Shippensburg, PA

The sun finally decided to come out today and we took advantage of it to go geocaching.  It had been 43 days since we last geocached and it was great to get back to it.  We hadn't been to Shippensburg, PA which is just up the road from us and thought we could combine a trip there with geocaching and it turned out to be a great decision.

Along the way we had some onlookers watching us geocache and they seemed to be very interested in us.  They even stopped eating and came nearer to us to see what we were doing.  From the puzzled looks on their faces I don't think they knew what it was all about.

We stopped for some coffee and looked across the street and saw this neat house up on some large rocks.  The house was made of stone also and had a window that looked like a big eye.  We didn't see anything written about the house and thought it might just be a private home.  It would have been interesting to tour the house and see how it was made.

Shippensburg is the home of Shippensburg University and looks like a very nice small college town with a thriving downtown area and a very beautiful campus.  There was a football game going on between Shippensburg vs Clarion and the "Ship" won the game 54-24.  They have a nice stadium and an endzone scoreboard with a huge tv screen showing the game in progress.  Very impressive for a small college to have such nice facilities.

A nearby department for Fine Arts had a statue called Creative Tools and hidden near it was a geocache.  Gerry got out and found the cache while I took this picture of the statue.  The statue had a paintbrush, scissors and pencil on a rock base and was about 12 ft high.  

Shippensburg University was established in 1871 as the Cumberland Valley State Normal School. The school received official approval by the state on February 21, 1873, and admitted its first class of 217 students on April 15, 1873. In 1917 the school was purchased by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. On June 4, 1926, the school was authorized to grant the bachelor of science in education degree in elementary and junior high education. The school received a charter on October 12, 1926, making it the first normal school in Pennsylvania to become a state teachers college. On June 3, 1927, the State Council of Education authorized the school to change its name to the State Teachers College at Shippensburg.
The business education curriculum was approved on December 3, 1937. On December 8, 1939, Shippensburg State Teachers College became the first teachers college in Pennsylvania and the fourth in the United States to be accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and (Secondary) Schools. 

The State Council of Education approved graduate work leading to the master of education degree on January 7, 1959. On January 8, 1960, the name change to Shippensburg State College was authorized.

The arts and sciences curriculum was authorized by the State Council of Education on April 18, 1962, and the bachelor of science in business administration degree program was initiated on September 1, 1967.

On November 12, 1982, the governor of the Commonwealth signed Senate Bill 506 establishing the State System of Higher Education. Shippensburg State College was designated Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania effective July 1, 1983.  There are about 8400 students enrolled in the University 7200 undergraduates and 1200 graduate students in calendar year 2011

All in all we had a great day geocaching and learning more about Shippensburg.  It is a neat little burg.  Sorry, I had to say that.  

We found 11 caches today and now have 922 finds to our credit.  We tried to pick up one cache but it was in an alley and a van with three people was parked right near the cache so we tried to come back twice and the people were still there.  They looked at us much like the first group mentioned earlier so we decided to try for the cache another day.