Outdoor photo of Vance McCormick in a football uniform, leaning on a fence in front of an institutional building (23Q-06-02).
Vance Criswell McCormick was born in Silver Springs Township in 1872 and was part of the sixth generation of McCormick’s in Cumberland County. Vance attended Yale University, starring as the quarterback and captain of the varsity football team his junior and senior years before graduating in 1893. He was named to Walter Camp's All-American Eleven for his outstanding play on the field. After graduating from Yale, McCormick returned to Central Pennsylvania and coached the first Carlisle Indians intercollegiate team.
After his father died in 1897, Vance became involved in coal, lumber, and railroad enterprises as well as becoming director of Central Iron and Steel, the Dauphin Deposit Bank, and Harrisburg Bridge Company. McCormick also became executor of his father's estate, estimated to be worth twenty million dollars.
Being a businessman, however, was not enough for Vance McCormick. He entered politics in 1900 by winning a seat on the Common Council from the Fourth Ward of Harrisburg. On April 1, 1902, the twenty-nine-year-old McCormick became the youngest mayor of Harrisburg and presided over the most expansive era in the history of the city up to that time.
Four months after becoming mayor, McCormick acquired the Patriot, a morning newspaper, for which he was the president and publisher until 1946. He subsequently founded The Evening News in 1917 and was its publisher until 1946. Immediately after acquiring the Patriot, he began a sustained campaign to print Cumberland County news and gain subscribers there.
McCormick set about reforming the Democratic Patty in Pennsylvania in 1910. As a delegate-at-large to the Democratic National Convention at Baltimore in 1912, he played an important role in getting Woodrow Wilson nominated as the Presidential candidate on the forty-sixth ballot. As a Wilsonian Progressive, McCormick won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1914, but lost the general election to Republican candidate, Dr. Martin G. Brumbaugh, by 135,325 votes. McCormick never ran again for elective office but did become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1916. He succeeded in getting Woodrow Wilson reelected in a close race with Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes.
Becoming one of President Wilson's confidants, McCormick was offered cabinet posts in the Wilson administration. McCormick turned down these nominations the first term, but accepted them during Wilson's second term, becoming head of the War Trade Board, a member of the American War Mission to the Inter-Allied Conference in London and Paris in 1917, and as an adviser to President Wilson at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919. McCormick's direct involvement in national politics ended with his attendance in 1924 as a Democratic delegate to the National Convention.
On January 5, 1925, Vance McCormick, at the age of fifty-two, married Mrs. Gertrude Howard Olmsted, a widow. Vance McCormick died at his home, "Cedar Cliff” in Camp Hill on June 16, 1946 at the age of 73.
James Francis Thorpe was born in 1887 to Hiram Thorpe and Charlotte Vieux in a one-room cabin near Prague, Oklahoma. Hiram was a farmer and Charlotte, a Pottawatomie Indian, a descendant of the last great Sauk and Fox chief Black Hawk, a noted warrior and athlete.