For many Cecil County villages and towns the railroad station was the center of the community years ago, and the company official overseeing the comings and goings of townspeople, passengers, telegraph messages, freight and mail was an important member of the community. Each place with a station had one, a station agent, in charge of keeping everything on track at his depot.
F C. Breitenbach B & O Station Agent at Childs. Source: Cecil Democrat, Oct. 7, 1954
To keep the operation running smoothly, the agents were assigned many responsibilities at smaller places. Obligations included preparing for the arrival of trains, selling tickets, handling freight, mail and baggage, announcing arrivals, and taking care of the property.
Frederick ‘C, Breitenbach, Sr., of Cherry Hill was the Baltimore and Ohio’s agent-operator at Childs in 1954. He had just completed 50 years with the company, having come to the Singerly Tower in 1904. In subsequent years he was assigned to Childs as an operator-clerk and as an agent-operator at Leslie. His final stint brought him back to Childs in 1935.
“The romance of the railroad has been lost since steam has gone,” the agent told the Cecil Democrat in 1954. He loved “the smell of that old coal,” and “the engineers in those steam engines were hardy men. The trains today are more like street cars.”
Until 1949 local passenger trains stopped at Childs, but as he marked a half-century of service the station only handled freight, most of it going to and from the Elk Paper company plant. When he started at Childs, it was the most important stop in Cecil County and three people worked at the station, he recalled.
But in 1954 he was the only remaining employee. The rural Cecil County depot was slowly reaching the end of the line, although years ago the building alongside the B & O tracks was the center of the village. This old-time railroader had worked across the changing years and changing times as he and the station neared retirement.
He was born in Baltimore in 1885 and died in Union Hospital on May 16, 1958. He was an employee of the B & O for 53 years, last serving as “station master at Childs.”
A postcard of the Childs Railroad Station, Circa 1912. The card was unused, so there is no postal cancellation. Source: Personal Collection
“The Smoke at Dawn,” Jeff Shaara’s latest historical novel about the Civil War, has been released and it has a Cecil County angle. This third volume, part of a four part series, focuses on the critical Battle of Chattanooga.
Kyle Dixon has been listening to the audio version of the book., He informs me that William Whann Mackall, a Confederate General from Cecil County, appears on the pages of this just released volume. Mackall, a graduate of West Point, grew up near Childs. When the war broke out he resigned his U.S. Army commission and joined the confederacy.
A state historical marker near the boyhood home on Blue Ball Road provides additional information on Mackall. And here is a link to an article Milt Diggins did on the general.
The boyhood home of William Whann Mackall is just south of Childs on Blue Ball Road.
There is a great interest in learning how to identify and protect old pictures, and the Cecil County Public Library is presenting a how-to talk to help you get started with that task. So if you are the family archivist or the records custodian for your church or civic group, working to sift through old boxes of cherished pictures, this helpful program will introduce you to the basics and help assure your precious snapshots are passed along to future generations.
The program by Historian Mike Dixon takes place at the Chesapeake City Branch Sept 15, 2014 at 6:30 p.m. Mike will show you how to identify and preserve your historic photos.
A faded, Cherry Hill postcard mailed from that community Nov. 26, 1908. It was mailed to Miss Anna Pedrick, Dover, NJ. This was a Ed Herbener photo and the message simply said “arrived home safe.”
Simple adjustments made to the Cherry Hill postcard with a freeware program.
H. W. Cheney, the Cecilton Chevrolet dealer, marked the 26th anniversary of taking care of the automobile needs of residents in the southern part of the county in 1954. And he featured some great bargains on the used car lot.
Mr. Chyeney established the business in 1928, “starting out with only himself and a mechanic,” the Cecil Democrat reported. By 1954, the newspaper reported that his workforce had grown to himself: two salesmen, four mechanics, a parts man, and two clerical personnel.
The Democrat remarked that the dealership “was one of the oldest in continuous operations in Cecil County.” Mr. Cheyney was active in civic affairs, serving the community in many ways, which included the town board.
