Crime

Indentured Servants

1775 advertisement in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Gazette

Indentured servants were men and women who agreed to work for a master without pay for a specified number of years, usually in return for having their passages to America paid. This 1775 advertisement in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Gazette announced that the ship Hawke had just arrived from London and was lying off the Market Street wharf with a shipment of “a few likely healthy servants” of many different trades “whose times are to be disposed of.”

Lewis the Robber

Photo of eighteen young people sitting and standing around Lewis Cave at Doubling Gap, Pa.

From a likely fictional confession written a day before his death, Pennsylvania’s Robin Hood tells the story of David Lewis, better known as Lewis the Robber from his birth on Hanover Street in Carlisle on March 4, 1790 to his capture and eventual death in jail in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania on July