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The Society will host a reception on June 2 to honor Dr. Davy McCall, the generous donor of the Gerry Collection, an important new group of research materials pertaining to Cecil County.  The large collection, created between 1801 and 1931, contains original manuscripts related to the Civil War, Port Deposit, the Susquehanna, and the family during the time period.  The manuscripts include letters, journals, Civil War diaries and company record books, legal documents, African-American materials, and ephemera.

The reception formally opening this resource to the public takes place at the Historical Society at 135 E. Main Street., Elkton on June 2, 2012, at 2:00 p.m.  Light refreshments will be served.

A professional archivist, Jenifer Dolde, catalogued the collection and a 39 page, Google searchable, finding aid is available online.  Click here for an earlier blog post on the donation and click here to access the finding aid.

John Kilsavage, a rare book and manuscript dealer, in Havre de Grace said:  “Due to the large amount of information it [the collection] offers up from both ledgers and personal documents, researchers will be able to gain an amazing understanding of both personal life prior to the Civil War and after the war ends.  The consistency of the letters, being from one family and the vastness of the collection makes it one of a kind.”

The manuscripts specialist, talking specifically about the letters, added, “The content was amazing, both from personal observation to military logistics.  Letters discussed the loss of life to infection and illness, discussions and mentioning of both Stonewall Jack and Robert E. Lee, and actions in the field and kindness and bravery of the men.   The letters were extensive in their description and understanding of the complexity of war. ”

Please join the Society on June 2nd, as we honor the generous donor of this valuable records group and formally introduce the research materials to the public.

The recent discussions about how to improve the delivery of ambulance service in Cecil County brought to mind an earlier time when a similar examination was going on.  Back in the early 1980s the fire companies struggled to find enough volunteers to answer the heavy volume of calls that came in each day in the growing county.Frank Muller, who was a deputy sheriff, came up with an innovative idea, a Deputy-Medic program.  Muller, a certified law enforcement officer and advanced life support instructor, had just returned from a four-year stint in Ocean City, where an ALS program has been established.  Deputies were on the road 24/7 so why not have the officers certified as EMS providers support the fire company, he reasoned.

Everyone thought this was a great idea as it supported the existing volunteer system, so one day in 1983 medics started prowling the county, but they weren’t in ALS units.  These medics in patrol cars answered police calls, served court papers, transported prisoners, and responded as support units to the fire companies.  That preliminary step in what would evolve into the modern Emergency Medical Services system we have today, helped a lot with pre-hospital care.

But this approach of having law enforcement personnel help deliver ambulance service wasn’t new.  The North East Police Department, jump-started the idea thirty years earlier.  Concerned about the availability of an ambulance to transport sick or injured people to the hospital, the town council arranged to buy a combination police cruiser-ambulance.  Soon on a day in June 1953, Officer Otis Ferguson started patrolling the town, keeping an eye on things.  But if there was a medical emergency, he was right there too, providing transport to Union Hospital.  Three years later, the North East Volunteer Fire Company launched an ambulance service (1956).

Since most people looking up a telephone number these days go directly to the mass media of the 21st century Google or some other search engine, these once essential directories are in danger of becoming a fading memory.  Verizon is eliminating routine delivery of white pages, although printing of yellow pages will continue.  We will grant Verizon that these handy information sources are quickly becoming obsolete for modern day usage, as it’s been a long time since we paged through the pages.  But they were once essential, the annual publications having recurring daily use and kept in a readily accessible place.  The telephone directories were published for over 100 years in the mid-Atlantic, according to Verizon spokesperson Stephanie Hodge.  “From the very beginning someone always wanted to advertise in them.”  The early ones were thin affairs but they spoke volumes about what was happening in every community.

Early in 1900, as the Diamond State Phone Company was busy installing instruments in Elkton, it published the first list of subscribers in Cecil County.  It was a simple register of individuals who were on the network.  Most were clustered in Elkton (70) and North East (12), but there were “talking machines” in Childs, Bay View, Providence, Singerly, and Chesapeake City

With each passing year the content grew.  By 1908, as the Delmarva Peninsula was becoming a “network of wires” and the instrument was coming more and more into general use, the Cecil Farmers Telephone Company in Rising Sun issued an eight page publication.  By 1945, the Chesapeake and Potomac publication contained 48 pages and included yellow pages with headings that are recognizable today.

