Alfred L. Sponsler was born on August 2, 1822, in Pennsylvania. He began work as a “clerk in a store,” and he later worked for a “grain and forwarding merchant” in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Around 1847, while “coming from Newville to Carlisle on the engine of the railroad train…the engine ran off the track through an open switch, up an embankment and was overturned.” Sponslder was “thrown out and the wood in the tender fell upon him.” He survived the accident after a “long, long confinement to bed,” but he never regained the use of his legs.

 

By 1850, he was serving as a justice of the peace in Carlisle. He joined the Republican Party by the late 1850s, and the party nominated him for county treasurer in 1859. At some point in his life, a railroad accident “deprived him of the use of his lower limbs.” By 1860, he was working as a real estate agent, and he owned $5,000 of real estate and $500 of personal property.

 

A decade later, he owned $7,000 of real estate and $8,500 of personal property, and he employed a Black domestic servant. He became a prominent member of the local community, earning the nickname “Squire Sponsler.” As one writer noted, he “possessed social qualities of the most attractive kind and no man in his county had a larger circle of friends.” He possessed the “strictest integrity,” a “generous heart,” and a “noble character.” He fell ill in June 1882 and died on June 29, 1882. 

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