Some idea of economic condition of Pennsylvania during the Panic of 1819 may be obtained from the report of a committee of the State Senate appointed on December 10, 1819, to inquire into "the Extent and Causes of the present General Distress throughout the Commonwealth." The long years of war in Europe and of the war of the United States with Great Britain, although they brought wealth and prosperity to some, also produced inflation and speculation.
Americans have a love-hate relationship with the city. Thomas Jefferson wanted to create a country of gentlemen farmers because cities were a haven for men with radical ideas and dangerous to the "morals, the health, and the liberties of men.” The image of the city did not improve during the nineteenth century.
On the night of August 19, 1779, there occurred on the south side of the North Mountain about ten miles northwest of Carlisle a geological phenomenon that eventually drew the attention of the astronomer David Rittenhouse, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the Secretary of War, and the president of Harvard College, and was described both in private letters among these and other men and also in the published proceedings of the second oldest learned society in the United States.
The factors that gave rise to the iron industry in Pennsylvania are detailed in many studies of early settlement and industrial progress. Both William A. Sullivan in his Industrial Worker in Pennsylvania and Arthur Bining's Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century describe the rich, natural resources of the early colony and the influx of wage earners from the Old World as the perfect setting for industrial growth and development.
In 1918, as the war with Germany and the Central Powers was coming to an end, the United States faced another, more subtle, and seemingly invincible enemy. This was the Spanish influenza. Although on a smaller scale and of much shorter duration, it made some think of the Black Death that had decimated Europe in the Middle Ages.
For nearly half a century until his death on January 2 at the age of 85 Milton Embick Flower was the best informed, most authoritative, and most widely known historian of Carlisle and Cumberland County. He was the author of books, monographs, and catalogues that recorded and interpreted the past of this area, and, in the words of one of his successors as president of the Cumberland County Historical Society...
Pages of History: Essays on Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Carlisle: The New Loudon Press, 97 pp. $9.95.
Cloth and Costume, 1750 to 1800: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Cumberland County Historical Society, 199 5. $34.95 plus tax. By Tandy and Charles Hersh. Illustrated; cloth.
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.
This village is located on Cedar Run in Lower Allen Township approximately 500 feet upstream from its confluence with the Yellow Breeches Creek. The topographic features of this site created the first interest in the area. Located in a dell cut by Cedar Run, which falls rapidly to the level of the Yellow Breeches, it offered an ideal source of water power for the operation of the early mills. In addition, there was a large spring adjacent to Cedar Run that was used by the early residents to draw their water and was reportedly also used to power one of the mills.