harrisburg (pt. 1)

“A pair of shootings in Harrisburg early Sunday morning left one man dead and another hospitalized,” my morning paper reads. “Jonas Strunk, 35, of Harrisburg was killed when he at 2.36 a.m. near Kittatinny and Hummel streets,” the article fumbles on. The Patriot News doesn’t get much distribution outside of Harrisburg, but it is our city newspaper.

Harrisburg, my new home for the summer. We’ve all heard stories about cities on rivers, about whole societies built on the tides of water. The promise of sustenance and transportation is just too great to resist, and all over the world, civilization grows up hugging shores like a shy infant. All along the great moving waters of the world, the Niles and the Yangzes, people live, work, and die by the vicissitudes of rivers. Along the Susquehanna, a smaller stream here in central Pennsylvania, people have had a crossroads settlement on and off for perhaps as long as 5,000 years. For all that time it’s most prominent utility, always essential and largely unsung, has been moving people between other places of greater significance. And yes, we can thank the river for that.

I usually err on the side of avoiding history, so let me do just the reverse for this city. In its earliest recorded form, Harrisburg was known as Peixtin or Paxtang, a name that still occasionally surfaces on street signs and car dealership advertisements. It was a rest stop for Susquehannock traders on the trail from the Delaware to the Ohio rivers, or from the Potomac to the Upper Susquehanna. All these trails went through Paxtang like good advice, in one end and out the other. Later, the Iroquois would take the land from the Susquehannocks and then lose it in turn to white prospectors. Once they had been bought out and driven off and Paxtang had become the Harrisburg of today – in name at least – the city would become an important rest stop of another sort. Escaped slaves running the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada faced one of many formidable obstacles in the Susquehanna River. Harrisburg was an important stop in that railroad, resupplying the fugitives of slavery and sending them across the river safely. And as the old canals gradually disappeared, Harrisburg also acquired more prosaic railroads, you know, of the steel and stone variety. Its location here on the Susquehanna continued to make it a prominent crossroads of goods, especially steel and iron. The railroads were fruitful and multiplied, and multiplied, and multiplied. I’ve seen an old photograph of the train lines, thick cordons of steel, flanks almost touching, packed in tight rows. They gave the city a second, more temporary river, a wide, chugging current of smoke and steam that cut through the center of the city and then lifted and leapt across the Susquehanna by way of a plethora of handsome bridges built solely to lend them wings over the water. They carried tons of material, mostly metals, through the city every day; trains in from Bethlehem, Steelton, Pittsburgh, out to New York, Philadelphia, Trenton.

Soon, Harrisburg’s rail lines became militarily as well as economically essential as a logistical keystone of the Union’s war effort. After Fort Sumpter surrendered in April of 1861, 13,000 eager young recruits from all over Pennsylvania converged on Harrisburg to answer Lincoln’s call to quell the rebellion and save the union. Even more passed through the city on the way to enlist or reach the front, and so Camp Curtin, a permanent training facility, was established. Through the course of the war, Harrisburg moved men and supplies to the armies on the front, eventually sending over 300,000 young soldiers to the battlefield, making it the largest Federal camp during the war. The crucial importance of Camp Curtin and these railroads also made Harrisburg a primary target for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee attempted to take the city twice. The first time, he planned to use his victory at Harper’s Ferry as a springboard, but was stopped in a field of corn called Antietam. The second time, he sent two full divisions under Lt. General Richard S. Ewell through Maryland into Pennsylvania, but was slowed by a rain-swollen Potomac River, giving the Union time to respond. Ewell made it as far as Mechanicsburg – eight miles to the west of Harrisburg – before Lee received news of the advancing Federal Army of the Potomac and recalled the divisions to consolidate his forces in the face of this new threat. As it happened, Ewell’s cavalry brigade under Brig. General Albert G. Jenkins made it further, lightly skirmishing the 22nd and 37th New York Militia at Sporting Hill – just across the river – before retuning to the main force. Distracted from their goal of taking Harrisburg, they rejoined the main force and stumbled upon the Army of the Potomac more or less by accident at Gettysburg.

That, of course, was the beginning of the end for the Army of Northern Virginia and the Southern cause. Lee left Gettysburg in driving rain on July 5 of 1863 and limped back across the Potomac to gradually lose the war over the next two years. He never got a third chance at Harrisburg; in fact, he never was able to make another similar offensive at all, and so Jenkin’s skirmish on Sporting Hill turned out to be the furthest the Southern war effort ever got. The last remnants of the battlefield have, unfortunately, been literally paved over; today, a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commision historical marker designates the watermark of a generation’s efforts in the middle of a parking lot.