Immigrant

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.”

Cormick McManus: Irish Tailor

Photo of McManus’s 1812 tailor bill to William Line lists the prices charged for the clothing he made for Line.

Although Cormick McManus, a tailor, was one of a number of Irish Catholics who immigrated to America, settled in Carlisle, and was naturalized in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he was memorable enough to be written about in the reminiscences of several Carlisle natives. The tailor shop of Cormick McManus on West High Street, wrote James Miller McKim, was:

Conrad Reep: Mt. Holly Springs Cabinetmaker & Undertaker

Photo of the grave marker of the Reep family in the Mount Holly Springs cemetery

Conrad Reep, his wife Catharine (Lizman) and their two young daughters emigrated from Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany in 1848. Reep’s brother-in-law, John Lizman, also from Hess-Darmstadt, had immigrated earlier and was a cabinetmaker in Carlisle. Reep settled in Mount Holly Springs, six miles south of Carlisle. In 1856, he declared his intent to become a citizen and was naturalized on November 10, 1858.

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