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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.

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.

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.

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.