Rupert Charles Loucks

Rupert Charles Loucks

Long-time Shippensburg resident Rupert Charles Loucks, a historian by both profession and avocation, died on January 5, 2024, in York Hospital, aged 87.

He was born January 25, 1936, in Jamestown, New York, the son of Charles T. and Rachel Hoyt Loucks. He initially pursued his early-kindled passion for history at Jamestown Community College and Binghamton University’s Harpur College. He subsequently earned the master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in the Colonial and Revolutionary era phases of United States history. He initially taught at the University of Hartford.

From 1969 until his retirement in 1997, he was a member of Shippensburg University’s history-philosophy department. In addition to U.S. topics, Charles enjoyed teaching perspectives-enriching world history courses. He seized opportunities to integrate into the classroom art and architectural history and other material-culture oriented themes that were central as well to his wide-ranging avocational interests.

During both his teaching and retirement years, he enthusiastically embraced history-related projects involving cooperative community and campus interaction. Most noteworthy were various historic preservation enterprises. He was a driving force in the 1980s historic structures survey project that culminated in the HARB-administered Shippensburg Historic District. Independently, he pursued the parallel application process that secured for Old Main and the other four original Shippensburg University buildings their National Register designation as the Cumberland Valley State Normal School Historic District. That campus enterprise coincided with the major restoration and renovation of Old Main, including its Chapel, a project in which he actively participated.

In the course of that preservation activity, Charles became the resident expert on the evolution of the community’s historic streetscape. He happily shared both his insights and his enthusiasm for the preservation cause with classroom students, walking tour participants, and area organizations. Sometimes he integrated into such sessions tours of his cherished historic downtown residence, which is still only partially restored and renovated. The area organizations figuring into that cooperative campus-community preservation activity included the Shippensburg Historical Society, in which he was particularly active during the 1980s. Those integrative enterprises also involved the Shippensburg University Arts and Humanities Outreach Center, which he directed for several years.

Despite the brevity of his formal residence in his native Chautauqua County, in southwestern New York State, Charles always maintained his strong family and personal ties with that region and adjacent communities in Warren County, Pennsylvania. He devoted much of his time back home to exploring the role, from the 1790s on, of his paternal- and maternal-line family members in the settlement and development of that interstate-border area.

During his retirement years, he continued pursuing his life-long gardening and travel interests, as well as editing manuscripts for colleagues and friends.
He was preceded in death by his younger siblings, Richard Hoyt Loucks, in 1971, and Jean Loucks Estus, in 2006. His immediate survivors are a niece and nephew, Tracy Estus Paxton of Jamestown and Russell Estus, and his wife, Anna, of Frewsburg, New York, as well as their respective children and grandchildren.

His surviving kinfolk also include myriad cousins around the nation and in Ontario, many of them several times removed and bonded by common genealogical interests. He also leaves behind a host of close friends, several of whom live overseas, including, most notably, Iceland and Scotland.

The Fogelsanger-Bricker Funeral Home is in charge of the cremation arrangements. A memorial service will be held on Saturday, April 27, 2024 at 1:00 p.m. in the Shippensburg University’s Old Main Chapel.

His cremains will be interred in family plots in three cemeteries in his home-town area. They are the Busti and Fluvanna, New York cemeteries and Foster Cemetery, Lander, Pennsylvania. Thus, his remains will lie in close proximity to those of Loucks-line forebears of the six preceding generations.

Memorial gifts may be directed to the Shippensburg Emergency Services Building, 20 Walnut Bottom Road, Shippensburg, PA 17257, the Shippensburg Public Library Endowment Fund, 73 West King Street, or a charity of choice.

Online condolences may be expressed at www.fogelsanger-brickerfuneralhome.com.