William Heyser, the President of the Bank, local patriarch, and holder of nearly $80,000, could be seen walking across Chambersburg's Diamond, perhaps to chat with George Chambers, "gentleman," head of the county's founding family and worth over $100,000. They might confer with the wealthiest merchant of Chambersburg, J. Allison Eyster, head of a larger family still and possessor of $82,000. Younger men named Heyser, Chambers, and Eyster had already begun gathering their wealth and exerting their influence. Their wives and daughters, refined with careful schooling, enjoyed fashions from Philadelphia and trips to Baltimore.

Walking through the compact town of Chambersburg, these gentlemen and ladies would pass some family members of the 295 laborers who lived in the little town. Those families owned exceedingly little, maybe pots and pans, chairs and tables. Immigrants clung together, especially the 81 families from various German provinces. African Americans knew they were not welcome in the nicer part of town; the 59 families of blacks concentrated in the South Ward.

A wide array of artisans worked in small shops throughout Chambersburg, often living above their shops. Coach makers, silversmiths, and coopers conducted business beside book binders, confectioners, and printers. Blacksmiths, carpenters, and brick makers plied their heavy trades not far from seamstresses, tailors, and shoe makers. Houses, stores, shops, and small factories crowded together in the compact town. Most had three or four rooms, with a privy and perhaps a stable out back. Cattle and pigs lived in town, sharing space with the most modern conveniences.

Chambersburg attracted traveling shows and local talent, hosting brass bands, tight-rope walkers, circuses, and performances by fifteen local young ladies who "evinced a perfect knowledge of the highest order of vocal attainment." Chambersburg residents could see "Morrison's Grand Pan-tec-na-thec-a," "five splendid Panoramas, painted in a new and novel style with Dioramic effect on a scale of magnificence never before attempted," portraying the interior of the White House, Niagara Falls, and a journey across the Atlantic. The show had recently appeared in London.

As proud and as conscious of itself as Chambersburg was, most people in Franklin County lived in the countryside. Their farms prospered: Franklin County boasted that it stood as the seventh largest wheat-producing county in the entire United States. At the end of the decade a local newspaper took stock of the changes that had taken place on the county's farms in the 1850s. Of the million bushels of wheat they expected in that fall's harvest, 576,000 bushels would be sent to market. While that amount of production evoked great pride, the biggest change lay elsewhere. "In 1850 there was not near as much corn raised as has been since. The exportation of corn was only generally commenced at the time of the Irish famine in 1847. The number of acres of corn planted is now more than double what it was in 1850." The paper expected a surplus of 1.2 million bushels of corn produced that fall. "These facts go to show what an excellent county, for agricultural purposes, Franklin is, and there is no one at all well acquainted with its quality of good lands that does not believe but that by improvement in cultivation, the agricultural products can be increased 50 per cent."

Franklin had long been a mature farming community; its fields had been plowed and harvested for generations. The rural population had grown steadily for the last twenty years, marked neither by the flight that eroded rural New England nor the flood of newcomers that rushed to the West. Increasing numbers of people, largely born in the county, filled the 722 square miles of Franklin. Two thirds of the farm land in the county rested under cultivation; the rest remained in forest to help supply the relentless need for wood for burning and building. Only two hundred and fifty new farms had been established in Franklin in the 1850s, only 13,000 new acres put into cultivation. The value of farms, though, increased by nearly five million dollars in that decade as the pressure of population on the land drove up prices.

The average homestead in Franklin occupied about 150 acres and would cost about $6,570 dollars if sold, an average typical of much of Pennsylvania. That average farm had four horses, four milk cattle, six beef cattle, and fourteen pigs. It used farm implements worth $200 and produced home manufactures worth less that $10. Franklin County farms combined the relatively simple elements of land, labor, animals, and crops into as many different forms as there were families. Each farm constituted a special place in the memories of the families who occupied them. The differences among the farms were well known to all the neighbors, with particularly fine orchards, bulls, or streams noted and coveted.

