Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Frontier Outpost, Military Town
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Carlisle was founded in seventeen fifty-one where several Indian trading paths crossed Letort Spring Run, a limestone-fed creek that still flows through town. The Penn family and the colonial General Assembly intended it as the gateway to the western frontier, the last reliable outpost before travelers crossed the Allegheny Mountains into territory most colonial Pennsylvanians had never seen.
From the beginning, Carlisle was a military town. The British built a fort here in seventeen fifty-seven during the French and Indian War. After independence, the Continental Congress authorized an arsenal at Carlisle in seventeen seventy-six that grew into a major Army supply depot. In eighteen oh one, the federal government purchased Carlisle Barracks from the heirs of William Penn for six hundred sixty-four dollars and twenty cents, establishing one of the oldest continuously operating military installations in the United States. The barracks later housed the Army's cavalry school, which trained officers who would face each other across Civil War battlefields a generation later.
Carlisle has also been home to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the most consequential and controversial federal institutions in American history, which operated from eighteen seventy-nine to nineteen eighteen and will be covered in a separate track.
The town is also the final home of a woman who may or may not be Molly Pitcher. Mary Hays, widely believed to be the inspiration for the Revolutionary War legend, lived out her life in Carlisle after the war and is buried here in the Old Graveyard. Pennsylvania awarded her an annual pension of forty dollars in eighteen twenty-two for services rendered during the Revolution.
Dickinson College, founded here in seventeen eighty-three, is one of the oldest colleges in the nation. Carlisle today is a small county seat of about twenty thousand people that wears its military and educational history visibly in its architecture and institutions.
