As the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project works to advance the cause of reconciliation in the state by documenting the history of racial terror lynching, the group has supported the development of blogs for the county coalitions.
Here is the link to The Cecil County Lynching Memorial page. The Committee is working to memorialize the victims of this terrible era in the County. The page is used to keep the community informed about research, plans, and activities.
You can navigate to the new page by clicking the “County Pages” tab above, or by clicking County Pages
The blog for the Cecil County Committee of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.
Carter’s Mill School, also known as the eight-sided school was built in 1820 by Robert Carter at Carter’s Bank. The stone place of learning was replaced in 1886 by a two-room frame building located on the west side of Singerly Road at Andora. William Spratt built the Andora School for $275
It is uncertain when the octagonal school building was lost. When the Cecil Whig visited the location in 1971 all that remained were some building stones. Mrs. Leonard Spratt informed the reporter that she had lived in the area for 30 years and the school was gone when they moved to the area.
A 1914 postcard of the old octagonal school at Carter’s Mill
One African-American boy the son of Gyp Valentine, an employee at Carter’s Mill attended classes at the octagonal school.
As for why an eight-sided structure, the History Center provides some insight: “The philosophy of octagonal-shaped school buildings can be traced to a Quaker tradition brought over from the old country. The concept is based on the idea that an octagon shape was conducive to a better learning environment because the instructor could be placed in a prominent position within the space and be the focus of the students.
It was also beneficial because the octagonal shape provided more square feet of inside space than either a rectangle or a square. Ventilation and lighting were also pertinent issues of the times, and an architectural structure with eight sides allowed for an opening in all sides of the building.
The building’s thick walls helped it to retain heat during the cold months, which also helped provide insulation against the heat in the warm weather.”
RESEARCH TIP — CECIL COUNTY DEATH CERTIFICATES AVAILABLE ONLINE — Here is some exciting news for historians and genealogists from the Maryland State Archives. The State has started digitizing Maryland death certificates. The first batch for the counties is now online. This batch runs from 1898 to 1910, but more will be added in the future.
Previously access to these records required a visit to Annapolis, where the certificates were available on the desktop computer workstations in the reading room. This is great news.
Here is an example, the Cecil County Death Certificate for Charles E. Queck. The 19-year-old baker was from Chesapeake City. The primary cause of death was typhoid fever, and he died on July 10, 1898.
The Board of Education purchased land for this building from Jesse & Rachel Hevelow for $10 in 1950, and the brick schoolhouse for African-Americans opened in 1952. Dr. Thomas G. Pullen, State Superintendent of Schools, and Mrs. Helen Harris, principal, spoke at the dedication that May. Once the modern facility opened, the former community schoolhouse across the street was sold to a Middletown Realtor for $2,000.
Coppin closed following integration in 1965 and there were a number of plans for the building, including use as a detachment for the state police. However, the Cecil Whig reported in 1971 that the school had been empty and boarded up since integration. It went on for other uses in time as the annex for the elementary school and as the local center for Head Start.
Briefly known as the “Cecilton Colored School,” the Board dedicated it as the Bishop Levi J. Coppin School, at the request of the PTA. The church leader had been born in 1848 in Fredericktown and went on to serve as an editor, educator, missionary and the 30th bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The Levi Coppin School sometime in the late 1950s. (Source: Cecil County Board of Education Collection at the Historical Society of Cecil County)After the schools were integrated, Mrs. Helen Harris became the principal of Elkton Elementary School. She retired in 1972 (Source: Cecil Whig, June 21, 1972)
CECILTON – September 2, 2020 – The demolition plan for the Bishop Levi Coppin School in Cecilton is being reassessed as a “post-review discovery” under section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, according to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD). Some months earlier, a determination had been made that the demolition of this African-American landmark would not adversely impact the community.
But with the clock ticking advocates heard that it was going to be razed so they stepped forward to provide significant information that hadn’t been discovered when the first 106 review was completed. Some of these new insights came from former students at Levi Coppin, while other evidence of important traces of earlier times came from a thesis, and a Google search that located blog posts, and articles published in the Cecil Whig in recent years.