Every family produced many of the things it needed for itself--butter, eggs, cheese, honey, apples, melons, potatoes, peas, and beans. Women put in gardens and tended hens and milk cows; their work often marked the difference between a prosperous family and one that merely got by. When the Franklin County fair rolled around in October of 1859, farm families eagerly displayed the fruits of their labor. "The Fair commenced yesterday--the weather is fine, and the prospects for a grand exhibition are very cheering," the Valley Spirit enthused. "Large crowds of people are here already, and others are constantly arriving. . . . Every man, woman and child in the county should turn out and not miss this opportunity of witnessing such a creditable exhibition of skill and industry of their own neighbors." And they did turn out: the fair pulled in over a thousand dollars.

The list of categories at the fair defined the things in which people took pride. Horses enjoyed prominence, with more categories--Blooded Stock, Carriage Horses, Saddle Horses, Brood Mares, Heavy Draft, Quick Draft, and Team of Draft Horses--devoted to them than any other animal. Lady Equestrians drew considerable attention. Sheep, though less exciting than horses, received their share of the prizes, with awards for best Short Horned Durhams and Devons, Durham, Devon and Teeswater Mixed, Fat Sheep, Cotswald and Bakewell Mixed. Swine found themselves ignominiously lumped into only one category, unless one counts Bacon and Hams. Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers won considerable attention in the press year-round, especially when someone produced a specimen of uncommon size or shape, and they elicited much praise at the fair as well. Women, "aided" by male secretaries, judged Poultry, Dairy, and Honey. Nearly two hundred Franklin residents, almost a quarter of them women, took prizes at the fair, with many unmarried women among the prizewinners. The fair offered young people a chance to show what fine catches they would make.

Farm families made elaborate calculations about the value of particular parcels of land, about the fitness of their various children to inherit parts of the farm, and about the best way to keep the farm intact. Abraham Essick, a Lutheran minister born in Franklin County, returned to his "old Homestead" in the southern part of the county after a long absence. His diary recorded the conflicting emotions of his visit. "This was my first visit home since the death of my father. The pleasure of recalling the scenes of my childhood, was saddened by the felt want of those who were my all in the days of childhood. They lie side by side in the graveyard of Grindstone Hill Church. I stood by their graves and felt how hard it is to lose a kind father and mother." That Sunday, Essick gave a sermon at the church and he felt old memories return. "Here I heard my first sermon not in this same church, but in the old log house that stood near the spot. This old log house was one of the first churches in all this country, having been built about the time of the revolutionary war. I recollect very distinctly when the cornerstone of the new church was laid in 1832. Then I was ten years old, and a pupil in the Sabbath School."

The pace of change had only sped up since then. "Throughout all the neighborhood I saw great changes, not only in the people, but more still in the general appearance of the country. New houses have been erected in places of the old, and farms have been divided and many houses built where none stood before." Essick himself, in fact, participated in that change. During his visit to Franklin, he sold his interest in the family farm to his brother-in-law. "He is buying out all the heirs at the rate of $60 per acre." Essick became wistful, reflecting on what it had required of himself and his family for him to become a respected minister of the gospel. "This is the only real estate my father ever owned. This he paid for by his own industry and brought up on it a family of twelve (one died at the age of four years) children, giving them all an education equal to any his neighbor's children and the best which the neighborhood afforded." Less fortunate or virtuous families found themselves pulled apart when twelve children tried to divide 123 acres and a lifetime of saving. Virtually every issue of the newspapers carried word of the buying and selling of land. An acre in the neighborhood where the Reverend Essick had grown up sold for about $85; closer to the nearby village of Greencastle, an acre sold for $600.

