A persuasive case could be made that New Kingstown should properly be named "Junkintown. " Consider, Joseph Junkin was the first settler. His home, before settling in Silver Spring Township near Stoney Ridge was a farm which lay on both sides of a line in Ireland separating County Down and County Antrim. Leaving Ulster about 1736, he settled at first in Chester County where he married a Scot, Elizabeth Wallace. They took up 500 acres of land in Cumberland County.
Elizabeth became custodian of one of the earliest places west of the Susquehanna where settlers worshipped, an outdoor chapel that eventually became known as "Widow Junkins' Tent." Located where Cumberland County officials recently proposed as a site for trash and sewage sludge transfer, it stood from about 1751 to 1830 as an elevated platform for a minister with a board nailed on a black oak tree to hold the Bible. Rude benches were the seats. The communicants were Scots Covenanters, a group with Calvinistic principles founded in 1638, predating the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. To the first communion, 21 August 1751, a service which then lasted as long as nine hours, the Reverend John Cuthbertson attracted a congregation of 250 persons. It was said to be the first Covenanter gathering in the New World. Those from distant areas stayed at Thomas Bell's Tavern which adjoins the site of the Covenanters "Tent. "
The word "tent, according to Whitfield J. Bell, was being used in 1760 in Edinburgh, home of the Covenanters, to refer to a pulpit in the Orphans Hospital there.
A son, Joseph, Jr., was a captain in General James Potter's Brigade during the War of the Revolution. After fighting at Brandywine he was wounded and returned to his father's acreage where he had started to build a stone house about 1775. This structure, still standing, was later known as "The Walker Place" and then as "Kanaga" for a subsequent owner, Henry W Kanaga. Joseph Junkin, Jr., later was ordained as a Covenanter minister. A prominent member of the congregation was the neighbor Thomas Bell.
Historians, engineers, and buffs of all walks of life can and should cheer the new work of Dr. Paul Gill, professor of history at Shippensburg State University. For a title he has borrowed a phrase from Rudyard Kipling's A Song of the English and for illustrations photographs from the Society 's extensive collection.