A War of 1812 reenactment scene at Caulk’s Field last year.
Program: “Archaeology of the War of 1812-Battle of Caulk’s Field.” Dr. Julie Schablitsky, Maryland State Highways Administration, Chief Archaeologist.
Abstract/Preview: Under a moon lit night on August 31, 1814, British Sir Captain Peter Parker engaged American Lieutenant Colonel Philip Reed in battle on an open field in Kent County, Maryland. After an hour of artillery and musket fire, the British, suffering heavy casualties, quit the field. Dr. Julie Schablitsky, under a National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program grant, completed a metal detector survey across 80 acres of agricultural fields to learn more about this pivotal battle. She considered military tactics, landscape, and artifact locations to reveal tro0p locations, an American encampment, and the battlefield boundary. Dr. Schablitsky will present the results of this investigation in this program.
Date:Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Time:Open for refreshments at 6:30. Speaker program begins at 7:00 pm.
Location: Historical Society of Cecil County, 135 E. Main Street, Elkton, MD
Thirty people interested in researching old houses and land records stopped by the Historical Society of Cecil County this afternoon to hear Wendy Webb and Darlene McCall carefully explain how to dig into such things.
The two professional title searchers shared their special skills and insights related to combing through deeds, mortgages, tax records, real estate documents, wills, and other public records. Conveyances, metes and bounds in deeds, and all the things that are crucial to understanding and documenting a property were things they touched on.
Taking a team approach, Wendy demonstrated how to navigate Maryland’s online property resource such as those provided for assessments and taxations and the land records. Darlene did a case study on an old Elkton property, which she research and documented. The audience had lots of questions for the two professionals.
Thank you Wendy and Darlene for an excellent workshop and for sharing your professional insights.
Darlene McCall examines the Martinent’s Map of Cecil County
William M. Singerly, the Philadelphia Record from the American Editors Series for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
As you travel around northeastern Cecil County, you notice the name all over the place. On the road heading north from the county seat (Route 213), almost making a straight line for Pennsylvania, signs let you know that you’re rolling along on Singerly Road. When the shriek of an Elkton fire engine or ambulance punctuates the calm of the day, the vehicle markings inform you that it is an emergency unit from Singerly Fire Company. If you are near Union Hospital searching for a parking spot, glance at the street signs. Singerly Avenue is what some say. Pause to pour over a county map, and you’ll notice that there is a place called Singerly.
It is not a popular name for a community or for that matter a wide spot in the road. According to the people who keep track of such things, the U. S. Geological Survey, there are only two other places named Singerly. Compare that with Elkton, Perryville Rising Sun. or Cherry Hill. There are a dozen or more of each of these across the nation. As for localities called Singerly, there is what the survey calls a “populated place” in Cecil County and another one in Virginia.
It is not even a common family name. A search of a couple of national telephone directories on the Internet leaves no question about that. There is one living somewhere out in Ohio.
The road, the street, the fire company, the “populated place,” how did this infrequently cited name become so common here? If you are a student of history or just someone with a bit of curiosity, perhaps you have wondered about this too. So let’s look at the record to see if we can explain its origin.
One day in 1880, a prosperous-looking gentleman from Philadelphia stepped off the afternoon train at Elkton. He climbed aboard a carriage for a trip to Providence, where he carefully examined an old paper mill on the Little Elk Creek. It had “gone to wreck under the weight of years,” the Cecil Whig reported. This stranger soon procured the title to the property and set out to build a modern paper mill on the site. It was not too long before a passerby on the road from Andora to Fair Hill, looking down into the “beautiful and picturesque valley,” observed a small village, in the midst of which was a busy mill, the newspaper noted.
The visitor was William M. Singerly, the editor and publisher of a popular one-cent daily newspaper, the Philadelphia Record. And he was a wealthy industrialist. He owned about a thousand houses in the city, operated a huge dairy farm there, and had major interests in manufacturing operations.
Having “pitched his tent amongst us,” the industrialist purchased a wharf and ground along the Big Elk Creek in Elkton, where he constructed a pulp mill four years later. For many years the “quiet and staid old town has been undisturbed in its slumbers by the busy hum of manufacturing industry but now there was another great Singerly boom,” the newspaper observed. He was providing work for nearly 200 men at the two factories.
His mills were about nine miles apart. When he built them, the road connecting the two factories was one of the worst in Cecil. At his own expense, he “piked” the route, covering the greater portion of it with crushed stone. After it was built the Whig said it was confident that there was one good road in the county if no more.
The late William Singerly. Publication unknown. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collection
With his enterprises growing here, he erected a handsome summer cottage for himself just a few blocks from the railroad station, over near Bow and Cathedral streets in Elkton. The handsomely furnished cottage cost about $15,000 to build, an enormous sum for that era (that is about $300,000 today).
There was some criticism of the capitalist, a few saying that he paid lower wages than other mills. This was not true for William Singerly paid all the skilled laborers $2.70 per day and the unskilled men $1.25 per day, the Whig wrote.
The last spike was driven on a new railroad across the county, the Baltimore and Ohio, in 1886. Near where the tracks cross Singerly Road, the Company built a Queen Anne Style Station and named it after the newspaper publisher. Mills along the busy Little Elk Creek hauled goods to the station for shipment to city markets.
