Andrew Carothers (1778-1836): His Life and Times
Frederick Watts, a well-known lawyer, judge of the Cumberland County Courts, and Unites States Commissioner of Agriculture, had this to say about his mentor and friend Andrew Carothers:
Recent
Charles Francis Himes (1838-1918): Portrait of a Photographer
The life of Charles Francis Himes, professor of physics at Dickinson College from 1865 to 1896, was one of many and varied pursuits. He was a scientist, an educator, and a historian; and with each of these roles his interest and achievements in photography were integrated. In the late twentieth century photography is taken granted. Anyone nowadays can buy a camera and take a picture, regardless of knowledge or skill; development and printing are done commercially; and photographs are used in every discipline.
Book Review: The Shippensburg Historical Society--A Fifty Year Retrospective, 1945-1995
The Shippensburg Historical Society-A Fifty Year Retrospective, 1945-1995. Various authors. Published by the Society: The News-Chronicle Company, Shippensburg, Pa., 1996.
Destruction of the Court House. 1845: An Eyewitness Account
In the early morning hours of March 24, 1845, the Cumberland County court house and Carlisle town hall burned down. The next morning the Carlisle Herald & Expositor printed an "extra," which was distributed in large numbers "through the county and to a distance." DESTRUCTIVE FIRE! County Court-House & Town Hall burned down!
The Carlisle Deluge, 1779, Revisited
We report here that evidence for the 1779 Carlisle Deluge still exists. In the Summer, 1996 issue of Cumberland County History, Whitfield J. Bell described what he called the Carlisle Deluge. Bell used primary sources, mainly a letter from David Rittenhouse to Benjamin Franklin, to describe how, on the night of August 19, 1779, a thunderstorm with copious rain opened a gash on the south side of North (Blue) Mountain east of Flat Rock and northwest of the present Bloserville. Rocks and trees were carried down the mountain.
Newville in 1859: Extracts from its Newspaper
The foregoing article by Angela Shears is primarily a personal impression of the Valley Times-Star of Newville, Pennsylvania, a weekly newspaper that began publication in 1858 and continues to this day. The author has written about its content, its editor, and its readers, especially in the past 30 years.
Newville's Hometown Newspaper: The Valley Times-Star and its Editors
Small "hometown newspapers" mean different things to different people. On vacation recently, I bought a copy of the local weekly newspaper-published in a quaint beach town for the past 142 years-and the store owner jokingly said, "You gonna go fish? That is the only thing people do with that paper! "
The Artificial Swan, the Elephant, and the One Hundred Educated Canaries: Public Performance in Cumberland County 1800-1870
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was no simple matter for professional performers to get to the Cumberland Valley, and local newspaper coverage of entertainment is so sketchy that we can only guess at how often theatrical companies, musical groups, or other entertainers included Carlisle, Shippensburg, Chambersburg, and other towns on their itineraries.
Transportation, Competition, and the Growth of a Town: Carlisle, 1750-1860
Rapid improvements in modes of transportation occurred during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. These innovations altered the structure of the United States demographically, causing some population centers to flourish, others to die, and still others to be born. Major cities, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, competed to build more extensive and efficient transportation systems to the hinterlands so that they could become the dominate outlets for the goods of the rural areas. Small towns in the interior of Pennsylvania which became entangled in this transportation web, such as Carlisle, prospered as a result of this competition.
Ida G. Kast, Cumberland County's First Woman Attorney
On August 1, 1893, Ida G. Kast, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, an instructor in Irving College in that town, in a letter to the Board of Examiners for Law Students requested permission to appear before the Board for preliminary examination to be registered as a law student. At the bottom of her letter it was noted "that the above Ida G. Kast is a person of good moral character and social standing."