AREA HISTORY:  History of Adams County, Chapter I, Adams County, PA

Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Kathy Francis

Copyright 2005.  All rights reserved.
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History of Cumberland and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania
Chicago:  Warner, Beers & Co., 1886
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Part III, History of Adams County, Pages 3-6

CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY 

I 
 
The interest excited among the good people of Adams County in the year of the 
Nation’s Centennial, by the action of Congress and the President of the United 
States, was most timely fortunate in arousing the attention of those citizens 
who could rescue from a fast coming total oblivion many of the important facts 
and dates of the early settlement and times of this portion of the State.  The 
history harvest had grown over-ripe, and already the golden grains had begun to 
fall to the ground and waste, before the Centennial reaper and gleaner came.  
Nearly a century and a half had been reeled off into Time’s swift flying 
shuttle.  Generations had been born, grew to lusty, struggling life, and then 
joined the silent multitude.  The busy, ceaseless loom of the universe had 
beaten and interlaced as one the webb and woof of history, the record of living 
man, that strange eventful story that historians are always telling and that is 
never told.  

But for this action of the Centennial year, the best efforts now of the 
historians would have been but shreds and patches of history of the eventful 
times of the earliest settlers; an incoherent story, mostly, “without form, and 
void,” so swiftly does Time cover and with impenetrable oblivion the flitting 
ages. 

Innumerable details of the first half century had already been irretrievably 
lost; details that the annalist of a hundred years ago would have deemed tedious 
or trifling, and probably passed by in silence; but the very abundance of these 
details now would be the richest materials to the hands of the historian, of 
absorbing interest, and laden with instruction to the people of this generation.  
Among others the Hon. Edward McPherson, H. J. Stahle, D. S. Buehler, John A. 
Renshaw (of Pittsburgh), Hon. John K. Longwell, of Westminster, Md., Rev. J. K. 
Demarest, Rev. W. S. Van Cleve and J. S. Gitt have gathered and at times have 
had published in the Gettysburg Compiler, and in the Star and Sentinel, many 
valuable facts, from ancient family papers, documents and the oldest records in 
this county, and in York County, and the recollections of themselves and the 
many descendants of the early pioneers, now growing to be tremulous, venerable 
and white haired men.  Their publications in the local papers created a wide-
spread interest among all classes of people, and ancient Bibles, old account 
books and yellowed manuscripts, that had lain in darkness and untouched for 
generations, were eagerly overhauled, and valuable facts brought to light; old 
grave-yards were visited and the fast fading inscriptions upon the crumbling 
stones above the dead were closely scanned and many dates and facts here secured 
for the historian, that the rust of a decade more of years would have blotted 
out forever.  There are many others than those named above to whose intelligent 
researches and recollections of the olden times these pages are deeply indebted, 
and to whom we here return generous thanks; many of these the reader will find 
in the credits given to them on the pages where facts furnished are given.  To 
the leading citizens of the county everywhere are due lasting obligations for 
the valuable and willing aid and the cordial reception given the corps of 
laborers engaged in the preparation of the work.  

II 
 
We have attempted in this work to do more than to merely give in the order the 
annals of the people, commencing with the earliest settlers and bringing the 
account to the present time – we present the varied pictures of that panorama of 
the generations, and then assign events and their results, and draw truthful 
deductions, and trace actions to that large and broad field that adds something 
to real history, the molding and influencing the human mind, that subtle power 
that has slowly but surely laid the foundations and built thereon the present 
and the coming civilization that is sun-lit with man’s best future hopes and 
aspirations, and whose distant murmurs are music to the true philosopher’s soul, 
like unto the “multitudinous laughter of the sea waves.”

The difficulties in the pathway of the annalist, or the historian, are great and 
varied.  He should be a stranger to all the prejudices, passions, loves and 
hates, idols and the despised of those of whom he writes.  He must accept no 
conclusions of the greatness or meanness of the contemporaries, as the 
interested and prejudiced judgments of men of the times of which he writes.  He 
must hear all sides patiently and then form his conclusions without a trace of 
the bias of those who bring him the account.  He must keenly distinguish between 
real greatness and noisy notoriety, and, hence, he must not be a man-worshiper.  
He must absorb all the facts and reject the coloring that comes of preconceived 
prejudices.

To these he must add the power to picture to his readers the people as they 
actually lived, dressed, worked, played, loved and hated, moved and acted, 
publicly and privately, and this picture should be like the impression of the 
picture upon your mind of the friend from whom you have just parted on the 
street.

When this has been done, there then comes the most difficult part of all; 
namely, to apply effects to causes, and trace these subtle and far-reaching 
influences and correctly join them together, interpret them to demonstrations 
about which there can be no more future field for argument and disputation that 
there is about a demonstration in a problem in mathematics.