For the moment the demolition is on hold in light of extra evidence of significance offered through petitions, letters, and the web as the State has opened the process to review the original determination. One of the steps in reconsidering the original declaration took place this afternoon in a former classroom at 233 Bohemia Avenue as people interested in making remarks about the adverse effect and potential mitigation of the proposed demolition offered comments for consideration and the public record.
On hot, sweltering summer days in the years before electric refrigerators, the iceman was a welcome sight in Cecil County towns. Plowing through dusty streets on a wagon, people could hear the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves, as the deliveryman approached.
Making his way slowly along the street, the deliveryman stopped at virtually every household, dropping off cakes of ice to homemakers. The rattle of the tongs and the rumble of the wagon called out to children. They would gather around as the driver chopped off an order, hoping for a small frozen chip.
This precious commodity had been harvested months earlier. Once crews cut blocks of it from frozen waterways, workers packed the product in sawdust, storing it away in icehouses. There it waited for the coming Maryland summer.
As winter eventually warmed into spring, the thermometer climbing ever higher folks began calling for the cooling product. And at the top of the Chesapeake, the season for the iceman was soon in full swing
Deliveries to houses, restaurants, hotels, and taverns were what those lazy, hazy days of July and August called for. After each stop, the quickly melting blocks were stored away in iceboxes. Today, of course, we go to the freezer to grab a cube or two. However, in this age long-ago age, these cooling cubs were not readily available.
This made the annual ice harvest an important cash crop, turning some area waterways into seasonal factories. So, what is the history of this once scarce product in Cecil County?
A shortage of ice had been a ‘”customary complaint” in Elkton during warm weather for years, the Cecil Whig remarked in 1866. Yet there was a “good omen” for a stock company, an ice company, had been formed to supply “the summer luxury.”
On hot summer days that year, an ice wagon traveled Elkton streets. In succeeding years, as the time approached when people required ice the company would announce it had plenty stored way if the winter had produced a strong extended freeze. From then on, the ice harvest was quite an enterprise in the county seat.
Demand for the product of summer must have been good. In 1867, the distributor had a “city style” ice wagon built, its bell-laden horses traversing the town. Elkton was rapidly putting on “city-airs,” the Whig’s editor stated.
The commodity depended on mother nature, and sometimes even 19th-century winters were just not cold enough. Dealers having exhausted the home supply by June 1876 had to make other arrangements so Joseph McNeal imported a fine quantity of the summer item from suppliers in Boston. It arrived in town on the railroad, no doubt having been heavily wrapped in sawdust and sacks.
Nine years later, as spring weather approached, icehouses and no ice, so the anxious dealers hoped for a cold snap. Commenting on the lack of the commodity, the Whig observed: Ice nowadays has become a necessity, and a failure to secure a home supply would greatly increase its cost as to rink it as a luxury among poor people.
Harvesting on the Susquehanna was a major commercial operation. There, when winters were cold enough, the America Ice Company cut river ice with horse-drawn saws, hauling huge blocks of it to large icehouses. The enterprise harvesting winter’s product on the river employed 50 to 100 men and many horses, the Cecil Whig reported. From then, until the arrival of warm weather, winter’s natural refrigerant stayed stored away in insulated structures at the edge of Perryville. At just the right time, it was shipped to Baltimore dealers.
Elkton received its first shipment of manufactured ice in January 1890. That winter, good ice making weather failed to arrive, and dealers exhausted their supplies. To satisfy the local market, one distributor, George Booth, purchased a ton of “artificial ice” in Wilmington, the Whig informed readers.
Viewing the approach of warm weather in 1909, consumers were anxious. While ice dealers had failed to secure a supply of natural ice, they had no reason to worry for the enterprise of Davis & Vinsinger had solved the problem. At the corner of Delaware Ave. and Howard Street in Elkton, they built an artificial ice plant and soon were making deliveries around town.
