The Borough of Carlisle, Pennsylvania

NO LIMITATIONS AT A GLANCE THE BOROUGH OF CARLISLE, PENNSYLVANIA WHAT: A borough of 19,000 WHERE: Cumberland County in south-central Pennsylvania WEBSITE: www.carlislepa.org T he Borough of Carlisle is the county seat of Cumberland County, located in the south-central part of Pennsylvania. This highly productive agricultural area of the state was originally settled and farmed by Scots-Irish immigrants, beginning in the early 1730s. It was named after the town of Carlisle in England by American pioneer, John Armstrong, Sr., a surveyor for the Penn family, and his son John Armstrong, Jr., a soldier and statesman who was a delegate to the Continental Congress, a U.S. Senator from New York, and Secretary of War. They even built its former jailhouse (which Cumberland County now uses as general government offices) to resemble The Citadel in their English sister city. The first new college in the newly recognized United States of America, Dickinson College, was developed in Carlisle in 1773, as Carlisle Grammar School, by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It was chartered on September 9th, 1783, six days after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War. The Dickinson Law School, founded in 1834, is the fifth oldest law school in the country and the oldest in Pennsylvania. It merged into the Pennsylvania State University in 1997, as Penn State Dickinson School of Law. Both institutions were named for John Dickinson, a signer of the Constitution who was later the governor of Pennsylvania, and his wife Mary Norris Dickinson, who donated much of their extensive personal libraries to the new college. A third major educational institution in Carlisle, population 19,000, is the United States Army War College, which moved to Carlisle from Washington, D.C. in 1951, and relocated to the 500-acre campus of the historic Carlisle Barracks, the nation’s second-oldest active military base. The Army War College‘s mission is to prepare officers for leadership at the highest levels. It is comprised of the Strategic Studies Institute, the Military History Institute, and the Center for Strategic Leadership, a state-of-the-art war gaming complex.