Joseph Ritner

Newville, PA · est. 1970

In 1920, at the old Big Spring Hotel near Newville, Pennsylvania opened what this marker calls the first state police training academy in the nation—a milestone in the professionalization of American law enforcement in the Progressive era. Recruits drilled in a paramilitary style that would become a model for other states. Just three years later the school moved east to Hershey in Dauphin County, and the pioneering Cumberland County site passed into history.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1994

On this Cumberland County tract in the mid-19th century, Frederick Watts laid out a model farm meant to prove that agriculture could be run as rationally as any industry. Watts helped found the Farmers' High School that grew into Penn State, led Pennsylvania's first agricultural society, and served as U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture in the 1870s. His careful site plans and building designs were arguments in wood and soil for a more efficient American farm.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

Founded in 1834 by the jurist John Reed — author of the influential "Pennsylvania Blackstone" — Dickinson School of Law became the oldest law school in Pennsylvania and one of the earliest in the nation. In an era when most lawyers still trained by apprenticeship, a formal school of law was a bold experiment in professional education. Among its early graduates was Andrew Curtin, who would serve as Pennsylvania's Civil War governor.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

In the hopeful years just after independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush — a signer of the Declaration — imagined a practical, liberal-arts education fit for a self-governing people, and with Col. John Montgomery of Carlisle he founded a college to train future leaders. Chartered on September 9, 1783 and named for John Dickinson, it became the first college established west of the Susquehanna River. The school embodied the founders' belief that a republic could only survive with an educated citizenry.