The Elkton Supply Company Ice Truck (Photo Credit: The Rhoades Collection at the Historical Society of Cecil County)
Henry Metz recalls that in 1926 when the Elkton Supply Company acquired the ice business from Newton-Mitchell Company, the successor of Davis and Vinsinger, delivery was by horse and wagon. Elkton Supply maintained two routes, which were driven by Edward Fleming and Charles Baader, he notes. Sometime after this trucks become standard equipment. And the once familiar sight of ice wagons passed from the Elkton scene.
Fresh ice had to be bought every day, and the shallow drip pan underneath the icebox had to be emptied, recalled Helen Keene Warburton. In the era before World War II, Warburton remembers ice being delivered. Each day, except Sunday, he “dropped off a 25- pound block of ice.”
Out in the country, it was a different story. Living on a farm north of Chesapeake City, Betty Eliason remembers her father, Frank Hutton, going to town each Saturday to buy a 100- pound block. “We had to make it last since that is all we had for the week.”
Home refrigerators eventually started plugging everyone into year-round ice. As the popularity of this appliance caught on, especially considering the ease with which it froze the water, the market for home delivery melted away in Cecil County.
Pardon the excessive capitalization, but killing myths is tough work. When serving as the Cecil Historical Journal editor for Historical Society of Cecil County (HSCC), I had the opportunity to employ facts to slay a few local history myths. But one of those myths has returned. The myth: Confederate General William Whann Mackall was born in Cecil County, according to Wikipedia, some genealogical papers at the HSCC, and an obituary in the Cecil Democrat, 22 August 1891, which was used by the genealogist who compiled the HSCC’s William Whann Mackall-Aminta Sorrell Family Group Record. At one time, even the state’s historical marker at Wilna proclaimed the site was the general’s birthplace. But the state replaced that marker with a significant rewording that identifies Wilna as his boyhood home instead. I will explain what led to the state making the change.
Confederate General William Whann Mackall was not born in Cecil County. He did, however, grow up in the county. I presented this fact a little over a decade ago, with documentation, but the correction needs to be reasserted once again–so I repeat, the general was born in Washington, D. C. and grew up in Cecil County.
While serving as the volunteer editor of the Cecil County Historical Journal from 2000 to 2008, I decided to research and write an article on Cecil County’s lone Civil War general, but I bumped into a problem. Sometimes historians will repeat generally accepted information conveniently at hand without further investigation. Using material at the historical society, it would have been easy to write that Mackall was born in Cecil County. But I have a Civil War book at home, The Civil War Dictionary, by Mark Mayo Boatner III, published in 1959, and the entry on Mackall had D. C. for his birthplace. Historians, confronted by glaring contradictions in the historical record, cannot simply pick the fact they like best or they think would most please their readers. I had to investigate further before I could declare where Mackall was born. Preparing my research for the article I had planned to write for the Journal took two tracks. One track, my primary interest, focused on investigating Mackall’s military record and writing an article about his military career. The secondary track focused on discovering Mackall’s actual birthplace, and if evidence pointed to Washington, D. C., then I would want to know approximately when he came to Cecil County, and the circumstances that brought his family here.
At the conclusion of my two-track investigation, I published the main article: Cecil County’s Civil War General,Cecil Historical Journal, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2007, pages 2-10. Eighteen resources were used and cited. The HSCC holds reference copies of the Journal and could provide scanned copies of the article on request.
One paragraph in that article mentioned that Benjamin Mackall, William’s father, moved to Cecil County when William was around 6 years old. I wrote a separate piece detailing the evidence that William was born in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. and more fully explained the circumstances that brought William’s parents to Cecil County. This smaller separate article was published on the historical society website (it was eventually removed) and elsewhere, but I do not recall where. Unfortunately, my original Word files for both articles became corrupted.
