In 1808 Thomas Sully, artist to the rich and famous, painted the portrait of Henry Connelly. (Fig. 1) Connelly, looking contented, prosperous, and very Byronesque, was 39 years old at the time. He had reason to look both prosperous and contented for he was one of the leading cabinetmakers of Philadelphia.
Cumberland County is fortunate to have had a number of excellent photographers who left behind a fascinating visual record of Cumberland County people, places and events. Charles C. Lachman, Frank Beidel, Charles F. Himes, A. A. Line, John N. Choate, Maynard Hoover, and Clyde A. Laughlin are just a few names familiar to those who know early local photographers.
The history of a remarkable African-American family in Pennsylvania begins, in a sense, with a two-story frame house at 43 Baltimore Street in Carlisle. The builders of the house, Jonas and Mary Kee, came into Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century from Maryland and Virginia respectively. Their daughter, Margaret, married William James Andrews, whose forebears were in Shippensburg as early as 1790. The Andrews were the second generation to inhabit the house.
A History of Carlisle, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1751-1835. By Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann. Carlisle: Privately printed, [1995]. Available from the author: 249 West Pomfret Street, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013. Price $39.95, including postage and handling.
Fortescue Cuming (1 762-1828) was one of the many travellers who passed through Cumberland County in the half century after 1785, and was one of those who kept and published a full account of the journey. A native of County Tyrone, Ireland, he had come to America after 1784 and been a resident of Connecticut since 1792. In 1806 he purchased land in the western country of the United States and the following year set out to the Ohio and Mississippi to inspect it.
Some idea of economic condition of Pennsylvania during the Panic of 1819 may be obtained from the report of a committee of the State Senate appointed on December 10, 1819, to inquire into "the Extent and Causes of the present General Distress throughout the Commonwealth." The long years of war in Europe and of the war of the United States with Great Britain, although they brought wealth and prosperity to some, also produced inflation and speculation.
Americans have a love-hate relationship with the city. Thomas Jefferson wanted to create a country of gentlemen farmers because cities were a haven for men with radical ideas and dangerous to the "morals, the health, and the liberties of men.” The image of the city did not improve during the nineteenth century.
On the night of August 19, 1779, there occurred on the south side of the North Mountain about ten miles northwest of Carlisle a geological phenomenon that eventually drew the attention of the astronomer David Rittenhouse, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the Secretary of War, and the president of Harvard College, and was described both in private letters among these and other men and also in the published proceedings of the second oldest learned society in the United States.
The factors that gave rise to the iron industry in Pennsylvania are detailed in many studies of early settlement and industrial progress. Both William A. Sullivan in his Industrial Worker in Pennsylvania and Arthur Bining's Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century describe the rich, natural resources of the early colony and the influx of wage earners from the Old World as the perfect setting for industrial growth and development.
In 1918, as the war with Germany and the Central Powers was coming to an end, the United States faced another, more subtle, and seemingly invincible enemy. This was the Spanish influenza. Although on a smaller scale and of much shorter duration, it made some think of the Black Death that had decimated Europe in the Middle Ages.