History is, on the one hand, individual stories and, on the other, stories of groups, nations and cultures. In my recollection of classes I took when I was in college, the starting point was the latter, but in my recent experience of trying to write history, I began with individual stories I found in the Johnson Collection in the Cumberland County Historical Society - a collection of letters and papers of an African-American family in Carlisle.
Being one of the oldest surviving county historical society in Pennsylvania, the Cumberland County Historical Society (CCHS) has cause for celebration during its 125th anniversary year. Founded in 1874 as the Hamilton Library Association, the Society's first century is recalled by Milton E. Flower in the publication "The First One Hundred Years".
To mark the 125th anniversary of the Hamilton Library Association Cumberland County History reprints here the Association's first annual report, for the year 1881, and a subsequent annual report, for 1900.
He could be an unlikable man-loud, arrogant, vulgar; but he was also civicminded and generous to his workers; and he deserves to be remembered. He was, from the last decade of the nineteenth to the third decade of the twentieth century, one of the most prominent businessmen in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In any era he would have been a colorful character, a volatile yet romantic man who made his fortune from shoes and flowers.
In his book, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Christopher Lasch cautions that "Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer attainable ...," a past that "stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection." "The hallmark of nostalgia," he writes, "is a dependency on the disparagement of the present."
On 14 September 1906 William Trickett, dean of the Dickinson School of Law, wrote a letter offering a faculty position to a young lawyer then living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trickett proposed that the young man—Walter Harrison Hitchler—teach courses in criminal law and equity. "I think you will like the work," wrote Trickett. "It will be useful to you, and may be the initiation into a career as professor of law, that may be lifelong and honorable."
The Bitter Fruits: The Civil Wilr Comes to a Small Town in Pennsylvania. By David G. Colwell, 1998. Cumberland County Historical Society, 1998.
A Short History of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1751 to 1936. By Daniel J. Heisey. 58 pp. Carlisle, Pa. The New Loudon Press, 1997.
Editorial Introduction. Mary Jane (Rippey) Heistand was born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1856 of a family long settled in that town and part of the county. In 1878 she married Lieutenant Henry O.S. Heistand, who had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in that same year. She accompanied him to the West, where he was stationed at the Poplar Creek Indian Agency in Montana Territory and at Forts Abraham Lincoln and Yates in Dakota Territory.
By the autumn of 1864, the editors of Harrisburg's daily Patriot and Union had written themselves into journalistic trouble. Their staunchly Democratic newspaper was read throughout the Commonwealth, but especially in Dauphin, Cumberland, and Perry counties. In its columns, they advocated a conciliatory approach toward the South. Then the Confederates raided Chambersburg, showed no bent for conciliation, burned the heart of the town.