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.
Joshua Gilpin (1765-1840) was the eldest son of Thomas Gilpin of Philadelphia, a prosperous merchant, mill owner, and early advocate of internal improvements, who was one of a number of Quaker pacifists who were arrested and sent to Virginia in 1777 for refusing to take an oath in violation of their religious principles.1 At the age of 19 Joshua took charge of the family's business and in 1787 extended it by erecting a paper mill on the Brandywine Creek in Delaware.2 He continued to oversee the Gilpins' affairs until 1795, when his younger brother, Thomas, Jr., joined him. Leaving Thomas in charge, Joshua went abroad, where he spent six years living and travelling in England and on the Continent. His time there was put to good use. He visited museums, viewed antiquities, and made a collection of minerals. Visiting the Fountain of Vaucluse, associated with Petrarch and Laura, he was inspired to poetry.3 He studied mining in Cornwall, iron manufacture at Colebrookdale, agriculture and viniculture in southern France, and made sketches of the industrial processes he saw. Understandably he was particularly interested in European paper-making. As an advocate, like his father, of a Delaware-Chesapeake canal, he also took a special interest in British canal building. He visited Mathew Boulton's Soho Works and talked with the proprietor; and he met and became friendly with such prominent Americans as the artist Benjamin West and the inventor Robert Fulton, with Richard Penn, who had been the last Proprietor of Pennsylvania, with Count Rumford in Bavaria, and with the Baron de Montesquieu, grandson of the philosopher, who had fled revolutionary France and was living in quiet retirement in England. In England, too, in 1800 he met and married Mary Dilworth, daughter of a Lancashire banker and like himself a member of an old Quaker family. He returned in 1801 to Philadelphia, where he resumed his career in business and took up again the project of a Chesapeake-Delaware canal. 4
With his family he visited Europe again in 1811-15. There he paid particular attention to English paper-making machinery, and from the observations and sketches that he made, his brother Thomas in 1817 constructed a machine for making paper over a wire roll in one endless sheet. The new process revolutionized paper-making, and after their mill suffered damage and destruction from flood and fire in the 1820s even the Gilpins stopped manufacturing handmade paper. The Gilpin mill survived the Panic of 1819, but was not remarkably successful. In 1837 it was closed.
Meanwhile, in 1809, with his wife and eight year-old son, Henry, Joshua Gilpin had travelled to western Pennsylvania, principally to look to the surveying of the family's extensive landholdings, but partly on vacation. The family began the return journey from Pittsburgh through Indiana County on October 1. They left Chambersburg for Carlisle on the morning of October 16. Riding in their own coach and attended by a servant, the Gilpins travelled as comfortably as was possible in that day and place. The journal records what they saw, expected, and received on the way.
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.
Fire was people’s greatest fear, especially in towns where houses and buildings were often attached to each other in rows.