The Western one-third of Cumberland County contains a multitude of historic structures; approximately two thousand of these were surveyed from September 1984 to September 1985 as part of a project sponsored by the Cumberland County Historical Society and the Pennsylvania Bureau for Historic Preservation.
When John Bratton, editor of the American Volunteer newspaper, paid a visit to the village of Churchtown in April 1875, and then wrote about it in his newspaper, little did he know he would rile up the editor of a competing newspaper and send him off on his own trip to Churchtown.
George McFeely was a true "officer and gentleman." As lieutenant colonel of the 22nd Regiment of Infantry and as colonel of the 25th Regiment, he acted as second in command of the force which invaded Canada. Then, after the war was over, McFeely was designated as a "gentleman" of Carlisle by the censors and the assessors of the septennial assessment of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.
In 1978, Cumberland County Government and Cumberland County Historical Society (CCHS) entered into a formal agreement to transfer older government and court records. The records, officially on long-term loan to the Society according to the agreement, are housed at the Society in an archival environment. Acid free supplies are used to store the records and the Society's archives provide a temperature and humidity controlled environment to better preserve these early documents.
Lying broken on the ground in the underbrush of a neglected Cumberland County burying site is the only known stone carved by Jacob Heneman. Who was he? Who were the other carvers of Cumberland County? There are 228 Cumberland County burying sites listed in Cemeteries of Cumberland County by Bob Davidson (Carlisle, PA: Cumberland County Historical Society, 2000). After removing the sixty-four that are identified as leveled, moved, or unknown, 164 are still in existence.
In October of 1859 the well-known raid by John Brown and his men occurred at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Most members of the Brown group were captured at the time of the raid, but several men escaped including John E. Cook and Albert Hazlett who fled into Pennsylvania. These facts serve as the backdrop for events that occurred in Carlisle later in October.
In 1964, the Mechanicsburg Area School District was created by merging three existing school districts: the Mechanicsburg School District, the Upper Allen School District and the Shiremanstown School District. The school district is fortunate to have in its archives a collection of documents from the former Shiremanstown School District.
Most studies of the economic impact of the War of 1812 focus on early economic growth including manufacturing, shipbuilding, and canal and road improvements, and later issues of economic decline including the failure of the First Bank, decline of-specie supply, and issuance of Treasury Notes. These macroeconomic studies target such things as the inadequacy of the banking system, depreciation, inflation, the depression beginning in 1815, the Panic of 1819, and subsequent recessions of the 1820s.
In 2011 CCHS acquired an 1813 petition to the state legislature that sheds light on an intriguing yet little known episode in the County's history. The document reveals that Carlisle Constable James Hutton petitioned the General Assembly on January 28, 1813, in an effort to reverse the decision of two lawsuits against him that threatened to take away his property and leave him homeless.
This article is the third in a series of biographical sketches about Jacob Fought, a blacksmith and innkeeper who moved from Berks County to rural Cumberland County in 1798, and to Carlisle in 1806. In 1811, he became proprietor of the Sign of the Plough and Harrow, a tavern located one and one-half blocks east of the town square.