The hidden power of land could be read on the landscape. Families clustered together, largely out of affection and for mutual support but also because they inherited land carved from the same original farm. Sons and daughters stayed with their parents not only out of devotion but also in hopes that they would receive the farm when their parents passed on. It generally took a lifetime to become one of the largest farmers in the county; almost all of the eighteen men with farms worth at least $30,000 had reached their early sixties.

Families bore many different shapes. While the average family contained over five people, many households contained twice that; more than 2,500 people in Franklin were listed as the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, or higher member of the household in which they lived. While many of those dependents were children of large families, over a hundred labored as female domestic servants and many hundreds were young male laborers, farm hands, or clerks living with their employers. Most of the 375 landless farm laborers in the county, generally in their late teens and early twenties, lived with families, either their own or their employers'. These young men worked hard but might worry about how they could acquire land of their own with the small wages they earned and the rising price of land.

Over four hundred men in Franklin County described themselves to the census taker only as "gentleman" or "gentleman farmer." Not surprisingly, many of the men possessed enough property that they did not have to work; others simply appropriated the name because they were too old to work and felt they deserved the honor. A number of these gentlemen had moved to Franklin from abroad, where such words apparently did not grate on democratic ears. Men from France, Prussia, England, and Germany claimed the label, while twelve men from Ireland, most of them with little money, did so as well.

Women headed 781 families in Franklin. Most of these women had been widowed, as their average age of 53 reflected, but others had never married or were mothers on their own. While most listed no occupation, 125 sewed and washed; another 42 farmed, 3 worked as professionals or merchants, 3 as clerks or proprietors, and 4 as artisans. Many independent women were quite poor, but 21 owned real estate worth more than $10,000. One 59 year-old widow, Mary Duffield, claimed property worth over $160,000, making her one of the richest people in the entire county.

Farmhouses spaced themselves along the intricate network of roads that lay across Franklin County. Those roads skirted the high lands and sought the low. Because of the mountains, large areas on both the eastern and western edges of Franklin claimed few roads other than those pushing toward an isolated ore bank or furnace. In the broad middle range of the county, though, roads wove together so that they left no part of the rich farmland far from connection with the next place.

Almost all travel within the county depended on horses, wagons, buggies, and carts. No one could go very far very fast. As a result, the countryside held within its folds, curves, and hollows simple buildings that provided the things country people needed most. Following just about any road long enough, a traveler would come upon one of four kinds of places scattered among the farms: a school, a mill, a shop, or a church. Each followed its own kind of geography.

Mills and shops appeared in every corner of Franklin County. The 2,555 artisans in the county actually outnumbered the 2,530 farmers. Mills, whether grinding grain or sawing wood, depended on running and falling water. As a result, the 59 flour and grist mills of Franklin huddled along streams. Every farm needed mills in the neighborhood, so the structures proliferated wherever water moved enough to turn a wheel and where no competitor stood too near. One hundred forty three men made their livings as millers; ten amassed considerable estates.

Similarly, blacksmiths set up shop in places where horses needed shoeing and wagon wheels needed fixing, which was everywhere. The 27 shops in Franklin employed two, three, or four men to help with the heavy work of the forge. About 250 men labored as blacksmiths, including some as masters and some as apprentices. Like farmers, blacksmiths tended to accumulate property as they grew older, though, unlike farmers, few worked beyond their fifties. As in milling, some blacksmiths became relatively well-to-do while most scraped by.

Since most "manufacturing" merely involved the grinding of wheat, the sawing of lumber, or the shoeing of horses, "industry" did not concentrate in towns or cities. Of the 328 industries in Franklin, fewer than a third operated within the larger towns of the county. The only six mills in the county that ran on steam were all located in Chambersburg; they included a paper mill, a foundry, a machine shop, a tannery, and an edge tools shop. Steam power permitted mill owners to set up business near their customers rather than near their power supply. Unfortunately, that power could exert its own cost: Lewis Weiser, one of the five men working at Jacob Heyser's paper mill, fell into the vats used for steaming paper. "He struggled in the boiling lime water some five or six minutes, there being no one present to assist him out," the Valley Spirit reported; "after gaining the edge of the vessel he fell back again into the heated liquid and received a second scalding. His body, legs, and left arm, are scalded in the most shocking manner, the skin being stripped off the greater portion of the surface and the flesh deeply burnt." He died soon thereafter.

