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Our news aggregator grabbed this interesting piece of regional news published by the Delaware County Times.  An HBO producer is looking for witnesses to the passage of Robert Kennedy’s Funeral Train through this region.  We are sure that many of our citizens recall that June day in 1968 as the train passed sadly through here as members of the Kennedy family acknowledged tthe people along the track paying their respects.  We wrote an earlier blog pieces on that also so our readers may find that of interest.

Witnesses to history sought – The Delaware County Daily Times : Serving Delaware County, PA(DelcoTimes.com)

Here’s the link to the video producers site:  http://www.iseverybodyalright.com/

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The Oxford Area Transit Service, a nonprofit group, is working to restore rail service between Philadelphia and Perryville on the old Philadelphia and Baltimore Central Railroad, which once served towns and villages in northwestern Cecil County. The public transportation advocates say that “with the influx of people connected to BRAC” this move would provide a much needed transportation enhancement, the Cecil Whig reported in a story earlier this week. If the service was restored the thousands of new resident expected to arrive in the area as part of the base realignment could use this corridor to ease the traffic burdens that some forecast will occur in the area.

Members of the nonprofit are planning to present their proposal to the Colora Civic Association, which is meeting Monday evening at 7:30 p.m. the Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church. This line, which runs through some of the most scenic landscape in the county, has a fascinating history. Several public transportation advocates, including Elkton  Mayor Joseph Fisona, are working to restore mass transit to various stations in the county.

David Healey, an author specializing in historical fiction and Chesapeake Bay regional history has provided us with a piece on  the passing of the author of “the Blue Max,” Jack Hunter.  He also maintains “David’s Blog” and he has allowed us to publish this piece here on Someone Noticed, as well.  Thanks David.

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by David Healey

“He took the Fokker to three thousand meters, nearly breathless with the speed of the climb. The long flat rays of the sun were deep gold, and the earth was a mosaic of sharply contrasted yellows and purples. The rich, sweet exhaust mixture coming back from the engine was, in the high coolness, an ambrosia …”

That’s a description in the 1964 novel “The Blue Max” of future German ace Bruno Stachel taking his first flight in a Fokker D-7 over the battlefields of Europe during World War I. That war, the descriptions, even the biplane are very real – it’s Stachel who is the stuff of fiction, but certainly a memorable character.

He came from the mind of Jack D. Hunter, a former Cecil County resident whose novel featuring Stachel became a 20th Century Fox movie. Local residents and visitors to Chesapeake City may be familiar with The Blue Max bed and breakfast at the corner of Bohemia Avenue and Second Street. The impressive, three-story structure was so named by Jack and Tommie Hunter, who renovated the building and opened a shop there in the 1970s. The Hunters later lived in Chesapeake Isle overlooking the water.

Sadly, Jack passed away this week in St. Augustine, Fla., where he moved around 1980. According to the Associated Press, he was 87 and had served during World War II as an espionage agent behind German lines.

I never met Jack in person, but I got to know him through phone calls and e-mails over the years, starting back when I was researching him for a series called “Cecil County’s Most Famous.” Of course, I had read his wonderful novel years before (and seen the movie starring George Peppard, James Mason and Ursula Andress – can you say hubba hubba!)

Jack had a lifelong enthusiasm for writing fiction – he continued to publish novels with major publishers into his eighties and kept a blog on writing- but his passion later in life was painting. He captured on canvas many of the dogfight scenes he imagined and that surely inspired “The Blue Max,” “The Tin Cravat,” “The Blood Order” and other novels. It almost doesn’t seem fair that such a gifted writer would also be blessed with a gift for painting. But that was Jack Hunter for you, a multi-talented individual.

The last time I talked with Jack was right around when the film “Flyboys” came out. (The film starred James Franco as an American pilot who joined the Lafayette Squadron to fight for France.) I told him it was high time for a remake of “The Blue Max” – and Jack agreed. He said there had been some talk about that happening.

Compared to “Flyboys,” his WWI story is far grittier and focused in its conflict between the ambitious Stachel and the aristocratic Wilhelm Von Klugermann. With today’s superior special effects, the original film would adapt well to a new version. If we’re lucky, we’ll see it hit the screen someday. Until then, we’ll always have “The Blue Max.” The novel is a finely told story and the film is a classic war movie.