Fortunately, my efforts did make a difference. My research convinced the state to change the historical marker at Wilna. I had previously written an article on Principio for the Journal, and the state had requested I suggest a script for a new historical marker they were placing there. I took the opportunity to ask the state commission if they would change the sign at Wilna if I sent evidence that it was his boyhood home but not his birthplace. I shared the documentation and research findings with the Maryland Historical Trust and the Maryland State Highway Administration. The state accepted the research and replaced the sign at Wilna. The marker no longer claims Wilna was Mackall’s birthplace, but instead identifies the site as “his boyhood home.” And as they say, the rest was history; that is until recently, when the error resurfaced. After all that detective work, including a trip to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Though the original article about Mackall’s boyhood home disappeared, I kept copies of the documents I used and was able to reconstruct much of it for this blog post.
The Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army from its Organization, September 29, 1789 to March 2, 1903, Washington: Government Printing office, 1903, compiled by Francis Bernard Heitman, has “Born in D. C.” for his entry on Mackall. Among the sources I used to compile the history of Mackall’s military service were two documents verifying Mackall’s birthplace as Washington, D. C. I had obtained copies of Mackall’s military records from the National Archives. These official records were detailed and spanned his military service in the United States Army and the Confederate Army. On one form, the blank for “born in” was filled in with the cursive abbreviation D. C. This was likely the same record Heitman used for his Mackall entry.
Register of appointments for William Whann Mackall
An online search revealed that General Mackall’s letters, part of a dairy written during military service, genealogical and biographical material, and other personal papers were housed at the University of North Carolina, as part of the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill. A perfect opportunity for a road trip. The papers provided a rich source of information about Mackall’s life, his military experiences, and his reflections on those experiences. The Manuscript Collection Survey, an introduction or overview about the Mackall papers, stated that the papers were deposited by his grandson, W. W. Mackall, of Washington, D. C. and that William Whann Mackall (1817-1891) was “born in Georgetown.” Separate research established that the Mackalls and their allied families were prominent in the Washington, D.C. region. Benjamin Mackall, William’s father, came to Cecil County in the early 1820s and he left the County by the 1840s, briefly returning to Georgetown before moving to the family estate, Langley, in Fairfax County, Virginia, not far from Georgetown. The estate shared its name with the nearby town, Langley, Virginia.
Approximately when did William’s parents come to Cecil County?
A search through Cecil County equity records at the courthouse (the records now located at the Maryland Archives and available online), family records and genealogies, and At the Head of the Bay: A Cultural and Architectural, History of Cecil County, compiled by the Cecil County Historical Trust, Inc. and Mills of Cecil County, John McGrain’s survey of historic mills in the county (reference copy available at the HSCC) presented enough information to form a reasonable conclusion about the circumstances that brought the Mackalls from Georgetown, Washington, D. C. to Cecil County, Md.
The family came to Cecil County after January 1817, after William was born in D. C. They had settled in Cecil County by January 1822; that was the month William’s brother, Richard, was born at Wilna, according to At the Head of the Bay. I had not noticed the date of Richard’s birth at Wilna when I wrote the Journal article in 2007, when I estimated William was about six when brought to Cecil County. If I had noticed, I would have estimated a slightly younger age. William was born 18 January 1817. Richard was born 14 January 1822, when William was four days away from his fifth birthday.
What brought the Mackalls from Georgetown, Washington D. C. to Cecil County?
Research revealed that family ties and economic opportunity brought Benjamin Mackall and his family from Georgetown to Cecil County. The family files at the HSCC, filled with genealogical records and copies of legal documents like wills, plus some separate research of additional resources showed a close relationship among three families. Not wanting to get too entangled in all the familial details, I searched just deep enough to get a general sense of the relationships as they pertain to the question, and I made some reasonable assumptions about the family and the land at Wilna. The Mackall, Moffitt (variation: Maffitt), and Whann families, in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. and in Cecil County, Maryland, were allied by marriage. William Whann, a Georgetown banker and his wife, Jane (Moffitt) Whann, originally came from Cecil County. Their daughter, Anna Maria, married Benjamin Mackall, William Whann Mackall’s father. According to At the Head of the Bay’sentry on Wilna Mill, the mill was established around 1740 by Richard Mackall on Little Elk Creek for producing flour (I did not search for the specific family link). On November 30, 1821, Sarah Maffitt purchased “Mill, Land, and Plantation” from the Elkton Bank of Maryland. The deed describes what appears to be Wilna (Cecil County equity record JS 19, pages 124-126; a previous description for the same land is in equity record JS 13, 124-126). About a month and a half later, January 14, 1822, Anna Maria (Whann) Mackall gave birth to William’s brother Richard at Wilna. Anna Maria’s mother, Jane (Moffett/Maffitt) Whann and Sarah Maffett were sisters. Ownership of the land would later pass to either another sister, Sally Maffett, or a related namesake. As noted, sorting out all the relationships could become more entangling than necessary for this inquiry.