Roy McCauley, Salesman, H. W. Cheyne, and Bobk Cooling, Salesman at Cheyney’s used car sale. Source: Cecil Democrat, June 20, 1954
Fire department based emergency medical services in Cecil County evolved slowly after World War II. The first company to acquire an ambulance was Singerly in 1941. Before that the American Legion in Elkton operated a unit for many years, but as the war approached they pulled back. After that, Taylor McKenney’s Garage in Elkton, answered medical transport calls, until the fire service got involved. Also, beginning in 1935 the Conowingo State Police barrack operated a transport vehicle and they continued with that service into the 1940s.
In the next decade after Singerly inaugurated its ambulance service, other companies joined in. In 1955, the Community Fire Company of Perryville and the Community Fire Company of Rising Sun started providing emergency medical transportation to the western end of Cecil. North East Volunteer Fire Company followed in 1956. In the 1960s, two more organizations added ambulances to their fleets. The Volunteer Fire Company No. 1 of Chesapeake City started in 1963, and Water Witch of Port Deposit added a unit in 1964.
But in the early 1950s, there were few ambulances available in the county to answer accident and medical calls. So perhaps Ernie’s Taxi saw a business opportunity, for the Elkton cabby announced in 1953 that he now had available for public use a fully equipped and approved ambulance, available on a 24-hour basis to all residents of Cecil County and surrounding areas. What’s more the rates were reasonable for local and local distance calls.
John Denver (center), in a photo from his time as president of the Maryland State Firemen’s Association. HIs two vice-presidents stand with him.
John Denver, a past president of the Maryland State Firemen’s Association, joined the ranks as a probationary member of the Singerly Fire Company in 1968. Over the decades, he served the company in many positions, and two years ago he served as in the senior leadership position with the State Association.
In this session with the Singerly Listening Station, an oral history project of the Elkton Fire Department, John shares his stories about the company. This is a brief outtake from a much longer interview, which is being archived for future projects and research purposes.
Firefighter Robert McKinney in the center of the photo.
Last month, Singerly Fire Company launched an oral history project to document the Department’s story. The project is initially focusing on recording interviews with the most senior members.
As the initial interviews are collected, we are sharing brief outtakes from the much longer sessions. In time, as the initiative advances, we will use the raw footage from the extended tapings to interpret the company’s history and produce materials to share the Singerly Story.
In the meantime, we are sharing these segments as we continue our work
Firefighter Robert McKinney shares his story, in this interview from July 12, 2014. Bob joined the company in 1969, and served in many positions. He was often the company’s top responder to alarms.
Since there is an enormous, rapidly growing body of research information available on the web, there is a need for a curated landing page, a place in the public commons on the net, to help someone digging into the past. This opportunity to help researchers is something I encounter often during public lectures and courses as I get questions about how to find helpful e-information. As a result, I beta tested some curated social media products and apps, such as Learnist and Liiist.
I have decided that the best way to point someone to valuable e-resources is to simply create a series of web pages, based on that test. Thus I have established this series, which focuses on linking to quality family and local history research resources related to the Delmarva Peninsula. This section of my website provides links to digital repositories, which have richly organized information and provide access to collections of quality resources for family and local history resources.
The landing page has general resources and the supporting pages are divided into major regions on the Peninsula. Select your region of interest and on the page you will find topical headings to direct you to rich content. The pages will concentrate on linking to high quality digital repositories of online data to help local and family history researchers.
Hopefully this helps you with your study of the past. If you have suggestions for additions or how to improve the product email me. I will continue to monitor the web and e-news outlets for developments, which should be added to the pages and add items as they come up, in order to help all of us with research in the region.
Myths and legends abound about the Cecil County Underground Railroad sites. Old houses with a secluded space set off speculation that it was a station on the Underground Railroad, despite the lack of documentation. Quilts hanging up in yards supposedly gave secret signals to escaping slaves. The Underground Railroad was presumably a vast sophisticated network that brought thousands upon thousands of people out of slavery. The traditional history of the Underground Railroad justly heralded the efforts of white men and women who helped freedom seekers, but often neglected to mention the free blacks who assisted and the freedom seekers who escaped on their own initiative.
Milt Diggins, 2nd from left, meets with members of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture
Broadly defined to include individual efforts to seek freedom as well as organized and spontaneous efforts to assist freedom seekers, the Underground Railroad played an important role in our national heritage. In the 1990s the national government recognized the need for an accurate depiction of the Underground Railroad in order to preserve that heritage. Congress charged the National Park Service with organizing and coordinating a national effort to gather and verify the accuracy of Underground Railroad stories tied to sites and trails, and to promote partnerships and educational programs to share those stories.