Once, decades ago, while do an investigation I talked with the “Clerk of the Phone Directories” at Verizon’s headquarters in Richmond, VA.  The clerk, apparently a holdover from the regulated era of telephony, managed the library for the directories that had been published by the telecommunications giant.  It’s hard to say as companies have streamlined and reorganized to create efficiencies what happened to that position and all those valuable sources of information.

Here are a few tips for deriving dating clues old phone numbers.  Into the 1950s, telephone numbers were listed by naming the exchange and the three or four digits for each connection.  The Cecil Theatre was thus listed as Cecilton 3551.  However, starting in the mid-1950s the exchanges switched to various names, which involved dialing two letters and five numbers so, for example, Keetley Motors in Port Deposit was DRake 5-5481 in 1956.   Port Deposit was the first exchange switched to this modern dialing convention, but others soon followed.  Elkton’s exchange was known as EXport 8.  By 1965, the Bell Network eliminated exchange names since it was a source of dialing errors.  So the number in 1965 for Union Hospital became 398-4000, replacing EXport 8-4000.

The Historical Society of Cecil County maintains a large collections of these telephone directories to help patrons with research questions.  Such ordinary, everyday things as a phonebook, when published annually for over one-hundred years can be a particularly valuable tool for historical and genealogical research.

Also See

Phone Books: Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

As Elkton shook off the effects of the Great Depression and World War II a tremendous amount of growth occurred in the community.  To keep up with the demands of the expanding place, new housing developments sprouting up in farm fields at the edge of town, the Singerly Fire Company launched a series of advances.  One of those involved replacing two obsolete pieces of firefighting equipment with a 1952 Oren, a “heavy duty pumper,” capable of pumping 750 gallons of water a minute.  It also had a booster tank carrying three hundred gallons of water.  Costing almost $17,000, the Oren went in service in January 1952.  The department also had a modern fire station on North Street for the unit, which had opened in 1950.  It is this unit that recently returned home to Singerly.

From the Cecil Whig YouTube Channel

A 60 year old firetruck has returned home at last to Singerly Fire Company.
Officials at the Elkton fire company welcomed the 1951 Oren fire truck during a ceremony last weekend.  Charles Richard Fox, a former Oren firetruck salesman who purchased the truck from Singerly for $500 20 years ago, fully restored it. He has now returned it back to Singerly, which plans to exhibit it in its museum.

The Octoraro Branch Railroad once connected Rising Sun, Colora, Rowlandsville, Liberty Grove, and other northwestern Cecil County communities with the outside world.  But in the automobile-age, passenger service declined rapidly and after World War II freight service slowly disappeared.

Although it’s been a long time since the lonesome locomotive whistle echoed through these valleys and hills, plenty of relics from the heyday of the railroad still exist for anyone casually exploring the abandoned right-of-way.  One sunny day this week, I snapped this shot of the old iron bridge where it crosses Basin Run and the tracks enter the deep cut outside of Rowlandsville.  Along the way, plenty of other artifacts from the golden era of the train caught our attention, including railroad stations, depots signs, several bridges and other remnants.

The Octoraro Branch, with its natural beauty, rolling hills, and gentle streams, would make an ideal rails to trails route for public enjoyment.

One of the speakers at this year at this year’s Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Conference is a local historian, Milt Diggins.  The conference, which takes place in Cambridge on June 1^st and 2^nd, will feature a talk by the author and retired educator.  Milt will present original research into the story of Thomas McCreary, a kidnapper and slave-catcher operating out of Elkton, Maryland, who was active a few years before and after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  This history offers a view of slave hunting and dealing in the Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware areas and its political ramifications.  It tells of McCreary’s most famous kidnapping, that of the Parker sisters in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and the mention of McCreary in the treason trial of Castner Hanway, a Pennsylvanian who refused to help a posse search for a runaway slave.

For those who enjoy the natural beauty of publicly owned lands and the cultural resources found on some of the properties in Cecil County, there’s some great new out of the Historic Elk Landing Foundation (HELF) this morning.   HELF announced that the 62 acres of land purchased by the Town of Elkton through grants from the Maryland Public Open Space program is now open to the public for strolling and picnicking from sun up to sundown year round.  The nearly fifteen year old nonprofit overseeing the restoration of the historic structures, caring for the grounds, and providing interpretive programming says it is “proud and pleased” to make this announcement as it provides stewardship for “a lot of land “ that “is some of the most picturesque ground in the Elkton area.”