John McGrain, a Baltimore County historian, did an extensive survey of the historic mills in Cecil County, and left a copy of The Mills of Cecil County at the HSCC. In his survey he states that Benjamin Mackall owed the mill. I did not find documentation to support ownership, and the land purchased by Sarah Maffitt includes the mill. But I did find documentation that Benjamin operated the mill, likely through a business arrangement with his wife’s aunt.
In May 1823, Benjamin Mackall, William’s father, purchased a collection of items, mostly household goods:
“One feather bed, bedstead and bedding, two tables one tea stand, four barrels, five yards of carpet, one shop board [Historically: “A counter or table on which a tradesman’s business is transacted or goods are displayed for sale.” OED online], one looking glass, two pots, one [D]utch oven, one set knives and forks, one set of cups and saucers, one tub, one bucket, one hog, two crocks, two jugs, two pitchers, one press iron, three chairs, two dishes, two plates, one breadbasket, one axe, one spinning wheel, three kegs, six tea spoons, one truck [At that time, and in this context, a truck would have been “A wheeled vehicle for carrying heavy weights ; variously applied.” OED online], one chest, one pot rack, two tea pots, one set razors” (JS 21, 35).
Two later entries in the county equity records clarify that those items were for spending long work days at the mill.
April 26, 1824 – Benjamin F. Mackall sold Parcel Hollingsworth, “three thousand and five hundred bushels of wheat now stored and in the keeping of Henry [Bennett or Barnett]; also one thousand bushesnow in the mill where the said Mackall resides; twenty five hundred bushels of wheat, now stored and in the keeping of William Hewitt, also one hundred barrels of flour in the mill where the said Mackall resides.” [emphasis added] (JS 22, 52-53).
September 24, 1825 – Benjamin purchased the indenture of Enos Woods for a period of 5 years to serve as a miller apprentice to learn the mill trade (JS 23, 200).
Other significant dates to conclude General William Whann Mackall’s relationship to Cecil County.
In 1826, William’s mother died; William was nine years old. In 1834, William ended his residency in Cecil County to attend the U. S. Military Academy at West Point and begin his military career. On January 13, 1844, William Whann Mackall and his brothers, Henry and Richard, purchased the estate from Sally Maffitt. (equity record GMC 5, 368-370). It is possible that Sally Maffitt became especially significant to William after the death of his mother; William would later name his second daughter Sally Maffitt Mackall.
William served in the Mexican War, and during that time he sent letters to his father, who had briefly returned to Washington, D. C. On September 10, 1846, a Cecil County equity record identified Benjamin as a resident of Fairfax County, Virginia, likely at his estate, named Langley, which shared the name with the nearby town. William would inherit Langley after the Civil War. Benjamin had traveled back to Cecil from Fairfax, Virginia, that September to buy three children from Jane C. Mitchell.
The entry for the sale of the children was stark, but not uncommon:
Sam aged about ten years Slave for life
Henry aged about eight years Slave for life
Newton aged about five years Slave for life
[GMC 11, page 294-295].
December 19, 1848 – Major William Mackall and his wife sell their share of the land they purchased in 1844 to Henry C. Mackall. Two justices of the peace in Washington, D. C. affirm the sale and it was recorded in Cecil County, RCH 2, 207-208. Except for the possibility of family visits, William’s ties to Cecil County have ended.
For More on Milt’s scholarship, see this blog post.
