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Searching for Community: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1750s–1780s Richard K. MacMaster In 1769 an anonymous writer in the Pennsylvania Chronicle sketched a picture of a potential Scotch-Irish, linen-making region in the Pennsylvania backcountry . He had seen an advertisement for a proposed new town to be laid out on the Juniata River and took this as his starting point: “The proposed erection of a town on Juniata seemed to me to point out the proper place for the erection of a linen manufacture; the distance from maritime navigation must ever keep provisions low. These countries abound in great tracts of fresh land, proper for the produce of hemp and flax, and Cumberland County is seated in great measure by natives of Ireland, who, many of them, understand that employment, and would, no doubt, engage therein with alacrity, if properly encouraged.” The writer expanded on the advantages of his scheme for more than a page, but they need not detain us, other than his insistence that the back inhabitants could not readily send their produce to market. “And inasmuch as the provisions raised in those inland parts are too remote from marine navigation, to bear the expence of exportation, or encourage the industry of the farmers, the erection of trading and popular towns is become absolutely necessary.”1 Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna was the domain of the ScotchIrish . They crossed the river in the 1730s, and by 1745 settlers had formed ten Presbyterian congregations within the bounds of what was soon to be Cumberland County. Settlement spread beyond the Susquehanna and followed the river and its tributaries, like the Juniata, deep into the Pennsylvania backcountry by 1769. But settlers had difficulty in transporting goods. Farm surplus went to market in Philadelphia by wagon over roads that were little more than rutted trails. Even iron was hauled in wagons. “The traveler who headed west from Philadelphia would find the road rutted and muddy, 78 Richard K. MacMaster thanks to heavy use by hundreds of Conestoga wagons loaded with produce.”2 Wagons and teams crossed the broad Susquehanna with some difficulty by ferryboat.3 This would change in time. While backcountry merchants continued to ship farm produce and pelts to market in Philadelphia, a network of improved roads drew much of their trade to Baltimore and encouraged the growth of towns west of the Susquehanna. The river itself became a highway into the interior. By 1775, according to one Middletown boomer, merchants there traded up the Susquehanna, and produce was brought down the river to Middletown “with many thousand bushels of wheat, rye, and Indian corn annually unloaded here” (see map 4.1).4 James T. Lemon wrote of a “town-making fever” that led to the founding of more than twenty-nine new towns in the Pennsylvania backcountry between 1756 and 1765, more than in all of Pennsylvania in the previous seventy-five years.5 This fever reached its peak in the 1760s, with the end of the French and Indian War and a positive economic outlook based on wartime profits on backcountry produce. It also reflected the commercial development of the county towns in the backcountry, notably Lancaster, York, and Carlisle, as secondary centers for the distribution of manufactured goods and the shipment of wheat, flour, flaxseed, beef, and pork to Philadelphia and a market overseas. Lemon suggested that some of the new towns, such as McAllisterstown (Hanover) in York County and Chambersburg and Shippensburg in Cumberland County, developed in the 1760s as satellites of the county towns, being important transport centers at major crossroads. He also recognized a different network for which the established county towns and the new towns were nodal points, the commercial network linking city merchants and backcountry shopkeepers.6 Given the difficulties in transportation, which were beyond the ability of an individual farmer, towns became “absolutely necessary” as collection points for the shipment of produce and the distribution of imported goods as well as a market for nearby farmers. Philadelphia (and later Baltimore) merchants were essential middlemen in getting the flour, flaxseed, and iron of the backcountry to consumers in the Atlantic world and in bringing an increasing variety of European and East India goods to backcountry farmers. They depended in turn on backcountry shopkeepers to supply the exports they needed and to alert them to the goods demanded by their customers. Commercial networks were also information highways, with backcountry towns as nodal points in a complex web of credit, goods, and ideas that linked...

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