The Many Names of Huntsdale and Mt. Holly Springs

Doing research into the history of a place can be a confusing exercise because county and township boundaries changed over the decades as well as the names of towns and villages. To confuse matters, when a post office was established, it was sometimes given a different name than the village in which it stood.

Take for example the village of Huntsdale on Pine Road in Penn Township (created from Dickinson Township in in 1860.) It was named Milltown and Spring Mills then Elmira then Huntsville and finally Huntsdale. And for a brief time, its post office was called “Ernst.”

The 1872 Atlas of Cumberland County recorded the name of the village as Milltown, but it was also known as Spring Mills as evidenced in an 1875 item in a Newville newspaper that alerted its readers that “Milltown, or Spring Mills, has ceased to be. Hereafter it will bask under the mellow-sounding title of Elmira. The citizens are making application for a post office.”¹

The name Elmira was supplanted in 1876 when the Harrisburg and Potomac Railroad made changes in the names of several stations on their line. They changed the name to Huntsville in honor of Joshua Hunt of Lehigh County who was one of the directors of the railroad.² By October 1880, the name had obviously been changed to Huntsdale because that was when the name first appeared on Harrisburg and Potomac Railroad time tables. That was the same year that a post office was established at Huntsdale and it was named “Ernst,” probably for Abraham Ernst a prominent Huntsdale merchant.³ Sometime before 1885 the name of the post office had changed officially to Huntsdale.⁴

Mount Holly Springs, in South Middleton Township, is located on Route 94 (the Hanover/Carlisle Turnpike also known as the Baltimore Pike) six miles south of Carlisle. It has had several different names. On the 1815 plan of the town, it was named South Middleton. In 1818, George Crockett advertised that he had opened a tavern in the white house he built in the town of South Middleton on the road from Carlisle to Baltimore. The town was still called South Middleton in 1825 when the tavern was rented by Jonas Zigler.⁵

Upper Holly was known as Papertown. An 1827 indictment for a fight in Zigler’s tavern in South Middleton called the town Papertown.⁶ Newspaper advertisements for real estate sales, notices of deaths, etc. used the name Papertown consistently beginning in the 1830s. “Papertown, or Mt. Holly Springs, was incorporated into a borough” in 1873, and the newspaper reported that “the citizens were very jubilant.”⁷

Lower Holly was known as Kidderminster for the carpet weaving factory there. What is confusing is that the Kidderminster factory was situated in Papertown. The earliest newspaper reference to Kidderminster as a place was in 1837 when James Givin gave his address as Kidderminster.⁸ A post office existed at Kidderminster in 1839 when the newspaper reported that Samuel Givin, Esq. had been removed from the post office.⁹ In 1846 (the last year that local newspapers mention Kidderminster as a place apart), the Carlisle Weekly Herald apologized to its readers for not receiving the newspaper in Kidderminster and Shepherdstown because they had been misdirected.¹⁰

The names of other towns and villages in Cumberland County have changed over the years. Jacksonville, on the Walnut Bottom Road in Newton Township, had once been called Frystown and then Canada.¹¹ The name given to the post office was Walnut Bottom.

Lemoyne, on the Carlisle Harrisburg Pike, was known as Bridgeport and Riverton. In 1897, the post office was established there and named Lemoyne.¹² In 1905 the name of the town was changed to Lemoyne as well.

The post office in Milltown, Lower Allen Township, was named Eberly’s Mills. Allen was the name given to the post office in Churchtown, Monroe Township, and Centerville’s post office was called Dickinson.