New Cumberland: Four Names for One River Town

This borough at the mouth of Yellow Breeches Creek has worn at least four names. The Shawnee people who lived here gave it the first: the area was known as Shawneetown. A French-Canadian trader named Peter Chartier opened a post on the west bank in the early seventeen hundreds, and the spot became Chartier's Landing.

In the early eighteen hundreds, ironmaster Jacob Haldeman laid out town lots along the Susquehanna River, and the settlement became Haldeman's Town. The name New Cumberland came into use in eighteen twenty-seven.

By the mid-eighteen hundreds the young borough was a busy river town of a few hundred residents. Its spot at the confluence made it a natural shipping point for grain and iron moving up and down the Susquehanna. The river and the creek also formed a harbor for lumber rafting, which brought sawmills, a grain mill, and a depot. The borough was incorporated on March twenty first, eighteen thirty one. After the Civil War the lumber trade declined, and the town turned to woolen mills, nail and carpet factories, and retail. The name that stuck was its fourth, and it has held for nearly two hundred years. Its population peaked at nine thousand eight hundred three in nineteen seventy, and the town counted seven thousand five hundred seven in twenty twenty.