At the crossroad above the mill and opposite to each other were two farmhouses, each with a barn. The one on the left stood where the present missionary house now stands, and had at one time been occupied by the John Myers, Brethren in Christ family. (See map on page 7.)
These buildings largely comprised the village. Two other features were the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad which ran past the Shelley farm and the mill, and the Yellow Breeches (sometimes called the Minnemingo by local residents) which had supplied water power for the mill and which forms the boundary at that place between York and Cumberland Counties. A milk delivery station, with an ice house providing ice to cool the milk, stood against the railroad near the present entrance to the college.