The nonprofit has been charged by the Town of Elkton with preserving and presenting this valuable public resource to the community since 1999.  It is accomplishing its mission through living history interpretations, regular programs that draw on the site history, and the restoration of the cultural resources, according to the organization’s website.  The property’s owner, the municipality, transferred responsible for the restoration, management and operation of the site as a living history museum to the nonprofit.  At the time that was done, the town stated that it was creating a public-private partnership that freed the municipality of the responsibility for bearing the cost of the maintenance, upkeep and operation of the site, as a nonprofit would be able run fundraising events and seek corporate sponsors.

Click here to read the full announcement.

While historians learn about the past in many ways, one of the most exciting can be reading letters that were penned long ago.  You never know what these private communications from another age are going to reveal or where they’re going to come from.  Sometimes these old sheets of paper have been stashed away in a long sealed attic trunk or shoe box, placed there by relatives who passed away generations ago.  But a few times they’ve been trapped or secretly stashed behind walls for some reason, and revealed by construction or some other disturbance.  Whatever the case these private exchanges are often illuminating as they put a different sort of light on times gone by.

As the War of 1812 Bicentennial draws near I’ve been examining aging, unpublished manuscripts from that era and came across one from Captain Andrew Hall of the 30^th Maryland regiment.  This document had been in the custody of a relative Thomas E. Hall, who generously shared a copy.

Nearly two hundred years ago on November 13, 1813, the Captain penned this letter to his brother-in law David Wherry and sister in Brandy Camp, Ohio.  He began by talking about the family in Cecil County and his aging mother.  But he informed the recipients that these were dangerous time here as the waters of the Chesapeake were polluted with the English and they had been here since last spring blockading all the seaport towns.  Merchandise of all sorts, especially sugar and salt, was very high as a consequence.   After describing the prices of basic commodities, the officer noted that flour wasn’t selling briskly because of the blockading of the rivers by the enemy.

Despite the blockade, the trade from Baltimore to Elkton and then by wagon to Christiana was brisk.  The demand for wagons exceeded anything Hall had seen and they were charging as high as a half a dollar per barrel for flour and 15 pence per hundred for hauling from Elkton to Christiana as there was no water passage.

Hall also told his brother-in-law about the British invasion on the Upper Chesapeake.  On the 26th of April (1813), the militia had orders to march, but not being armed things were in a confused state.  On the 28th the British landed at Frenchtown and set it on fire, which  “consumed  it to ashes.”  Elkton would have been destroyed if it they’d not been “cowed” by the shot of one cannon ball from a small battery thrown up at the landing.  It had a “good effect on them” which prompted them to retreat by the time the militia was pretty well collected with arms.  The invaders fell down the river till the fourth of May when they attempted a landing at havre de Grace under a heavy cannonading on both sides.  As they had the greatest force they succeeded in landing and setting fire to the town and several small vessels.  From there the British went to Cecil Furnance, which was also burnt to ashes.

Hall was born in Cecil County in 1768 and died in 1846. He married Rosannah Mahaffey on February 6, 1789.  He noted in his communications written in the middle of the war, that he had eleven children living and three dead (seven sons and four daughters).

The history that unfolds in aging letters provides glimpses into a very personal past as they reveal what others thought and observed.  There’s great value in these aging letters for they show what someone though and generally was passing along in a private exchange between two people.  That’s far different from say a newspaper, where an editor wrote for a large general audience and numerous factors affected the coverage provided by those sources.

Be sure to check out your attic for documents like this one that should be saved.  And I’ll share some other private, unpublished communications from this war in the weeks ahead.   I’ll also do a little more digging on Capt. Hall and see what else we can develop on this militiaman’s history.  Crowd sourcing can be helpful in these situations too so feel free to share added information.

Finally thanks to Thomas for sharing this letter so we know what was on the mind of one milita officer from northeastern Cecil County during those trying months, a dangerous times when the war came to our rivers and shores on the Chesapeake.