One Sunday evening in 1898 distressing news flashed across the wires from Philadelphia to the county seat. William M. Singerly, the man who had brought a significant measure of prosperity to the county, had died suddenly of “tobacco heart.” The next day, the headquarters of the Singerly Fire Company was draped in mourning. It was a testimonial to a man who had supported the fire company with liberal donations at the time of its organization.
The street he lived on, a place tucked in alongside Route 213 near the CSX tracks, a major state highway, and the fire company that he contributed money to have helped keep the name of William Singerly well known in these parts.
The Singerly Fire Company was ready to upgrade its motorized firefighting equipment in 1927, and after checking out the options, the company purchased a Hale Type four 500 GPM pumper (shown below). This unit responded to every alarm until it was replaced in the 1950s by Oren Pumpers. This was the fourth piece of automotive equipment in the company’s inventory. In the summer of 1914, Singerly acquired a GMC truck at a cost of $2,800. In 1920 the company purchased another GMC and sold the older unit to Aberdeen.
A 1928 advertisement for Hale Fire Pump Company shows the Singerly pumper, a new Hale pumper.
Emily Kilby will be doing a completely new talk about Fair Hill on March 20, 2014 at the Fair Hill Nature Center. Discussing the sociological/economic world that existed there during the 19th Century, she will use the Nature Center property as the specific example. This new talk focuses on how people lived and made their living out of the resources available in northeast Cecil County.
If you plan to attend be sure to reserve early, as the audience size is limited. Her series of talks have been very popular, generally filling the meeting rooms to capacity.
Where: Fair Hill Nature Center, 630 Tawes Drive, Elkton, MD
More than ever, people are curious about the past that is all around them in Cecil County. Whether they are newcomers just getting acquainted with their community or those who have lived here for centuries, these inquiring types are intrigued by the area’s history and the intersection of the past with the present.
Surviving traces of earlier times — graveyards, old houses, buildings, crumbling stone fences, rusting railroad tracks, or something else — often stimulate the questions. But frequently, it is something to do with genealogy, research methods, or the narrative about a local organization. And occasionally, the discovery of a trove of family photographs or papers stored away long ago brings a question to mind. Whatever the mystery, family history riddle, or surviving relic that stimulates the desire to delve into the past, they want to know more about the past, culture, and people.
To help those mystified or curious about something, the Cecil Whig, the county’s newspaper of record, has a column in the print and online editions that lets you ask questions for the Historical Society of Cecil County to answer. Each week the volunteer researchers at Cecil County’s history and genealogy library take a current inquiry about a person or something that has intrigued a reader and provide some answers to the puzzle. There is also a weekly “recognize this” photo, where readers are asked to share their memories of an image from earlier days.
So if you are Cecil County curious, pass along the question that sparked your interest, and our local history and genealogy experts will puzzle over it for you.
The Aegis and Intelligencer, Bel Air, MD, November 1, 1889, an online digital copy of the newspaper provided by the Maryland State Archives.
At a rapid pace these days, old newspapers are being digitized and made openly available to researchers, and as I work on Cecil and Harford county projects I often find additional collections of these valuable publications. Some are completely digitized and fully text searchable, while on demand PDFs make up other groups. Either way, as we undergo a revolution in research methods, the study of the past is strengthened as we make more materials readily available on our desktops.
Previously work with these aging newspapers and the technology from another era required lengthy visits to a library or special collections institution, along with hours of eye-straining labor as the microfilm slowly scrolled along on a screen.
The Maryland State Archives has had some PDFs of state newspapers online for a number of years. But this evening I needed access to one of those limited runs, and discovered that the Archives has been busy strengthening its virtual publications resources, placing nearly 100 titles online, from around the State. The serials are not text searchable, but the renderings are clear and easy to read and are great step forward in making a larger universe of data available to a broader audience. Not all the years are online for the selected serials, but this appears to be a work in progress.
Commercial, subscription data providers are also starting to provide online newspapers from the area too. For example, GenealogyBank has the following:
Bel Air – Harford Gazette and General Advertiser – 1848 – 1852; National American – 1856; Southern Aegis – 1857.
By-the-way, more 21st century resources are in the product development pipeline. DigiStew, the blog of digital systems at the University, discusses a project the University library is working on as part of the National Digital Newspaper Project. Through August 2014, the institution will digitize 100,000 pages of historical newspaper content from the state of Maryland. “The newspapers will be made freely accessible and searchable on the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. Once optical character recognition has been applied to papers, we greatly expand the efficiency of our research, opening such access to much more data.
Early this morning, as Elkton started recovering from yet another blast of wintry weather, it appeared that the Union Hospital greeter had been outside in the freezing conditions too long.
A powerful storm dumped 14-inches of white stuff on the county seat, but before dawn it had moved on up the coast. And across the county things had remained relatively quiet as people settled in to let this big nor’easter pass.
But upon approaching the main hospital entrance soon after daybreak visitors found the snowman there to welcome them on this Friday in the middle of winter, as the sun started to break through the clouds.
Some freedom seekers fled from slavery by crossing the Delmarva Peninsula and others by fleeing from the Peninsula. Some risked running on their own and others connected with the Underground Railroad. What we know about these freedom seekers, their routes, and the help they received will be presented. The upper region of the Delmarva Peninsula will receive the most attention.