Franklin's largest industries were not its modern steam-driven enterprises but rather those that took advantage of the iron ore in the mountains. The pig iron foundries and forges of the Hughes family, established early in the century, still ran with water power in 1860 yet employed 85 men and earned enough to make the elder Hughes--with real estate worth $152,000 and personal property worth $61,000--the second richest man in Franklin County. The Caledonia furnace and forge of Thaddeus Stevens employed eighty men; Stevens himself lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a prominent congressman and spokesman for Pennsylvania's iron industry. The furnace, he complained, seldom made a profit.

Much of the work performed in Franklin had changed little in several generations. Grinding flour, tanning hides, forging horseshoes, distilling liquor, making a cabinet, or drying bricks demanded skill but not great investments in machinery, buildings, or innovation. Most of the shops of tanners, shoemakers, distilleries, cabinet makers, stone cutters, potters, coopers, tinners, harness makers, wagon makers, brick makers, butchers, machinists, tinsmiths, tar makers, and brewers employed only two or three men, including the proprietor and his sons. In Franklin, as in most of the North except New England, relatively few women worked in industry. Only 27 women labored in anything that could be called a factory. Six worked in a tailor shop in Waynesboro, five worked in Heyser's paper mill in Chambersburg, four worked in Isaac Hutton's shoemaking shop there, and two each worked as shoemakers, in a small rural woolen factory, and at a rural slaughterhouse.

The economic growth of Franklin merely elaborated what had been happening for decades in America. The iron industry, undergoing the beginnings of a transformation elsewhere in Pennsylvania, trundled along in Franklin. The county prospered and grew, but, like the great majority of the North, had hardly undergone an industrial revolution.

In the relatively placid life of Franklin County, only one economic change stood out as truly new: the railroad. The railroad embodied the true promise of the nineteenth century, all that was modern, efficient, and forward-looking. And Franklin needed access to it. Compared to the booming cities of the east or the booming lands of the West, after all, Franklin County, like much of the east, seemed to be falling behind. Its gain of a couple of thousand people in the 1850s seemed small indeed when older cities in the east as well as newer farms, towns, and cities in the west roared ahead.

Franklin had been an early beneficiary of the new means of transportation, for the Cumberland Valley Railroad made Chambersburg its terminus when first built in the late 1830s. That line, however, was completed just in time for the depression that settled across the country in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Moreover, its track was lightly built, its cars old-fashioned coaches that sat only fourteen people. Being stuck at the end of line put Chambersburg in an embarrassing position. The train left town at 4 in the morning, made Harrisburg at 8, Lancaster at 12, and Philadelphia at 6 that evening. The return trip brought the train back into Chambersburg at 10 at night. The town, in other words, never saw the train in the daylight. No wonder the world's first sleeping car was reputedly built in Chambersburg in 1839.

The machine shop of the Cumberland Valley Railroad stood as the most modern and impressive manufacturing facility in the county. It employed 22 men in work that demanded great skill. Their craft combined artisanal dedication with modern machine tools, small scale, and impressive results. A local newspaper boasted of the latest production of the shop, "planned, and entirely completed in all its various parts, in our own place, and by the skill and labor of our own mechanics" The locomotive, the "ENTERPRISE," "is a substantial and beautiful piece of machinery and is built after the most approved modern plan." The "Enterprise," competent judges told the paper, "will compare favorably for speed, construction and finish with any Locomotive Engine built in the country."

