Note: Dr. Herrold delivered the Annual Address at the dinner of the Cumberland County Historical Society on October 17, 2000. The address was principally the Reverend Mr. Ault's sermon of 1873, which contained an historical account of the Reformed Church in Pennsylvania and the Cumberland Valley. It is reprinted here from the original manuscript in possession of St. Paul's United Church of Christ, Mechanicsburg.
In May of 1943, as American and British forces were wrapping up their operations in North Africa and preparing for an invasion of Sicily, United States military personnel in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, were making their own unique contribution to the Allied war effort. Deep in the heart of the Michaux State Forest, an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp was being renovated for an entirely new purpose: to detain and interrogate German prisoners.
Before April 1861, no one saw the Civil War as inescapable. Cumberland County Democrats, like most northern Democrats, opposed the nation's division over slavery and tried to placate the South without alienating their constituents.
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.
Merri Lou Schaumann, ed., Pictorial History: Shippensburg Area, Big Spring Area, Cm-lisle Area, Mechanicsburg Area and West Shore Area (Carlisle: Cumberland County 250'" Anniversary Committee, 2000). 5 volumes, 96 pp. each. Photographs, maps. $16.95 each volume, $75.00 set.
John B. Frantz and William Pencak, eds., Beyond Philadelphia: The American Revolution in the Pennsylvania Hinterland. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998) viii, 273, maps, index. Hardback $55.00 (ISBN 0-27 1-01 766-X) Paperback $ 19.95 (ISBN 0-271-01767-8).
Captain Raphael Cummings Smead, after serving some months with the army in Mexico, was ordered to Carlisle Barracks in 1847. He brought his wife Sarah Radcliff and their family of five children to the town, and enrolled his oldest son, John Radcliff, in the local Dickinson College. But a liberal education appears to have had few attractions for either father or son; a commission in the army or even a job as a surveyor or engineer on one of the railroads under construction in the West promised higher social rank and income.
"He gave River City the library building, bur he left all the books to her." Meredith Willson, The Music Man. That verse summarizes the history of public libraries in many American small towns. A generous citizen provides for a library and puts it in the care of a guardian. The public library in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is no exception, and it is the purpose here to address some aspects of its history, in particular its nature as a public and memorial library.
There was a time when Cumberland County had no Republican party. It was born of the 1850s struggle between slavery and free labor that produced the Civil War. The party itself helped bring about war, for it was exclusively northern and "free soil", determined to stop slavery's spread. Merely by winning the presidency and Congress in 1860, the Republicans provoked seven southern states to secede, with four to follow upon the war's outbreak.
In the late summer of 1847 when Professor John McClintock was tried before the Quarter Sessions Court of Cumberland County, the only white man among 34 other Carlisle Pennsylvanians, all black, charged with inciting a riot, he seems to have reached a turning point in his career. His first book had just been published by Harper Brothers in the fall of 1846...