History

LeTort Elementary is one of seven elementary schools in the Carlisle Area School District. It is located at 110 East South Street in Carlisle, the Cumberland County Municipal Seat (established 1750). The building is set on eight acres of land and was opened for classes on November 9, 1936. Initially, it was occupied by 435 pupils and eleven teachers. The school is named for James LeTort, the first white settler of Carlisle and of the Cumberland Valley.

School

LeTort was an Indian trader from Lancaster County, of French Houguenot parentage. He settled about 1720 at the head of the spring or trout stream which now bears his name and which bounds the school site on the east. He carried on trading as far west as the Ohio country and served the government as Indian interpreter. The name LeTort was selected after a referendum among leading citizens showed it was the outstanding favorite.

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The first sizable settlement of Europeans came to Carlisle about 1730, when a wave of Scots and Scots-Irish arrived. Three Carlisle residents signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776: James Wilson, George Ross and James Smith. One Carlisle resident involved in the revolution was Mary Ludwig Hays. Legend has it that when her artillery–man husband, John, was wounded in the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, she took his place at the cannon. She also took water to wounded soldiers, earning her name Molly Pitcher. A statue of her, complete with ramrod, marks her tomb in the Old Graveyard at South and Bedford Streets which bounds the school site on the west.


Old Cemetary