Index of Cumberland County Birth, Wedding, Divorce & Obituary Newspaper Records - 2003
This index runs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2003.
A Traveller in the County: 1810
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. One of these was Margaret Van Horn Dwight, a young woman of 20, who was journeying to the town of Warren in Connecticut's Western Reserve.
Margaret Dwight belonged to the clerical aristocracy of New England. She was the daughter of the Reverend Mr. Maurice William Dwight; her uncle was President Timothy Dwight of Yale College; her grandmother was a daughter of the great Jonathan Edwards; and, after the death of her mother, she lived in New Haven with her aunt Woolsey, whose son Theodore became president of Yale. In 1810, accompanying Deacon Wolcott and his family and a Mrs. Jackson, the latter's sons and a daughter-in-law, Miss Dwight left New Haven to go to cousins in Ohio. There she met and married one William Bell, a native of Ireland, who was later a merchant in Pittsburgh. The couple had thirteen children. Margaret Bell died in 1834 at the age of 44, remembered as "a lady of remarkable sweetness and excellence, and devotedly religious."
During the six weeks' journey from New Haven, which she left on October 19, to Warren, where she arrived on December 1, Margaret Dwight faithfully kept a daily journal of her observations and experiences on the road to "New Connecticut." Her little party travelled through Fairfield, just east of New Haven, through Westchester County in New York, to Hoboken on the Hudson River in New Jersey; then across that state to Easton ("small but pleasant"), Allentown ("not a pleasant place"), and Reading, which she judged "one of the largest & prettiest towns" she had seen, and where "almost every one could talk english." The group reached Harrisburg on November 1. Beyond the Cumberland Valley the journey was often physically exhausting, for Miss Dwight had to trudge over the mountains on foot, and rest and comfort were not often to be found at inns at the end of the day. Sometimes there were not enough beds or even any at all, the food was ill prepared, and the innkeepers and their servants indifferent or surly. Genteel travellers like Miss Dwight and the Wolcotts were embarrassed, offended, and even frightened by the loud, coarse wagoners toiling over the same road—men generally dirty and profane who "jabbered" in "Dutch." Margaret Dwight sent her journal to her cousin Elizabeth Woolsey, in whose family it remained until 1912, when it was edited by Professor Max Farrand and published under the title of A Journey to the Ohio in 1810 by Yale University Press, by whose permission a portion—pages 25-33—is published here.
Miss Dwight punctuated her narrative mostly with short and long dashes. The latter seem often to indicate a break that other writers would mark with a fresh paragraph. To make this reprinting of the journal easier to read and understand, the editor has in general replaced short dashes with a period or other appropriate mark, and has made paragraphs where the text and Miss Dwight's long dash suggest that is acceptable.