Jack Hunter was surely one of “Cecil County’s Most Famous” and we’re lucky that some small part of his legacy lives on with the name of “The Blue Max” in Chesapeake City.

A nonprofit group in Oxford Pa is attempting to restore rail service to the old Octoraro Line through Cecil County.  Click on this link here to go to a full piece on this subject over on our public affairs blog.

In the heyday of downtown Elkton, Chief William White or one of his police officers directed Friday evening traffic at the heart of the business district, Main and North streets. Lines of automobiles, hundreds of shoppers, and more than a few strollers streaming into town from throughout Cecil County moved through that intersection. This activity, most of it converging on one corner in a few hours, required the attention of the town’s thin blue line to keep things flowing smoothly.

Central Elkton was busy on most days in the mid-twentieth century, but Friday evening it was especially so as the narrow main street – a route built for horses, coaches, and wagons – overflowed with people and vehicles. The draw: downtown’s large assortment of stores, shops, banks, car dealerships, and service stations, a movie house, restaurants, and modern supermarkets.

Just a few years before Chief White or one of his men stationed himself at that bustling corner, Main Street had served as the main thoroughfare for vehicles traveling between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Those days, luxurious vehicles, cars of lesser pretension, trucks, taxis, and buses rumbled over the tourist road, passing right through downtown.

What were the changes that occurred to the old business district over the decades? Well, 1937 would have passed almost unnoticed except for a declaration from the State Roads Commissions that it would rob Main Street of through highway traffic. More accurately, the Commission said it intended to construct a bypass, a “modern dual-lane superhighway” south of town. Increasing traffic had overtaxed the old Post Road where once Revolutionary War Troops marched and stagecoaches rumbled past. Abruptly 1937 was unlike any other recent year.

Route 40 Sidetracks Traffic from Town

Sidetracking traffic from Main Street would take profitable commerce away from Elkton establishments. Over morning coffee, at the Chamber of Commerce, and everywhere businesspeople gathered, the talk was, could downtown cope with the loss. Proprietors of the five hotels were particularly concerned. Out of sight, out of mind could have been their worry. As for the Chamber, “you could hear the members … scream,” wrote Rodney Frazer in Parts of Elkton As I Remember it in 1918.

While the community agonized over the pending loss of a great deal of traffic, an aspect of business full of character felt the crunch in 1938. A “look before you leap” law, as the Associated Press called it, put the breaks on instant marriages. For decades, couples from practically all points came to Elkton’s “busy marriage mart” by the thousands, and a full-scale industry, including marrying ministers, tourist houses, hotels, taxis, and restaurants, developed around the trade.

After the state threw the “48-hour monkey wrench in the machinery,” applying brakes on altar-bound couples, the town’s marrying parsons saw almost two-thirds of their business slip away, the Evening Sun reported. In December 1938, 277 couples visited Elkton for a quick marriage; the business had churned out 1,843 in November and 2,344 in October.

Other businesses also felt this decline: “Why the couples brought in about $20,000 a month here, and that’s a good deal for a town of this size,” the owner of the New Central Hotel told the AP.

While national newspapers riveted in on the threatened extinction of the marriage mart and some marrying parsons moved to greener pastures, bulldozers and paving equipment worked away south of town, out of the gaze of city reporters. Finally, one June morning in 1941, dignitaries gathered at the state line to dedicate the “Philadelphia Road” (Route 40).

Motorists began cruising between Baltimore and the state line on “one of the finest roadways in the country” without going into Elkton. Suddenly, the constant flow of machines on the old Post Road ended abruptly. Where once pedestrians stepped lively to cross Main Street, folks ambled now crossing without much difficulty. Accustomed to commerce from a stream of motorcars, trucks, and buses, downtown enterprises could not help but suffer. Main Street must have taken on a sad and deserted appearance to some businessmen.

But looming on the horizon were the dark, distressing days of World War II and the economic stimulus this provided to the nation’s economy. Besides, trade was sufficiently healthy to attract a chain store, J. J. Newberry Company. The Company announced it was building an outlet on Main Street in 1940. “Hundreds of shoppers” and thirty clerks were on hand when the doors opened a year later. The Chamber proudly remarked that it was an outstanding addition to the business section.

