Cumberland Valley State Normal School Historic District

Seven acres on a rise above Shippensburg hold five buildings put up between 1870 and 1915 for the Cumberland Valley State Normal School. Samuel Sloan designed the central Old Main in 1870 in the Second Empire style; it opened in 1873 and was reworked in 1895 by Harry E. Yessler, who replaced its Mansard roof with a steep Classical Revival gable roof and raised the tower. Arthur P. Rosser designed the Romanesque Revival gymnasium, now Stewart Hall, completed in 1895. Horton Hall, a Romanesque Revival women's dormitory, was begun by Rosser and finished by Yessler after Rosser's death in 1894, and it opened in 1899. Maurice R. Rhoads designed the Classical Revival principal's residence, now the Martin House, and the Renaissance Revival Model School, now Gilbert Hall. The buildings matter because they preserve, in their original setting, the campus of the stockholder phase of Pennsylvania's state normal school system, which ran from 1857 until about 1917. Old Main's financial troubles, including an 1887 sheriff's sale, were central to that system's decline.