Greencastle, Pennsylvania

Greencastle, Pennsylvania, was founded in the early seventeen eighties by John Allison, a Scotch-Irish settler who surveyed his land into two hundred forty-six building lots.

Allison named the town for Greencastle in Ireland, a nod to the homeland of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who made up much of the early population. By seventeen ninety, the settlement had roughly sixty houses and four hundred residents. Pennsylvania later incorporated it as a borough.

Greencastle sits at the southern end of the Cumberland Valley, close to the Mason-Dixon Line. The area saw Confederate troops pass through on their way to and from Gettysburg in the summer of eighteen sixty-three, and on July second Union cavalry under Captain Ulric Dahlgren rode into the town square and captured Confederate riders carrying dispatches. Today it is one of the best-preserved small historic boroughs in Franklin County.