The National Park Service website Network to Freedom (http://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/index.htm) provides a fuller explanation of their Underground Railroad Project. The website also features a database of designated Underground Railroad sites, facilities, and programs. Teachers and organizations offering programs can find a wealth of educational resources. Another section of the website presents Underground Railroad history through essays, individual stories, research reports, a map, a timeline, and multimedia.
Cecil County did not have any officially designated UGRR sites. In April, the National Park Service, in partnership with the Maryland Department of Tourism, asked if I would select, research, and verify the UGRR connection with a few county sites or trials, and submit detailed applications in July. If the applications are approved, the National Park Service will officially designate the proposed sites as UGRR sites. I focused on transportation links for the nominations.
Location has made Cecil County a significant transportation link on the east coast. Waterways and roadways in Cecil County have carried traffic between Philadelphia and Baltimore ever since the colonial period, and in the 1830s one of the nation’s earliest railroads linked the two cities. This transportation heritage offered the best candidates for UGRR nominations. Frenchtown, the Chesapeake Bay, the Susquehanna River, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal have documented UGRR stories. I researched and wrote up applications for two obvious trails used by UGRR conductors and freedom seekers: The Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad station and steamboat ferry at Perryville, and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.
If the applications are approved, summaries of 200 words or less will be available on the Network to Freedom website, and the detailed applications on the Cecil County Underground Railroad sites are available on request through the website. The following are the summaries for the two nominations (The C&D summary is slightly larger than the one on the application):
The Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad Station and Steam Ferry Landing site in Perryville, Maryland, at the mouth of the Susquehanna River, is relevant to the resistance to slavery. The site is associated with famous and lesser-known escapes, and one kidnapping and rescue of a free Pennsylvania citizen. At the Susquehanna River, trains stopped in Havre de Grace, passengers and cars crossed on the railroad ferry, and resumed their journey from the Perryville station. Frederick Douglass escaped on this railroad in 1838, and the Crafts in 1848. Charlotte Giles and Harriet Eglin escaped from Baltimore on this railroad. Henry “Box” Brown was freighted across on the ferry in 1849. Rachel Parker was kidnapped on the last day of 1851 by Thomas McCreary, who Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists referred to as “the notorious kidnapper from Elkton.” Part of the drama of her abduction, her rescue, and her pleas for freedom unfolded at Perryville. In 1853, Aaron Digges, fleeing from a Baltimore butcher, entered the train at the Susquehanna crossing, but he fell into the hands of Constable Thomas McCreary. In 1854, Henry fled from John Stump, who owned the land at Perry Point, by taking the train out of Perryville.
The US Army Corps of Engineers currently owns and operates the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. This canal, built in 1829 by investors, provided a route for freedom seekers on steamboats, schooners, and other watercraft. Boats entered at Elk River in Cecil County, Maryland and exited at Delaware City, New Castle County, Delaware. This eliminated approximately 300 nautical miles between Baltimore and Philadelphia. This Chesapeake Bay to Delaware River route to Philadelphia was also safer for smaller watercraft than a voyage into the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay. William Still and Sydney Gay recorded escapes on steamboats and schooners passing through the canal from Baltimore, Norfolk, and Richmond. Local newspapers reported unsuccessful canal-related escapes and complained about suspicious Philadelphia oyster boats assisting escapes. When some freedom seekers fled from the lower Eastern Shore, a newspaper commented that the close watch kept on the canal would make it difficult for them to pass that way.
Part of the chart of the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays shows the Upper Peninsula and areas for the Cecil County Underground Railroad. Published by Fielding Lucas Jr., Baltimore, 1840. Source: www.oldmapsonline.org
Mounted on the wall in Sheriff John F. DeWitt’s office in the antiquated 19th-century Cecil County jail were two photographs he proudly displayed and discussed. When someone first visited the county’s top lawman in a space that was full of career-related memorabilia, he often directed the visitor’s gaze to these images of a hanging.
A ticket to the last hanging, signed by Sheriff Biddle
Those old pictures from long ago showed a young man, 23, spending his last minutes on earth in the Elkton jailhouse yard. In those days, the local lockup, the equivalent of Maryland’s Death Row at that time, was the place where felons were executed, the gruesome task falling to the local sheriff.