The historian cannot stop with the relation of the mere facts as he finds them 
in tradition and in the annals as written by eye witnesses of occurring events.  
He must interpret all afresh, and properly divine causes and tendencies.  So 
immeasurably large is the field before him that he cannot institute new 
inquiries as to facts, but must accept these as they come to him, though he may 
well know how uncertain the most of them are.  He sits in the high court of last 
appeal, recasting the characters of the men and women who lived and acted in the 
periods of which he investigates, condemning and praising, and telling why they 
acted as they did, and what has come to their fellow-man as the results of their 
existence here upon the earth.

III

It is impossible to form a just judgment of these men if we confine our 
investigations and circumscribe our view to the day they are found in this new, 
wild country.  Such a study would fill us with error, and we would rise from the 
perusal of such a history with grotesque and irrelevant conclusions, and that 
would be unjust to the memories of our forefathers and a wrong to ourselves and 
future generations.

There must be some general comprehension of that age-the bent of the world’s 
controlling peoples, and the mighty religious struggles that were at that time 
culminating in drama, tragedy, blood and revolutions, and in the end liberty for 
all mankind.  When William Penn was traveling through the Old World hunting for 
recruits for his province, it must be remembered that the “flaming sword” was 
uplifted high; a religious frenzy had seized the people; the soldiers marched 
the public streets and drove the people to attendance upon divine worship; 
turmoil and frenzy reigned supreme, and the wildest insanity was turned loose.  
There was no separation between theory and practice, between private and public 
life, between the spiritual and temporal.  Inspired corporals in the army 
clambered into the pulpits and launched the thunders of God’s wrath at the heads 
of their superior officers.  The historian Neal, in speaking of England, says: 
“They wished to apply Scripture to establish the kingdom of heaven upon earth; 
to institute not only Christian Church, but a Christian society; to change the 
law into a guardian of morals, to compel men to piety and virtue; and for a 
while they succeeded in it.” * *  Then the discipline of the church was at an 
end.  There was nevertheless an uncommon spirit of devotion among all people; 
the Lord’s Day was observed with remarkable strictness; the churches were 
crowded three and four times a day; there was no traveling on the roads or 
walking in the fields.

Religious exercises were set up in private families; family prayers, repeating 
sermons, reading the Scriptures and singing psalms were so universal that these 
were the only sounds you could hear in the city on the Lord’s Day.  Theaters 
were razed and actors whipped at the cart’s tail.  Parliament set apart one day 
of each week to the consideration of the progress of religion, and the species 
of speeches delivered the moment this subject was entered upon were wild, 
incoherent, ranting and savage denunciations of real and imaginary sins against 
subtle and curious dogmas; and bills of attainder and the penalties of the 
stocks, whipping post, burning holes in the tongue with hot irons, slitting the 
ear and nose, throwing into dungeons, and banishment and death for the most 
trivial offenses of speech or acts were the daily and hourly transactions 
everywhere.  In order to reach crime more surely they punished pleasure.  Human 
ingenuity was exhausted in the hunt for victims to consign to the most shocking 
punishments.

But they were unlike all other religious fanatics who had yet appeared, for 
while they were austere against others, they were equally so against themselves, 
and they practiced the virtues they exacted.  Two thousand ministers, after the 
Restoration, resigned their cures and faced certain starvation for themselves 
and families rather than conform to the new liturgy.  In turn the persecutions 
heaped upon them were shocking and cruel.  And from here came the people to this 
country, of whom Taine, the historian of “English Literature” says: “But others, 
exiles in America, pushed to the extreme this great religious and stoic spirit, 
with its weakness and its power, with its vices and its virtues.  Their 
determination, intensified by a fervent faith, employed in political and 
practical pursuits, invented the science of emigration, made exile tolerable, 
drove back the Indians, fertilized the desert, raised a rigid morality into a 
civil law, founded and armed a church, and on the Bible as a basis built up a 
new State.”

The English, the Dutch, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans, the Welsh, Swiss, Danes 
and French came together here to be welded by the logic of fate into one people.  
The Anglo-Saxon, most fortunately, dominated all and shaped the ideas that 
controlled and influenced this heterogeneous mixture of opposites.  All brought 
with them their variety of religious sects, their hates and jealousies of each, 
their intense prejudices of races and religions, their gloomy fanaticism and 
severe morals.  But the supreme force in welding into one this mass was the love 
of liberty among all, and the vivid recollection of the persecutions that had 
exiled them to this new world.

Here were some of the controlling conditions antecedent that have resulted in 
the glories of this great age.  This was the alembic which distilled the new 
spiritual life, the new rate, the new civilization, the epoch and age that, like 
the genial rays of the spring sun, has circled the globe and made vocal with joy 
where all was icy despair and dreariness.  Bearing these great antecedent facts 
in mind, we can proceed with the story.