ELKTON, May 20, 2018 — We were saddened to hear that Don Herring passed away on May 12, 2018, at the age of 87. A journalist of the first order, he was associated with the profession throughout his entire adult life, including over 30-years in Cecil County. He took over as the managing editor of the Cecil Whig forty-seven years ago, and although he retired as the parent company’s executive editor in 1997, he was still on the job part-time. For many years afterward, the retiree wrote editorials and columns for the corporation’s publications.
After the city editor from the Indianapolis Star arrived in Elkton in 1971, he quickly developed a deep working relationship with the community, having a powerful sense of how to cover his beat. There was attention to details and coverage, as he brought a superb product to subscribers every week.
Don remembers former Cecil Democrat Editor Clark Samuels. (Source: Cecil Whig)
Over the last three decades of the 20th century, a former editor with a metropolitan daily directed coverage of the county’s top stories, including Hurricane Agnes and the fatal gas explosion in downtown Perryville, along with fine week-by-week coverage of everyday life. The Whig received many prestigious awards for outstanding journalism in his era. Over the decades, Don Herring guided the county’s newspaper of record through a changing newspaper marketplace as the broadsheet chronicled the County and became a daily.
In addition to his professional work, he was deeply involved in his community. This engagement ranged from the Singerly Fire Company and Emergency Management to his commitment to history. He valued the past, serving as a trustee at the Historical Society for about six years. In 1992, he wrote a book, “A History of the Cecil Whig,” which will always have a prominent place on our bookshelf.
In 1997, one of Don’s photographers, Jim Cheeseman, donated some 10,000 prints and an untold number of negatives to the Society, enabling future generations to see much of Cecil’s recent past. The editor and society trustee helped arrange this valuable donation, and the three of us sat around Jim’s Kitchen for months sorting out the body of work that spanned three decades, while trying to add some recollections to the images. Of course, the two of them also shared lots of stories about covering the beat locally, and on the city jobs both had before arriving at the Whig.
Thanks to Don’s encouragement and assistance this irreplaceable recordation of the last decades of the 20th-century are available to future generations. I still recall picking up the phone one day in 2007 and Don was on the other end. He was calling to tell me that Jim has passed away.
Don Herring, Jim Cheeseman and Mike Dixon examine the Cheeseman Collection at the Historical Society (Source: Cecil Whig).
Don’s commitment to Cecil County Journalism and the community were strong in every aspect. He was a first-rate, old-school editor, who kept up with things and modernized news coverage here. We in the county are lucky to have had a professional managing journalist bring high-quality news to our homes every day, and those of us who worked with him in the community are fortunate to have had the enriching experience.
These times and those wonderful memories seem a lot more distant as we write this early on this Sunday morning in the middle of spring. Don will be missed and all of those who had the opportunity to work with him as an editor or as a volunteer in the community are fortunate to have known Don Herring.
Many times each day, sirens blare out in Cecil County as volunteers dash straight for a nearby firehouse. Within minutes, emergency vehicles, sirens screaming and lights flashing, rush out of a station en route to a blazing inferno, a serious accident, or some other emergency.
This scene has been happening here for centuries. Many times, it was a cold Maryland night when the cry of “fire” echoed through the darkness; on other occasions, it was a sweltering Eastern Shore day. Whatever the case, people rushed to the firehouse, and then down the street they came with their engine.
These days, fire companies operate sixteen stations. The incorporated towns and Hack Point have had facilities for a long time, and as the county grew in recent years, companies opened stations in Woodlawn, Conowingo, South Chesapeake City, and Calvert areas.
These structures have an impressive legacy. Some started as simple sheds to quarter buckets, ladders, and perhaps a creaky old hand-pumper. Grander municipal structures for steam engines appeared later, and today metal-and-steel stations await the next alarm.
A Firehouse for Port Deposit
Port Deposit was discussing the need for a central place to store firefighting machinery in the 1860s, a time when men hooked ropes to apparatus and towed it to fires. “Two engines, which “in days gone by” had saved the town from calamity, were scattered about, reels were in a lumberyard, and hose was in a warehouse, a correspondent told the Cecil Whig.