Despite the pride and good jobs brought to Chambersburg by the railroad shops, the line did not help the county as much as people hoped and expected. Since the railroad came in from the northern end of the valley and stopped at Chambersburg, the great majority of Franklin south of the county seat still found itself quite far from easy rail access. As early as 1839, the county built a rail line from Chambersburg to Greencastle near the Maryland border and then on into Maryland at Hagerstown. But after two years of losing money with this train, horses replaced steam power; progress seemed to run backwards in a humiliating way. No one could seem to make a profit off the line, much to the chagrin of businessmen and boosters for the county.

The only other railroad in Franklin bore the inauspicious name of the "Tape Worm," so-named for the winding, rising, and falling route it would have to follow through the mountains of eastern Franklin. Thaddeus Stevens, with political pull and strong economic interest in connecting his iron business with the rich lands of Maryland and the Valley of Virginia, managed to get the line chartered in the 1830s. But like the Chambersburg-Greencastle line, the Tape Worm never managed to amount to much. The appropriations made for the line in the Pennsylvania legislature somehow evaporated without the railroad actually being built and Thaddeus Stevens became the butt of jokes and charges of malfeasance.

By the late 1850s, then, Franklin County waited at the end of the line of its only successful railroad and had seen two other railroads limp along or die. At a time when the northeast was being knit together by railroads at a blistering pace, when fortunes were won or lost overnight by the placement of a rail line, when counties flourished or floundered as a result of their position on the growing network of rails, Franklin's was not a satisfactory position.

Business leaders and the local newspaper aired the subject in considerable detail in 1859 and 1860. They wanted several things, and they wanted them badly. They wanted a more direct connection to "the cities of the east," especially Baltimore and Philadelphia. As it was, Franklin's only connection to Baltimore depended on the horse-drawn railroad to Hagerstown and their only connection to Philadelphia required a long lazy arc up through Harrisburg and back down. They benefited from no through traffic at all. To end this ignominy, the county's businessmen wanted to rejuvenate the "Franklin County Railroad" between Chambersburg and Greencastle and they wanted to broach the mountains to the east to the small town of Gettysburg in the next county. While Gettysburg itself, no bigger than Chambersburg, seemed unlikely ever to matter very much to anybody outside of Adams County, a connection there would mean that Franklin County residents might develop a straight shot to Baltimore. "The Merchants of Baltimore see the necessity of this road, in order to secure the trade and produce of the great Cumberland Valley," Franklin boosters told themselves, "and express themselves as ready to invest their money in it whenever the demand is made upon them."

The little Franklin Railroad between Chambersburg and Greencastle, by contrast, lay under the control of Franklin people. As one local correspondent put it, "Much has been said during the past winter in regard to relaying and putting into running order the long neglected 'Franklin Railroad.' Scarcely a number of your excellent and widely circulated paper has appeared but what contained an article or short notice in regard to it, either for meetings of the citizens, or stockholder, or from agents for materials for its reconstruction." For it to become a modern line, the Franklin Railroad would first have to be rebuilt to withstand the rigors of locomotives and heavier rolling stock. That rebuilding began in the spring of 1859. The Cumberland Valley Railroad unloaded the latest T-rails in Chambersburg and local farmers began cutting the timber for the cross ties.

Crews worked on the new line all summer long; it finally opened in August. While the weather had been, not unusually for that month, hot and muggy, "a more balmy, exhilarating air and glorious sun never ushered in a brighter morning than that which gladdened the hearts of all on Tuesday," the Transcript enthused. Twenty-six brigades of militia appeared, marching and drilling for the amusement of the crowds. After riding the cars for a distance, "a Sham-battle was fought, in which officers and men went through the various evolutions required of them with a commendable skill." The militia men had never fought an actual battle and never expected to see one, so the occasion to launch sham warfare was welcome. All the soldiers seemed "apparently highly pleased with the magnificent performance."

