Carlisle and Vicinity

When it was decided to create a new proprietary town at Carlisle, its planner, John Armstrong, followed the model of Lancaster with a central square (CU3) intersected by the principal streets whose greater width established their importance. High Street, running east–west, retains its original English name while north–south York Street was renamed for nearby Hanover in York County on the way to Baltimore. Thus Hanover Street, the route from the south, continues to the town square. Carlisle began as a frontier entrepôt straddling the great arcing route to the south and west. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become an important industrial center with attendant working-class neighborhoods and the corollary of a new elite neighborhood on Moorland Avenue south of High Street. Apart from the college and the central square, the glory of the town is its diadem of churches that attests to the industrial wealth before the Great Depression. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Carlisle Barracks and U.S Army War College have become more difficult to enter, but worth the effort. Among the Barracks buildings is a simply detailed powder magazine constructed in 1777 by Hessian prisoners captured in George Washington's victory at Trenton and the Georgian Revival buildings of the War College by Harrisburg architect M. I. Kast.