Winters in New England are lengthy and bitter, and the college-age students at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (Springfield College today) in Springfield, Massachusetts in the early 1890s could become somewhat boisterous when weather conditions prohibited their going outside to participate in sports.
James Hamilton, Jr. (1793 - 1873), was born in and was a lifelong resident of Carlisle. His father was a wealthy attorney and James followed in his footsteps after graduating from Dickinson College. Beyond law, James was also interested in education, science, and history, and became an active philanthropist in support of those interests.
There is a rugged knot of mountains where Cumberland, Franklin, and Perry Counties come together, crossed now by roads with odd names such as "Cow Pen Road" or "Three Square Hollow Road". It is lovely in the Fall with the foliage in bright color and again in the late spring when the mountain laurel froths in sunlit openings.
When John Bratton, editor of the American Volunteer newspaper, paid a visit to the village of Churchtown in April 1875, and then wrote about it in his newspaper, little did he know he would rile up the editor of a competing newspaper and send him off on his own trip to Churchtown.
Paul Chambers Reed and his son Richard Crandall Reed were architects in Carlisle from the 1930s until the late 1990s. During this time, they made their mark on Cumberland County through the many functional buildings they designed in addition to their dedication to serving the community.
The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation . By Sally Jenkins. Photos, 343pp. New York, NY, Doubleday Publishers, 2007. $24.95.
Original narratives recounting the experiences of local citizens during the Confederate occupation of Carlisle in late June and early July of 1863 are always of interest to staff and patrons at CCHS. Our much-used collection of contemporary accounts, particularly those that describe the shelling of the town, is a perennial favorite of students writing history essays, reporters setting up Civil War-related stories, and history buffs in general.
On October 18, 2007, the Cumberland County Historical Society received notification from the National Park Service that the application for Kaufman's Station at the Village of Boiling Springs had been evaluated and was officially named a site on the Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
The oldest town in the Cumberland Valley, straddling the border between Franklin and Cumberland counties in the rolling foothill system of the Appalachian Mountains of south central Pennsylvania, the Borough of Shippensburg is laid out in a grid pattern. The town's major east-west thoroughfare is King Street, an old Indian path, and along this two-lane road, also designated U.S. Route 11, has long lain much of its commercial district.
Two women trudged alongside the American soldiers through 350 miles of uninhabited primeval wilderness in Maine, following a faulty map of an unmarked route to Quebec. The terrain with its hills and deep ravines, the rivers, rapids and ponds with their bogs and marshes, and the forest with its fallen trees and rotting debris were obstacles that would have challenged the best of woodsmen.