Carlisle is a post town, and the capital of Cumberland county. It contains about three hundred houses of brick, stone, and wood. The two principal streets cross each other at right angles, where there is a market-house, a neat brick court-house and a large stone meeting-house. There are besides in the town, a German, an Episcopalian, and a Roman Catholick church. The streets are wide, and the footways are flagged or coarsely paved. Dickenson college on the north, was founded in 1783, and was so named in compliment to Mr. John Dickenson, formerly president of the supreme executive council of Pennsylvania, and author of the Pennsylvania Farmer's Letters, and other writings of much merit. It has a principal,[13] three professors, and generally about eighty students. It has a philosophical apparatus and a library, containing about three thousand volumes. It has £4000 in funded certificates, and the state has granted it ten thousand acres of land: {33} On the whole it is esteemed a respectable seminary of learning, and is extremely well situated for that purpose, in a healthy and plentiful country, and about equidistant from the capital of the state, and the capital of the United States, one hundred and twenty miles from each.[14]
