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.
For nearly half a century until his death on January 2 at the age of 85 Milton Embick Flower was the best informed, most authoritative, and most widely known historian of Carlisle and Cumberland County. He was the author of books, monographs, and catalogues that recorded and interpreted the past of this area, and, in the words of one of his successors as president of the Cumberland County Historical Society...
Pages of History: Essays on Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Carlisle: The New Loudon Press, 97 pp. $9.95.
Cloth and Costume, 1750 to 1800: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Cumberland County Historical Society, 199 5. $34.95 plus tax. By Tandy and Charles Hersh. Illustrated; cloth.