Shippensburg, Frontier Gateway

Shippensburg, tucked in the Cumberland Valley along Interstate Eighty-One, is one of the oldest towns in Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna River. Scots-Irish families first settled here around seventeen thirty. The heirs of William Penn later granted the land patent to Edward Shippen, a onetime mayor of Philadelphia, who gave the town his name.

By seventeen fifty, Shippensburg was serving as the temporary seat of Cumberland County, hosting the first courts held in this part of the frontier. It anchored the road south into the Valley and west toward the Ohio River, funneling settlers, soldiers, and commerce through a narrow pass in the mountains for the next two centuries.