Robert Grant Crist was known to many different people in many different ways: he was a husband, father, friend, colleague, and professor. Everyone, however, no matter how they knew him, knew him as Bob Crist, historian—an appellation with which I feel sure he would have been fully satisfied, and the one most familiar to the readers of this publication.
This village is located on Cedar Run in Lower Allen Township approximately 500 feet upstream from its confluence with the Yellow Breeches Creek. The topographic features of this site created the first interest in the area. Located in a dell cut by Cedar Run, which falls rapidly to the level of the Yellow Breeches, it offered an ideal source of water power for the operation of the early mills. In addition, there was a large spring adjacent to Cedar Run that was used by the early residents to draw their water and was reportedly also used to power one of the mills.
Joshua Gilpin, a well-to-do merchant, manufacturer, and capitalist of Philadelphia and Delaware, travelled through Cumberland County from Chambersburg to Harrisburg in 1809 on his way home from a business and pleasure trip to western Pennsylvania. As was his custom on journeys of this kind, he made a record of observations and events. Although not notably different in content from those of other travellers on the same road at the same time, its relevant portion is nonetheless worth reprinting as a source of information about the county at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
An unusual letter from George Boyer Vashon (1824-1878), a noted African American attorney, educator, and poet, who was a native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was recently discovered in the Mary Wager Fisher Papers in the Special Collections Library at Duke University, Wager (as she then was)1 , an American journalist, was particularly active in the movement for education of freedmen. The letter, written in response to a request by Wager for biographical information, provides details of the education and accomplishments of an outstanding individual.
Perhaps if a symbol were to be chosen for historians, it would be an owl. The wise old owl, who listens more than he speaks, just as the historian is supposed to observe and study before he publishes his essay into the past. Yet, upon reading historical essays, one begins to sense that historians might more appropriately march beneath the sign of the parrot. History, which began as the most inquisitive of arts, often degrades into repeating accepted wisdom, and the received tradition replaces individual inquiry.
The year 1993 marked the centennial of the building of St. Patrick's Shrine Church in Carlisle. Just as the Rev. Dr. Henry G. Ganss published a comprehensive history of the parish in 1895, so it was deemed appropriate to prepare a brief history of the present church and its people during the last century.
Nellie Clayton Cornman was born in Carlisle, and Robert Tempest in Philadelphia. Music was their common bond, but in personality and temperament they were complete opposites. Both were born in 1868 and were 39 years old when they met.
At a Place Called the Boiling Springs. Edited by Richard L. Tritt and Randy Watts. Illustrated, 247 pp. Boiling Springs Sesquicentennial Publications Committee, 1995. $35, cloth.
Taverns of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1840. By Merri Lou Schaumann. Illustrated, 250 pp. Carlisle: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1994. $34.95.
There is no mystery about the name Carlisle Springs, and no research is required to learn its origin. What other name would anyone give to a sulphur spring of medicinal properties located only five miles from the county seat of Cumberland County? What is of special interest, however, is that Carlisle Springs was one of many springs, baths, and spas that flourished as popular resorts for health and recreation in the United States in the second third of the nineteenth century.