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Dallastown to Red Lion, 1876 and 1928

A recent post related the troubles motorists had traveling from Dallastown to Red Lion in the fall of 1928 because of road construction and deep mud on the detour. I was asked exactly where those roads were.

Click here to read that post.

The state road that was being reconstructed was probably the short stretch of Route 74 that runs between Red Lion and Dallastown today. I don't think the path of that road changed much over the years, so it still pretty much follows the red line on the map.

As for the detour and the alternate route mentioned in the newspaper--I tried to reconstruct them using the 1876 Pomeroy, Whitman and Co. Atlas of York County, a present-day ADC atlas and the advice of a friend who knows the area.

You think road construction causes problems for motorists now? The following news article, from the October 19, 1928 York Gazette, might make you appreciate modern techniques.

“ARREST MAN AFTER TEN MILE CHASE--FIND HATCHET AND SEARCHLIGHT.” So screamed front page headlines in the April 20, 1908 York Gazette.

What was the crime?

One hundred and ten years ago an article on the front page of the Gazette starts out: “A gang of burglars raided the post offices at Dallastown and Red Lion sometime Monday night and succeeded in making a fairly good haul.”

The first robbery was in Red Lion. The article states: “About 12 o’clock that night [Monday] a number of residents in the vicinity of the post office were awakened by the noise of an explosion. A family named Spangler residing in the office building, on hearing the explosion made an investigation of every room but the post office, and finding everything all right, retired to bed. At Hildebrand’s hotel on the opposite side of the street the explosion awakened occupants of the house.”

It goes on to say that:

We didn’t know how bad smoking was for our health 90 years ago, when cigar factories were springing up everywhere. In York County, we knew cigars were very good for our economy. For well over 150 years, processing tobacco into cigars kept many York Countians gainfully employed.

Lewis Miller illustrated a group of youths, himself among them, making cigars in 1811 at the shop of “William Spangler, Tobacconist.” They were Henry Sheffer, John Lehman, Jacob Weiser, Lewis Miller, Daniel Masse, Daniel Wolf, Emanuel Sheffer, John Jones, and Henry Wagner. Miller would have been around 15 at the time. Some of the boys look quite a bit younger.

According to the Red Lion Area Historical Society webpage, in the month of October 1929, 15 million cigars were shipped out of the Red Lion train station on the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad. This wouldn’t have included the millions more made each month in factories large and small in York and just about every community in the county.

My grandfather, Edwin Shelley, converted a three-story house into a cigar factory in Lucky, Chanceford Township. Grandpa wasn’t alone as shown in the following Gazette article from the fall of 1917:

One hundred twenty-five years ago people were a lot more passionate about their politics. A November 1882 Gazette article recounts a "DEMOCRATIC DEMONSTRATION AT RED LION." Imagine the following spectacle today:

One hundred years ago the Gazette reported a disastrous fire in Red Lion:

When Mrs. Emanuel Barshinger of North Main Street woke up about 4 a.m., she could see a fire in Millard Smith's cigar factory. It soon spread to surrounding buildings. The Smith factory and his warehouse were destroyed, as were John Garner's warehouse, the stables of Levi Kaltreider and of Dr. G. N. Yeagle.

The Leo Fire company was credited with saving Mrs. John Seitz's barn and