Towns often start in strange ways, following paths not first expected by their planners. The farther we are removed from those founding days, furthermore, the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct just how a town began. After the passage of a century or more, most tangible vestiges of the early days are gone and we are left with only the old myths and oral traditions. So it is with Mechanicsburg. Almost.
Some things we have always known. This modest Cumberland County trading and manufacturing village, situated on the old Trindle Road midway between Harrisburg and Carlisle, was incorporated in 1828 and named, we are told, for the "Village of Mechanics" there located. Of its earlier history little has been known other than a few names of founding fathers, some Indian legends, and stories of earlier names for the place like "Dry Town" and "Stoufferstown." Of physical remains of those early days there is only the old 1825 Union Church on East Main Street.
That is as much as was certain. Yet legend and physical remains have always combined on another site in Mechanicsburg, a partnership that, if correct, would take us back to the very founding of the village itself, to the very first citizen of what would become the town, and to the home in which he dwelled.
For as long as anyone can remember, there has stood at 217 East Main Street a moderately sized building, partly log, partly frame, with a large brick addition at the rear. It has served a number of purposes in our own time--apartments, private dwelling, boutique, carpentry shop. But along with it there has always gone the oral tradition that this was the "hotel" built by George Frankeberger in or around 1801, the first structure erected in what is now Mechanicsburg.
Local lore is often surprisingly correct. Yet it is also just as often mistaken, and only careful research into the surviving documentary records offers any real chance of separating fact from fiction.
The legend is easily confirmed. Prior to 1800, all of what is now the village of Mechanicsburg was the property of Leonard Fisher. It was mostly wooded then, and research has not established whether Fisher himself lived on any of the property that later became the town. What is certain is that on December 2, 1800, he sold twenty-one acres and three perches of his property to George Frankeberger.
It was a plot bisected by the Trindle Road--now Main Street-- and including a "cross road." That crossroad was then known as Meeting House Street, because it ran out to the Silver Spring Church. Today it is Walnut Street. Some time later Frankeberger (note there was no second "n" in the name, as legend has it) bought another twenty-eight acres and fifty perches from Fisher on April 3, 1804. This adjoined his first purchase and extended it westward toward present-day Market Street. Thus we know that George Frankeberger did own land here. Indeed, he owned most of the eastern half of the future town.
But did he operate a "hotel" here? Happily, Cumberland County in those days required all keepers of taverns and public houses to apply for a license and pay a fee. Just as happily, those old records survive, and thus we find that George Frankeberger made application before the June 1801 session of the Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas. To the court he attested:
That your petitioner has accomadated [sic] himself with a convenient house, and other necessary things for keeping a house of Entertainment, on the public road, commonly called Trunnel's road, about ten miles from the borough of Carlisle. That the said road is deserted, owing merely to the circumstances of the inconvenience attending Travellors, for want of Taverns.
The same records show that Frankeberger applied for and received his tavern license every year thereafter until 1809. Then, on June 19, 1810, he sold all of his property to Jacob Stair and left the vicinity, though not the county.
It seems to be an axiom of geography that settlements arise along rivers and heavy trade routes. One has only to consider the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, or Rome, Paris, or London. In many ways Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century was similar more to an ancient or medieval land than to anything of the twentieth century.
Mechanicsburg is situated about midway between Harrisburg and Carlisle. Due to this location, it was a reasonable place to build an inn and tavern which resulted in the beginning of the town.