Jack particularly enjoyed sharing the narrative about those moments permanently frozen in time with fresh journalists, who stopped by his office for some reason or another. Impressionable teenagers, especially troubled ones, were targets too, getting the full treatment. And he would use the images while extolling his criminal justice philosophies to any curious types. He was ten steps to the right of Attila the Hun (or something along that line) was one of the things he would squeeze in. Of course, he was a strong supporter of the death penalty.
Convicted of the murder of Judge Albert Constable, John M. Simpers, spent his final days in cell two on the second floor of what had become known in the 1970s as the “DeWitt Hotel.” It was the same one occupied by Truss, Cooper, and Stout. as they awaited their fate on Cecil’s death row, years earlier.
Minutes before 10:00 a.m. on October 20, 1905, Sheriff George C. Biddle and Deputy J. Wesley McAllister entered the cell, which had been under a constant around-the-clock death watch for days, to escort the doomed man outside. Harry Moore had acted as the day watch over Simpers, while Sheriff Biddle and Deputy McAllister divided the long night hours.
In the yard, the convict ascended the gallows, with the two lawmen at his side. All the gruesome equipment was ready for this day, the one designated in the death warrant. The Scaffold had been completed and tested earlier in the week by contractor Calvin Merritt, who had built “each death machine” that had been “used in executions in Cecil County for the past thirty-five years,” the Cecil Democrat observed. The black cap used to mask the face was made by Charles Purnell, and the rope was supplied by Fisher Bros. of Philadelphia.
A photographer permanently captured this autumn scene of the hanging in a series of shots up to the point where Sheriff Biddle picked up a hatchet and cut the rope, causing the death trap to spring open and the body to shoot downward. The Washington Post described what the camera didn’t capture: “Like a flash, the body of the murderer shot downward, swayed back and forth, turned around, and then became still. In twelve minutes the jail physician pronounced Simpers dead.”
Until 1879 legal executions had been public spectacles, drawing large, frenzied crowds as people gathered to watch convicts die. But a new state law stopped this, and the last one before this took place in the yard of the jail in 1893.
The Simpers execution in 1905 was conducted in the presence of about 35 people and not more than a hundred gathered outside the granite wall while the hangman discharged his disagreeable duty. But two outsiders got a view of it, perched in the topmost branches of trees in front of the jail. “People pressed through the yard after the body was born out and viewed the gallows, but few obtained, few if any souvenirs of the gruesome event,” the Appeal wrote.
The body remained “suspended until about 10:30 when the noose was loosened and lifted and the corpse was placed in a temporary box which was borne through the jail yard gate to the waiting wagon of Undertaker Clark S. Grant of Cherry Hill, according to the Elkton Appeal. He removed it to his premises in that village and interment took place in a more corner of the county burial ground, the Potter’s Field.
Sheriff DeWitt in his office in the old jail, in the 1970s. One photo of the last hanging is on the wall behind him. This picture was taken by the library to promote reading. Notice that he is holding “Crime and Justice.” (source: Cecil County Library
A photographer was there to capture those last minutes in a series of pictures. Jack had two of them in his office, and many other local people have copies of shots showing the moments leading up to the cutting of the rope.
There are several of these around the community, including the ones in the Sheriff’s office. When examining them, look carefully for differences, as a number were snapped, recording those rapidly passing seconds. When the “black cap was drawn over his face to shut out earthly sights before the fatal plunge,” seems to be when the photographer stopped snapping photos. Or perhaps those final images were kept close and never circulated beyond the criminal justice system.
These two were given to me by the Sheriff sometime back in the 1970s. I also remember Mr. Dan Henry, an elderly deputy, saying that he was one of the kids in the tree.
At this point, I don’t know who the photographer of the hanging was, but given that we know the names of individuals in this trade in the county seat, we should be able to figure that out. I will update this once I examine the business directories.
One of a series of photos of the last execution in Cecil County. The black cap is getting ready to be pulled over the convict’s head before the rope is cut. This is a copy of the one Sheriff DeWitt had in his office
Other executions were photographed around the nation in this era, as a Google search will show.
Another of the execution photos in the sheriff’s office.
