What they say about York County: Not too hot and not too cold

For about a dozen years, I've been teaching a class to school teachers and administrators about York County's changing culture.

That change process started in about 1730 when pioneers from Europe started settling on York County's soil.

My class is early on the syllabus in this Leadership York/Jewish Community Center program, setting the stage for a school-year-long series of topics that include bias awareness, socioeconomic biases and Anglo-American, African-American and Latino religious expressions.

In recent years, I teach the teachers in this Leadership for Diverse Schools program about York County's past before interviewing the star of the evening, York native Dorothy King. This Penn State Harrisburg professor and playwright tells about her experiences growing up in a tightly knit West Princess Street neighborhood in York.

I always tell the class that this cultural explanation is the most difficult presentation I make in a year because I try in less than 45 minutes to explain the "why" about York County.

'Why" is important. As  York County historian Jim Rudisill has said:

History is really "His Story," the story of people, and ends in a "y."

“Why" is the most important question historians can ask.

I would say that it's also the most difficult to explain, because York County is more complex than it seems.

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Here's a Reader's Digest version of my presentation to the Leadership for Diverse Schools' audiences:

York County's story begins with immigrants from Germany, Britain and Scotland/Ireland moving inland and then crossing the Susquehanna River after 1730.

That east-west orientation didn't last long, although it was never broken and often quite important. But the county's proximity to Baltimore, especially after the Northern Central Railroad connected the two in 1838, made for strong trade and family relationships with that Southern city.

That long Mason-Dixon Line placing York County in the North could not keep Southern ideas about race and politics from flooding through here.

So to apply what writer William Ecenbarger said about Delaware, York County became a Northern county with a Southern exposure and a Southern county with a Northern exposure.

Meanwhile, some York County municipalities resisted public education until the 1870s, and the county developed a system of one-room schools that lacked cohesion and ended in the eighth grade. Jobs could be found on bountiful farms and in plentiful factories so high school educations were not vital to support a family. And most significantly, the county did not host a college that offered four-year degrees until relatively recently - about 1970, when York College expanded.

So the county did not benefit from unified secondary or post-secondary education systems that would combat Southern ideas, make change desirable, soften sharp edges in the way people think and bring acceptance of people different from themselves.

Some people readily agree with James Carville's snarky comment about this region: Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.

Carville, however clever, is simply wrong.

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About halfway through my presentation to the teachers, I give what might be seen as the other side, comparing a breakdown of Christian denominations and other religious groups in York County with those in a large Mississippi county.

York County is much more diverse today, with a surprisingly large number of people without religious affiliations. This pokes at the mistaken notion that York countians mostly think alike - or at least like folks in Alabama or Mississippi.

And politically, York countians have avoided presidential candidates who put forth extreme positions on the right or the left over the course of centuries, according to a survey by two York College professors.

And then I point out that York County is in the North, after all, and also in Pennsylvania, with the Keystone State's reputation for feeding creativity from the middle, as described by historian Philip Klein:

"John Updike has characterized his native state as one of 'mild, misty, doughy, middle-ness,' where immoderate extremes have been resisted... . Pennsylvania's aversion to extremes grew out of its many different peoples, climates, topographies, economies, traditions and cultures."

I point out that all of these swirling forces of standing between North and South, positioned in the middle of the Mid-Atlantic region and primed on the leading edge of the Keystone State have prompted confusion about county identity and a weakness in confidence. It has meant that York County sometimes settles, searching for the pragmatic solution rather than the right solution.

This is illustrated by former York Mayor Charlie Robertson's remark in 2001 when the question came up about why no one was prosecuted in the murder of a black woman and a white police officer in 1969.

"Everyone knew who was involved," Robertson told Time magazine.

"But everyone just thought it was even. One black had been killed and one white – even."

And it could explain why York surrendered in the face of the Confederate Army in the Civil War, a century before the turbulent 1960s.

As leading industrialist A.B. Farquhar wrote about the prevailing view of slavery in those years, saying that the events leading to the Civil War "did not much move us":

"York was distinctively Northern but not bitterly anti-Southern. The community felt that slavery was wrong in principle. At the same time, being acquainted with many slave owners, we also knew that slavery was better in practice than in theory and that the planter who was cruel to his Negroes was a rare exception."

More: 4 images show the the rise and fall of venerable A.B. Farquhar Co.

He simply misses the point that you can be cruel to a whole group of people by denying them their liberty.

A community that thinks like this hasn't much fight, so the next step is to rationalize the surrender of York by saying that we gave up to stave off the burning of the town and destruction of private property.

Charlie Bacas, a thoughtful Yorker, has an interesting take on York County's culture in the 1800s. In an email after observing an Underground Railroad presentation, he pondered how ex-slave William C. Goodridge could have succeeded so well as a businessman in York in the 1800s.

Bacas conjectured that the Civil War-era culture in York County was one of "common decency, tolerance and live-and-let-live pragmatism."

"Not too hot and not too cold and very York County to this day," he wrote. "As a border county we were not as blue as the counties to our north but not as grey as those to our south."

I'm not sure if York County has more ambivalence than other border counties that are caught in the swirl of ideas.

But its location has prompted one of my former Leadership York students to sum up her big takeaway from the class: "York County has an identity crisis."

More: Civil War surrender to Rebels helped define York

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Fortunately, we're increasingly asking "why" today in exploring what makes York County, York County.

For example, each year, Dallastown Area High School teacher Tom Melhorn brings his local history class into that conversation.

Tom shared his syllabus to help me prep for an upcoming presentation to his class.

He has the county's centuries of history covered well, working through our involvement with the Susquehannock Indians, in wars and through rumors of war, big controversies and development of our industrial might.

He tackles head on the topic of race relations in the county, covering the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration of blacks from the South after World War I, the 1969 York City race riots and present-day racial challenges.

For too long, when York County history has been taught in schools, the text has been based on Gibson's and Prowell's histories that largely fail to recognize contributions from blacks, women and the working class. For too long, students have been allowed to cite those mammoth century-plus-old works as authoritative.

Sensitivity in recognizing contributions to York County's story by all people is growing in York County as seen in that Dallastown school example.

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The Leadership for Diverse Schools program is contributing to that understanding.

For the first time this year, I was able to attend the spring graduation of the teachers I had taught in October.

Part of their graduation requirement was to tell how they're going to apply lessons from their coursework back in their districts.

The teams put forth impressive plans to fulfill a goal of this leadership development course - to respond more effectively to their diverse student and parent populations, "cultivating an acceptance of differences."

Every time Leadership for Diverse Schools sends another class back to their schools, we gain more fight so that when someone or a group of people are wronged, we can more effectively say: "No, that is simply is not right."

More: Helping to sort it out in York, Part III: We must not forget lessons from 1860s, 1960s