In the early morning hours of March 24, 1845, the Cumberland County court house and Carlisle town hall burned down. The next morning the Carlisle Herald & Expositor printed an "extra," which was distributed in large numbers "through the county and to a distance." DESTRUCTIVE FIRE! County Court-House & Town Hall burned down!
Irving College, located between Simpson and Main Streets in Mechanicsburg from 1856 through 1929, once offered the same type of curriculum, administrative trends, and student organizations that existed at many women's colleges throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irving was founded in 1856, during the initial rush of female colleges, when no less than seven women's colleges were within a 50 mile radius of the county seat.
No telephone history would be complete without a brief biography of the telephone's inventor. Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the telephone, came from an English family deeply involved in speech and elocution. As a young man, Bell traveled from England to Boston where he earned his living teaching speech to the deaf.
Cumberland County History prints below excerpts from the 1912 entries in the diary of John A. Smith of Dickinson Township, taken from the original in the possession of his, the Editor. Besides giving insight into life three generations ago in the County, the entries represent an expansion of a matter mentioned in passing by Dr. Warren Gates in his article in this journal one year ago.
It was Pearl Harbor Day plus four. In that four years Dickinson College had lost most of its students to war service. It had lost one president, and its current one had been ailing since a March heart attack. It had lost much faculty and engaged the rest along with its facilities and energy in a training program for the air corps.
My father was District Attorney from 1904 to 1907 and built a house on South College Street in Carlisle, at the corner of Graham Street, in 1910. The way it happened was this. Wilbur F. Sadler was judge of Cumberland County at the time. He had been elected, for the second time, in 1904 in a bloody battle with John Wetzel in which each side was reputed to have spent $100,000, a huge sum in those days.
Considering the time and the place, the first army seen in Cumberland County was of quite respectable size. Made up entirely of British regulars, it comprised two foot regiments, a detachment of artillery, and three independent (or unregimented) companies. With these units at less than full strength, the whole force numbered about twelve thousand.
The present collection of proverbs began as an incidental by-product of a study on the life and times of Lewis the Robber, central Pennsylvania's folk-hero. Examination of newspapers and other materials published in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before 1820 revealed a wealth of proverbial material in dated occurrences prior to the starting date of Archer Taylor and Bartlett J. Whiting's Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-80.
The 2012 issue of Cumberland County History is an eclectic mix of articles spanning from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It has been a pleasure to review the numerous articles submitted over the past year. They have included a wide variety of topics and have been extremely well written and researched. Sufficient articles were submitted to warrant two issues. A number of submissions are being held for publication in 2013. I am certain that the eight articles published in this issue will be of interest to our readers.
The 2013 issue of Cumberland County History marks the 30th year of publication of the Journal. That alone is an important milestone, but it is also appropriate at this time to acknowledge the significant contribution to the success of this publication made by Executive Director, Linda F. Witmer. Her ongoing support for the Journal has made it possible to continue publication during the rich and the lean times at CCHS. She has made an indelible mark on the Society in so many ways and this publication, in its thirtieth year speaks to the success of her tenure at the Society.