Leaving the Cumberland Valley: Patterns of Migration from 1750 until 1890

After decades of introducing Dickinson students to the fascination of the history of Carlisle and Cumberland County, four years ago I at last had the opportunity to explore the topic myself, first in a book on leisure in the nineteenth century, and then, after retirement, on the important but ignored phenomenon of migration out of the Cumberland Valley. While going through newspapers from the 1870's in search of stories on brass bands and picnics, dances and choral concerts, I had encountered a continuous barrage of stories and letters by or about those who had relocated from the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania to the Smoky Hill River Valley and other places in Kansas, so that was the aspect that I first addressed.

This essay represents an attempt to expand that inquiry and to ask more broadly, and necessarily more speculatively, what impelled people in Cumberland County, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to leave a place that they continued to recall with great affection and to make new lives for themselves in new places farther and farther to the west, physically very unlike the valleys and rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania. The project had a certain personal attraction as well, since some of my own ancestors, after spending a century in Dauphin and Cumberland Counties, like so many others had made the long trek to the rolling prairies of western Illinois.

For many years, my late friend and colleague Warren J.Gates and I taught Dickinson's course in historical methods and led students into research in local history. There was nothing Warren liked better than a pun, and he was fond of saying that while many towns were towns of "character," Carlisle was a town of "characters." The Gates Thesis held that Carlisle and Cumberland County were exceptionally suited to serve as stopping-off places to somewhere else. A great many people, he suggested half seriously, arrived in the Valley intending to move on, but some of them never got around to it. These were Carlisle's "characters."

Since its foundation Cumberland County's location has made it a hub for those migrating south or west, whether by path and wagon road in the eighteenth century, by canal and railroad in the nineteenth, or by interstate highway today. Yet none of the nineteenth century local histories of Cumberland County addressed the topic of the continuing movement out of the Valley. Neither did Milton E. Flower's still useful essay on the history of Carlisle. One gets a hint of the magnitude of these migrations by skimming through the Biographical Annals of Cumberland County and similar volumes, but we encounter there only a handful of the thousands who left Cumberland County to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Several groups who moved away from "mother Cumberland" deserve more attention than I can provide here. There was for example the group that made a remarkable journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to settle in the raw frontier town of Natchez. And in 1849-50 at least thirty young men, bearers of good Cumberland Valley names like Keller, Bentz, and Hoffer, made their way to the gold fields of California, either overland, across Panama, or around Cape Horn. 2 Finally, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as they found their opportunities for employment restricted almost entirely to unskilled labor, many of Carlisle's African-American community moved to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, and other cities of the East or Midwest.

Cumberland County History recently published three contemporary accounts of what was the most massive migration from the Valley: the one to Kansas in the 1870's. For that phenomenon, there exist all sorts of materials: newspaper reports, letters, memoirs, and photographs, plus detailed information from the 1870 and 1880 manuscript censuses. The same cannot be said for the three earlier migrations that I want to discuss. I must instead draw inferences and make brave generalizations from rather limited information.

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