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Facts and Events
References
- Pennsylvania Archives, in With history and muster rolls of the regiment
5th ser., vol. 3, pp. 671-76, 679-80, 683-88.
Of the two sheriffs of Cumberland County whose election was announced, Nov. 5, 1776, Henry Makinly received 170 votes and his brother-in-law, Robert Semple, 490. Pennsylvania Archives, 6th ser., vol. 11, p. 157.
- Colonial Records
vol. 10, p. 756.
- DICKINSON COLLEGE, A HISTORY. BY Charles Coleman Sellers. MIDDLETOWN Wesleyan University Press CONNECTICUT
HENRY MAKINLY (he spelled his name consistently so, though others, including his children, used the more accepted form, "McKinley") must have arrived in Carlisle in the summer of 1769, and probably in response to an appeal for a teacher from Steel or Alison. On November 20, 1770, he purchased (at sheriff's sale) a house on the southeast corner of Hanover Street and Locust Alley, and that event is the best clue we have to the date of his marriage to John Steel's daughter, Elizabeth.1 Lydia, the oldest girl, was probably already married to Robert Semple. John Steel, Jr., nineteen at this time, had the law in view as a career, and it is interesting to note that George Duffield, Jr., would also choose that more worldly area of persuasion and contention. The other Steels were Margaret (named for her mother), Mary, Sarah, Robert, Andrew (aged six) and Jean. We know that the father, now a man of fifty-five, owned two fowling pieces, and so can picture him out with his sons for sport and game, a man of action ever. His bold life and his success were such as his son-in-law would now seek also.
Henry Makinly, like young John Steel, was a minister launching his American career from the springboard of an educational establishment. In Ireland, he had been ordained, March 4, 1766, as pastor of the congregation at Moville in Derry Presbytery, County Donegal—romantic names: Moville, "the plain of the ancient tree," and Donegal, even more aptly, "the fortress of the foreigners."2 Before Makinly, impoverished Moville had had only four settled ministers since 1715, all for short terms, and he had no successor there until 1784.3 Once in America, however, he figures as a teacher, soldier and farmer, his clerical call, apparently, quite left behind. The Carlisle tax lists show him as owner of two cows in 1773; two cows, two horses in 1775. The years bring children to his knee, Henry, John, Daniel, James, Martha and Margaret.4 Daniel would have a son, Daniel, who will in time appear in the Dickinson College arena, playing a small part opposite George Duffield, grandson of the Duffield of these early days.
Makinly's work was fundamentally college preparation, although all the American schools—again, following the Scottish trend—varied their fundamental grounding in the classics with courses useful to those who would go directly into business or a profession. Many of his pupils went to Princeton; some, particularly those with medicine in mind, to the College of Philadelphia. Best known of them all was John Armstrong, Jr., the old Indian fighter's brilliant, sardonic son, who left Princeton in 1775 for a military career, earned some distinction as a staff officer and Washington's resentment as author of the "Newburgh Letters" of 1783, was Congressman, Senator, Jefferson's minister to France and Secretary of War in Madison's war cabinet. George Stevenson, aged eleven, was put to school with Makinly in 1770, to be launched six years later upon his memorable career as Revolutionary soldier, physician, trustee of Dickinson College and a founder and first President of the Board of Trustees of the University of Pittsburgh.5
Another boy, Elisha Macurdy, whose schooling must have begun about 1772, remembered a second teacher. "One of his instructors," Macurdy's careful and devout biographer informs us, "was the late Judge Creigh . . . who is recollected by many yet living, as a prominent Elder in the Presbyterian Church of Carlisle. Another, was a gentleman, who was son-in-law of the Rev. John Steel, of Carlisle, but whose name has been forgotten. Under his direction he commenced the study of the Latin language, but had not advanced far, when his studies were interrupted and the school dispersed, by the breaking out of the war of the Revolution.
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