The reporter for the Transcript let fly his highest hyperbole and imagery for the debut of the Franklin County line the next morning when a "magnificent train, capable of conveying near a thousand passengers, moved off in fine style." As it shuttled back and forth to and from Greencastle, giving people free rides, "Nothing could well exceed the beauty and splendor of the last return in the evening. The sun, as though wearied of a day's continued smiling upon happy thousands, withdrew amidst a gold-halo, and twilight, avant courier of the stars, began to envelop in her misty folds the expectant groups that thronged the pathway of the fire-king." (It began to get dark.) Fortunately, "the solemn shade that enveloped the green wood in the distance began to relieve the suspense by exhibiting a mellow glow--then distinct sparks, followed by a broad glare, and the now distinct breathings of the 'thing of life' which forms such a wonderful sample of the creative power of man." The train roared along at twenty miles an hour and covered the trip from Greencastle to Chambersburg in twenty-five minutes. The crews immediately set to work extending the line to Hagerstown, pulling Franklin County ever tighter into the orbit of Maryland and Baltimore.

Everyone knew the railroads came at a cost. Even on the day that the rejuvenated Franklin Railroad ran its free rides, one boy broke his leg jumping from the cars, and "a little negro boy" died when hit by "a loose car which a number of boys had put in motion." While the paper merely mentioned in passing these and the other injuries and deaths that followed, it dwelled on the loss of railroad men. Henry Minnick, a fireman on the Cumberland, lost his balance and fell under the wheels of the cars behind his engine. "Every body loved him for his many noble qualities of head and heart," the Transcript reported. "He leaves a widow and four small children, as well as a large circle of sorrowing friends to mourn his sad fate. He was 37 years and 2 months old at the time of his death."

Despite the renewed connection to the south, Franklin still longed for a railroad to the east. Turnpikes in areas where no railroad ran had fallen into a "melancholy quietness" and a way had to be found to connect Franklin directly to the huge markets on the other side of the mountains. At the same time, Franklin had to hustle if it were not to be left off another line proposed to the west, this one from New York to Cincinnati. Public meetings agitated the issue, trying to rouse subscriptions and public spirit. They pointed to the Erie Canal as an example of what could be accomplished by far-sighted men. Moreover, a line from New York through Pennsylvania would avoid the snows and ice that hindered more northerly railroads. Indeed, such a railroad, running through Franklin, "forming the shortest line between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic, will soon become the world's favorite highway."

In a scene that any American booster would have envied, Franklin witnessed the arrival of an emissary from the "Capitalists of New York." The people in the county felt a little guilty hoping to get on a line that would enrich New York City rather than Pennsylvania's own Philadelphia, but they had a sense of humor about their apostasy. "Who can blame them for acting on the principal of the man whose only prayer was 'bless me and my wife, my son John and his, we four and no more,?'" the Valley Spirit asked. Indeed, Franklin County folks "feel disposed to vary the prayer alluded to and say 'Bless Chambersburg and the city who builds the road, we two and that will do.'"

Despite the willingness of such eager men to suspend their state loyalties, other people in the county apparently remained unmoved by the possibility of becoming part of the "world's favorite highway." The supporters of the enterprise staged a public meeting on the issue, arguing that "the importance of having a connection by Railroad with the Great West cannot well be over-estimated." They admitted "too much indifference manufactured by our citizens in this great enterprise," but "it is not too late to repair our past negligence. This meeting may give a fresh start to the project that may result in much good. The farmers along the line have taken hold of the matter with much earnestness, and they now appeal to the citizens of the towns for active cooperation." After all, "fortunate will it be for Chambersburg when that day arrives that this great avenue to wealth will be opened up for its benefit. There is not an individual in the community to whom it will not bring immense personal advantages. We are not asked at this time to subscribe a dollar. Let us attend the meeting, one and all, and learn all we can about the prospects of constructing the road." Despite such efforts, the New York line never came anywhere near Franklin. The county would have to make do with the railroad it had, now running unbroken, if circuitously, to the cities of the east and south.