York really is the center of the universe, especially when you consider its place in historical events. Local historian June Lloyd looks at how things have converged on our hometown, past and present.A 1917 newspaper account captured some reminiscences of David Sloat, who at 90 was one of the last three Civil War veterans in Wrightsville.
After the war Sloat had moved to Ohio and lived there for fifty years, but he retired back to Wrightsville. There he shared his vivid memories, as a boy of 16, of the Confederate invasion of York County. The account states:
Lewis Miller drawing of himself and friends admiring 1868 Wrightsville bridge.
Bridges make our lives so much more convenient.
We have recently been hearing about the high cost of maintaining bridges. They are, of course, much more expensive to build from scratch.
Where would we be if we didn't have the four bridges (Norman Wood in the south, two at Wrightsville in the middle, and Route 76 in the extreme north) that cross the Susquehanna River from York County?
Wrightsville has always occupied an important location in the transportation network. The Monocacy Trail, orginally a Native American path, became one of the first roads for the European settlers to York County and beyond. That road crossed the Susquehanna River at Wrightsville, first by ferry and then over bridges covered and modern.
The Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, opened in 1840, followed the west bank of the river from the Chesapeake Bay to Wrightsville. Then the mules, working from towpaths on the covered bridge, pulled the canal boats across the river to Columbia to continue on their journey up the east bank.
Railroads soon replaced canals as movers of people and freight, again crossing the bridge at Wrightsville. The excerpt below from the November 20, 1877 Gazette shows the hazards passengers could face and the volume of products shipped out from Wrightsville.
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:
