For nearly half a century until his death on January 2 at the age of 85 Milton Embick Flower was the best informed, most authoritative, and most widely known historian of Carlisle and Cumberland County. He was the author of books, monographs, and catalogues that recorded and interpreted the past of this area, and, in the words of one of his successors as president of the Cumberland County Historical Society, he was "our standard source" of information ranging from local characters and institutions through eighteenth century craftsmen and architecture to the Civil War and Victorian furniture. He was the repository, always informed and often charming, of a well-nigh endless fund of anecdotal information about Carlisle personalities-their families, foibles, and business relations-with whom it sometimes sounded as if he had been personally acquainted, by no matter how many generations they had preceded him.
Milton Flower belonged to a family where history was a constant presence. He grew up in the house his great-grandfather had owned. Family portraits and family heirlooms filled it, each with its own story, and after Dr. Flower inherited the place, he had the view of the Carlisle Square reproduced from Sherman Day's Historical Collections of Pennsylvania as wallpaper for the dining room. His mother was a genealogist and historian, the author of studies of such local institutions as Irving College of Mechanicsburg and the iron furnace at Pine Grove. She contributed a daily history column to one of the Harrisburg newspapers that ran to 83 installments; and her account of George Washington's visit to Carlisle in 1794, written for the bicentennial of Washington's birth in 1932, was reprinted in 1994 for the town's bicentennial commemoration of the famous visit. Such was Mrs. Flower's reputation that friends and strangers called with historical and genealogical queries, and if these calls came at dinner time and she was unable to answer, Milton was sent to the phone to reply. Eventually the calls were for him as well.
After graduating from Dickinson College in 1931, Flower taught in the Carlisle High School. In 1937 he wrote a play based on Mary Dillon's historical novel of Carlisle and Dickinson in the Civil War, In Old Bellaire. The play was performed but never published, because the owner of the copyright refused permission.
He became a member of the Historical Society-then simply the Hamilton Library Association-in the 1930s, when the Society was moribund. He was elected a director in 1944, served as president from 1961 to 1968, and contributed importantly and permanently to the Society, not least to its revival. He presented the results of his research in ten or a dozen papers and addresses to the Society. The original idea for many of the Society's exhibitions and successful programs were his. One of these was the Antiques Forum, for which he solicited artifacts from personal friends and acquaintances and from professional museum curators, and in many instances wrote the catalogues as well. As president of the Society in the 1960s he had a large part in the expansion of the building, for which he enlisted the interest and generous support of some community leaders. He was one of three persons designated by Mary Wheeler King to draft a plan for use of the Two Mile House. In 1993 he was a member of the committee that conducted a successful financial campaign for the Society and at the time of his death he was on the committee that is currently planning the extension of the Society's building and functions. For his professional contributions to history Flower was, appropriately, named Historian of the Year in 1969 and for his many other services to the Society he was proclaimed Volunteer of the Year in 1987. At his death he bequeathed the Society several rare and coveted pieces of furniture, including a tall-case clock.
Flower's first extensive research into local history was a study of the early history of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, submitted as a thesis for his master of arts degree at Columbia University in 1938. Based on a wide variety of printed primary and secondary sources, it related the financial and engineering history of the railroad before 1850. Although the railroad's goal of reaching Pittsburgh was soon blocked by the Pennsylvania Canal and the Pennsylvania Railroad, and its hope of linking the Susquehanna Valley with Baltimore was frustrated by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the C.V.R.R. provided passenger and freight service through the Valley for more than a century. Flower concluded his monograph with some of the eloquence and warmth with which he often wrote of his town and county.
On the night of August 19, 1779, there occurred on the south side of the North Mountain about ten miles northwest of Carlisle a geological phenomenon that eventually drew the attention of the astronomer David Rittenhouse, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the Secretary of War, and the president of Harvard College, and was described both in private letters among these and other men and also in the published proceedings of the second oldest learned society in the United States.
Wilhelm Schimmel (1817-1890) was a German itinerant who lived in Cumberland County during the last quarter of the 19th century. In exchange for food and lodging, often in people’s barns, he made wood carvings for them.