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Chapter 6. Adapting to the Next Century
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chapter six Adapting to the Next Century “upon the whole,” said one visitor, Carlisle had “a respectable appearance” by the nineteenth century. No longer was it the woods that Euro-Americans such as the fur trader James LeTort encountered in the 1720s when he built his cabin along the creek that later bore his name. Nor was it the fledgling interior town said to be “much at a Stand” in the 1760s when a host of fur traders, refugees, and soldiers brought together by the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Uprising made it their temporary home. Instead, Carlisle residents of the early republic took great “pleasure” in the “improving” and even “flourishing Situation ” of their borough; it was “a handsome village and Shire town” (figure 10).1 Carlisle had indeed changed over the half century since its founding. Its population was larger than at any time in its history. With just over 2,000 inhabitants by 1800, Carlisle was the fifth largest town in Pennsylvania.2 The townscape was expanding as well. New public buildings, including a “handsome ” new structure for county court offices and a new market house that opened in 1802, joined the existing brick courthouse, the “large & elegant” stone Presbyterian meetinghouse, and the Anglican church on the “spacious” public square.3 One block east, the jail that Loyalist prisoners had complained about so bitterly during the American Revolution had been repaired and enlarged in 1790. And on the west side of town, a graceful new brick school building for Dickinson College was under construction; it would open in 1802.4 The town’s domestic landscape was also growing rapidly as a building boom expanded the number and quality of Carlisle’s domestic structures.5 As 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 177 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 177 2/2/10 10:36:03 AM 2/2/10 10:36:03 AM 178 chapter six evidence, records produced in 1798, the year the U.S. government administered a Direct Tax on property (including dwelling houses) to generate revenue for a possible war with France, indicate that the 312 lots originally laid out by Thomas Penn’s officials were densely occupied by nearly 300 houses and more than 450 outbuildings of varying shapes, sizes, and materials.6 More significant than their quantity, was the size and style of these structures. Visitors described the newest houses as “neatly built” or “tolerable good ones”; some were even “very large & elegant.”7 By 1800, Carlisle thus had an impressive appearance of status, permanence , and gentility that belied its past. To read the words of town boosters and some visitors, it was no longer a coarse colonial village of the mid-Atlantic interior; rather, it had come into its own as a prosperous and pleasing place. By all outward indications, townspeople had redefined their community and themselves by building upon the cultural clout Carlisle merited as home to Dickinson College, as well as the economic gains brought by its profitable Figure 10. Carlisle 1797. A sketch by C. V. Colbert, Comte de Maulevrier. This is the earliest known sketch of Carlisle, made about 1797. The steepled building is the first courthouse. The old military barracks, or public works, are on the right. This bucolic scene was in keeping with the idealized image town boosters promoted near the turn of the century. (Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.) 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 178 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 178 2/2/10 10:36:03 AM 2/2/10 10:36:03 AM [34.237.140.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:55 GMT) Adapting to the Next Century 179 postwar grain trade connected to Philadelphia and Baltimore and its increasingly diverse and industrializing economy. Townspeople, in short, had pushed aside their town’s colonial past and Carlisle’s long-standing connections to the American West. Instead, they and their town assumed what residents implied was their and its rightful position between Baltimore and Philadelphia. A new day had dawned; and Carlisle became, like these cities, a town of the cosmopolitan east. Its betweenness narrowed to purely intraregional functions, and it sat more on the edge of the east than in the middle of the mid-Atlantic.8 But there were cracks in this neat narrative of progress and change. It was a one-sided story told by the town’s privileged and powerful, and by European observers eager to see...