Daytripping, part 1 of 2

One of my college buddies was in the Philadelphia area for her cousin's wedding and offered to meet me halfway, so I jumped on the chance for a weekend daytrip. A hamlet called Burnt Cabins is exactly halfway between Pittsburgh and Allentown, but the only thing there is an old grain mill, so I decided to go all the way to Carlisle, just half an hour from where they could pick me up at the train station in Harrisburg. Home of Dickinson College and not far from the beautiful Appalachian scenery of King's Gap, Carlisle (pop. 20K) is perhaps more infamous for having been the site of the first Indian Boarding School, where thousands of Native children were forcibly Americanized, and hundreds died.

Like a good Girl Scout, I packed my snack bag the night before with first breakfast (cherry Kuchen, clementines, and a hard-boiled egg), second breakfast (tres leches cake and a banana), lunch (cheese, crackers, carrots, grapes, mixed nuts, chocolate, fizzy water), an apple and cookies for afternoon snack, and an emergency granola bar. In the morning I added a mug of Irish breakfast tea with milk and honey and a thermos of ice water. I brought 2 layers and an umbrella for any potential weather, a book for work (a handbook on preoperative evaluation), a magazine for fun (National Geographic issue on pirates), and my laptop for work on or off the internet during the 5-hour train trip to Harrisburg in the morning and maybe for a short while on the bus ride back to Pittsburgh before hopefully catching some Zs that night. Oh yeah, I packed my sleep mask, earplugs, and some melatonin, because our ETA was just after midnight, and I still had to work on Monday!

Dear Husband kindly drove me to the train station but had to drop me off a block away because of road closures for a Sunday morning race. Here I am under the fancy dome of The Pennsylvanian, which used to be Pittsburg's [sic*] Union Station but is now luxury apartments. The current train/bus station underneath is decidedly more utilitarian. The sleepy crowd boarded as the sun came up, and then the train pulled away. I worked on this and that while enjoying the late-fall Pennsylvanian countryside. (The foliage was definitely past its peak.) I was going to take a photo or video from "the world-famous horseshoe curve" outside Altoona, but a slow-moving freight train had the inside track.

Happily reunited, we piled into the car for the short trip westward to Carlisle. First stop: Molly Pitcher's gravesite and memorial. She was born Mary Ludwig in 1744 and died Molly McKolly (or McCauley) in 1832. K. and her husband hadn't grown up reading about her heroic actions during the Revolutionary War and were impressed to learn how she carried water to the soldiers and womaned her first husband John Hays's canon when he was injured at the Battle of Monmouth. If you look closely in the second image, you can see that someone has added a white lace collar like those that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to wear.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania erected the monument in 1916 with a poem by Sarah Woods Parkinson (1864-1933) on one of the markers:

O'er Monmouth's field of carnage drear

with cooling drinks and words of cheer, a woman passed who knew no fear,

the wife of Hays, the gunner.

With ramrod from her husband's hand,

beside his gun she took her stand

and helped to wrest our well-loved land

from England's tyrant king.

From the ranks this woman came,

by the cannon won her fame;

'Tis true she could not write her name

but Freedom's hand hath carved it.

Shall we then criticize her ways?

Nay, rather give her well-earned praise,

then doff our caps and voices raise

in cheers for Molly Pitcher.

While researching this I learned that Parkinson was "the outstanding authority in the country on facts relating to Molly Pitcher," according to her death notice in the New York Times, and had gone blind by the time her poem was used. She also published a biography of the first president of Dickinson College (1908) and wrote a book entitled, Memories of Carlisle's old graveyard: containing a list of the inscriptions on all stones in the enclosure in 1898 and describing a walk through a part of the graveyard (c1930). Many of the headstones dated post-1900, so it wouldn't have everything, but it would have this unique horseshoe-shaped marker for "Our father and mother," Melchior and Catharine Hoffer, who died in 1849 and 1884, respectively. I had also never seen a marker made out of metal before, so when I inspected this white one for A. W. Walker, I was surprised to discover that my rings made a hollow sound, and that there are seams where the sheets of what I assume is aluminum are joined together. I suppose the original stone from 1890 was damaged, so this replacement was made.

Then we found a coffee shop and enjoyed a round of hot chocolate while waiting for a rain shower to pass. In the second part, I will share photos of the unusual performance we attended next.

*Union Station was built in 1900, in the middle of the 20 years when Pittsburgh didn't have its "h" (1891-1911).