One of those creaky old pumpers helped on the 83rd Anniversary of American Independence (July 4, 1859), when soon after midnight rolled across the river town, the ringing of bells and the startling cry of fire alarmed people.
This brought about the purchase of an additional machine, the Union of Baltimore, which cost $525, the Whig reported. Residents also busied themselves with organizing two fire companies, the Friendship and the Union, and there was talk about erecting an engine house.
The Port Deposit Municipal Building. The fire station was on the first floor.
Almost a decade later (1868), Eli Sentman finished building a “combined town hall, public school and Masonic Hall.” The engine room was on the first floor, and for “evildoers and night prowlers,” there was a town lockup “ready to receive unwilling occupants,” according to the Cecil Democrat.
Elkton’s Firehouse
In Elkton, what some called an “engine house” had been built on North Street to house the town’s first hand pumper in the late 1820s. In 1890, the town got around to building a municipal building at the cost of $2,973. Until then, the lone public property had been the old shed that served as an “engine house.”
The new structure, “Council Hall,” a two-story brick building with a bell tower, was turned over to the commissioners in February of the next year. The ground floor quartered the fire department; the upper story had town offices.
Remarkably, only one complaint was heard about the improvement, an Elkton newspaper reported. The “doors were too narrow to allow the new steam engine the town was going to get to come out at full speed,” a young man in the insurance business observed.
It was not too long before the Singerly Fire Company, which was organizing itself at the same time, had the first floor overflowing with equipment. In a town that had relied on stubborn old hand pumpers for over 60 years, two hose carriages, a hook-and-ladder truck and a steam engine packed the floor.
In the twentieth century, steam engines gave way to motorized fire trucks and more fire companies formed. They, too, would erect stations.
However, the Port Deposit and Elkton stations, the county’s two oldest firehouses, served the Water Witch and Singerly fire companies for a long time. Once filled with hose and shiny fire engines, both are quiet now since engines no longer bolt out the door.
As the Spanish Flu caused death and havoc across Cecil County in 1918, essential workers toiled away day and night, struggling to alleviate the suffering. In this troop of people delivering critical services, doctors and nurses stood on the front line. Alongside these bedside caregivers, the druggists played an equally essential role as the virus ripped unchecked across Maryland.
These early 20th-century flu fighters, from every corner of the county, toiled away as the cases multiplied, providing vitally needed medications. Antiseptics by the gallon, atomizers by the dozens, and countless vials of patent medicines, passed over drug store counters. But the most significant contribution from this army of professional pharmacists was filling doctor’s prescriptions.
As frightened people staggered into drug stores with the physician’s script, exhausted druggists stood for long hours at their workbenches wielding the pestle and mortar. They poured, measured, ground, and compounded chemicals incessantly, dispensing prescriptions to alleviate the misery.
Medications for Fighting the Flu
Druggists, even the old hands, had never experienced anything like this. But alongside their clerks, they worked night and day formulating medications, counting pills, and providing supplies for those down with the virus.
When the contagion crypt into Cecil County in 1918, the physicians in this lethal battle had no curative treatments — without vaccines or antibiotics, they experimented, prescribing drugs to control cough and relieve pain, alongside various treatments previously used for respiratory diseases. The regimens available in 1918 included morphine for pain, quinine for malaria, digitalis for heart conditions, phenacetin for fever reduction, and morphine, ether, and chloroform for anesthetics.1
Frantic customers also stripped laxatives from the shelves. They were ordered as a cure for everything in those days. There were also general medicines for symptomatic treatment such as aspirin, calomel, and castor oil, and kidney pills with opium.
Antiseptics sold like never before. Listerine, peroxide, and a dozen other sanitizers and mouthwashes disappeared quickly from the inventory.
Desperate people also turned to a variety of additional patent medicines, which were available from an assortment of retailers as manufacturers boasted of the curative powers of these concoctions in newspaper advertisements. Laced with alcohol and narcotics, the distributors touted the benefits of alcohol, tobacco, camphor, quinine, and much more. They simply added Spanish Influenza to the ills they purported to prevent treat or cure.
Hill’s Cascara Quinine Bromide for the Spanish Flu (Source: Evening Journal, Jan. 9, 1919)_
Some across-the-counter treatments provided symptom relief. Vicks VapoRub, for example, became widely popular. As sales skyrocketed, pharmacists were asked to conserve stock as it was needed “in the flu districts.”
Pharmacists Should Receive Military Deferments
That October, Dr. A. R. L. Dohme of Baltimore wrote to the Surgeon General, asking that the government recognize the pharmacy trade as an essential industry and give pharmacists and drug clerks military deferments. Many of these men were being drafted by the army, while drugstores were being overrun with prescriptions and the remaining clerks couldn’t handle the volume, many working all night and day. Maintaining “professional pharmaceutical services” were essential so people could secure their medicines. . . . It was one of the direct needs of the public and the medical profession to help defeat the epidemic and save lives,” he wrote. 2
As that sorrowful October faded into November, the nervous tension in the shops eased as druggists got their first break from dispensing influenza remedies and sick room supplies in weeks. Standing in their shops, they could say they had done their part to combat the pandemic that brought Cecil County to a standstill as they provided victims of the contagion with vitally needed medicines.
Dr. Ragan’s favorite liniment. For man and beast. (Source: Personal Collection)
Cecil County’s pharmacists had been up to the unparalleled task of serving with doctors and nurses on the front line of the healthcare system, as the contagion ran its course here. These professionals, some of the busiest men in the county during some of the county’s most trying weeks in history, made it possible for victims of the virus to have vitally needed medications. To do this they labored for long, extended days, some working at their counters for as much as 20-hours a day while also facing the risk of infection. When the pandemic of 1918 struck Cecil County the pharmacists had alleviated suffering and hardship while saving lives.
Notes on Some of Cecil County’s Druggists
Here is a list of the druggists in Cecil County in 1916, along with a few additional notes on some of them. 3
CECILTON — Black, John H.
CHESAPEAKE CITY — Sawtelle, Seth S. and Smithers, Dedman S.
ELKTON — Frazer, J. Frank, Fraser, Robert B.. and Wells Drug Store
In 1869, Dr. James H. Frazer established the Elkton Drug Store on East Main Street. Later he sold the business to his brother Robert F. Frazer.4
NORTH EAST — McKnight, V. H.. and Moore’s Pharmacy
PORT DEPOSIT – Cameron, Harry R. and Carson’s Pharmacy
PERRYVILLE — Cameron, Norris C.
RISING SUN — Reynolds, Eli T.
In the northern part of the county, Eli Tucker Reynolds dispensed the medications at the Rising Sun Pharmacy. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he came to Rising Sun to clerk in the drug store of the G. G. Still and in 1891 he purchased the establishment. On Friday, September 27, 1929, while working at the prescription counter, he collapsed. The 61-year-old pharmacist died Monday, September 30, 1929 5
The Rising Sun Pharmacy, Aug. 28, 1891, Midland Journal
George McNabb, “Reminiscences of an Influenza Epidemic,” Reminiscences of an Influenza Epidemic (Washington, DC: The Bureau of Medicine and Surgery of the Navy Department, 1928) https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p249901coll37/id/14422[↩]
Moulton, Will C. “What Other Druggists Are Saying.” Northwestern Druggist XXL, no. 12 (December 1918): p, 23.[↩]
“Maryland Retail Druggists’.” In Era Druggists Directory, 18th ed., 72–74. New York, NY: D. O. Haynes & Co., 1916. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Era_Druggist_s_Directory_of_the_Unit/JvfNAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=”era druggist’s directory”&printsec=frontcover.[↩]
F Rodney Frazer, Parts of Elkton in 1918 As I Remember It (Elkton, MD: Historical Society of Cecil County, 1989) p. 3[↩]
Obituary, Eli T. Reynolds, October 4, 1929, Midland Journal[↩]