One numbingly cold December morning in 1947, a fire raged in the heart of Elkton. It broke out in a shoe store and spread uncontrolled through the A & P, Ritz and New Central hotels, the New Theater, and into Newberry’s, where it was checked. Eleven fire companies from as far away as Wilmington battled the blaze. By the time it was over, nine businesses were wiped out.

Having devastated properties along the south side of Main Street, the fire caused a reconfiguration of the business area. Newberrys wasted no time in announcing it was rebuilding. Besides, the Company required more space, so it acquired the property next to the first store, the New Central Hotel. Connelle Brothers, owners of the New Central and New Theater properties, purchased ground at the corner of North Street and Railroad Avenue to build a “modern theater” and a “shopping center.” Construction started in 1948.

Meanwhile, Ralph Aubrey Jeffers wrote The Cecil Democrat that year, presenting ideas for improving trade. North Street should be extended to Howard Street, he advised. Now was the time to do it; the fire had destroyed the properties necessary for the right-of-way. Another idea: Take advantage of doing business on two streets (Howard) instead of one. While the Chamber of Commerce examined the ideas, the Connelle’s finished stretching the business area northward; as a Wilmington reporter put it, they built “a second Main Street” on North Street.

Besides a theater, the building included an entire block of stores and a large supermarket, the “first in Cecil County.” The A & P opened on North and Railroad Ave corner a few weeks before Christmas 1948. Months later (April 1949), Mayor Henry H. Mitchell cut the ribbon, admitting the public to the Elk Theater on opening night to see Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Despite the bypass, economic upturns and downturns, a devastating fire, and wars, Elkton’s business district did just fine.

The Pull of Malls

Still, the powerful pull of malls, megastores, and shopping centers was a few years down the road. Perceptively, The Cecil Whig cautioned merchants about this in 1949: “There is a developing trend toward the establishment of large merchandising establishments in outlying districts . . . . It is not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the large merchandising concerns . . . should locate a large store on the Dual Highway near Elkton. . . . Those who come by highway would seldom, if ever, find the center of Elkton.”

Starting in the 1960s, the hearts and wallets of consumers were being wooed away from the nation’s main streets by malls, chain discounters, and massive superstores. It was all a national trend: main street businesses stagnated; main street Businesses closed; main street buildings stood vacant.

Downtown Elkton was not an anomaly to these happening. New stores opened a short distance away on South Bridge Street and along Route 40. Large shopping malls popped up in nearby Delaware. Shoppers on Elkton’s Main Street, like shoppers in most places, gradually migrated to new outlets.

Main Street’s business slowly dwindled. In Elkton, the principal onset was in the 1970s. The business district lost two anchors on Railroad Avenue (the Acme and a chain drug store) and several small businesses. Most of those who survived had gone a short distance, about a mile along Route 40, just as the paper had predicted decades earlier.

The bulk of this relocation started in the summer of 1975 when town officials joined shopping center developer David Cordish in a field near U.S. 40 and MD 213. Shovels of dirt were thrown in groundbreaking ceremonies for the Big Elk Mall. This phase would contain some 20 stores including two anchors, Developer Cordish said. He had found his anchors nearby.

Now downtown merchants had their first major competition for in county retail dollars. Despite the commotion on the highway, downtown still had one major anchor, the A & P. Surviving several years after Acme moved, it fell victim to a corporate wave of closings of unprofitable stores. It was a sad day when the store closed in 1982, shoppers said. A store that had been a mainstay of Elkton shopping for “60 years” was suddenly gone. An independent grocery store filled the void, but a fire eventually destroyed it.

The migration of smaller businesses from downtown persisted. Elkton planning consultants, surveying the central area in 1979, found “only 45 retail or wholesale establishments in the district. . . .” Their count was strict: beauty parlors, barbershops, eating places, banks, and offices were not tallied.

The commercial district was also losing its institutions and its old industrial base. Downtown lost the library when the new headquarters opened on the north edge of town in 1987. The Elkton Elementary School had closed over a decade earlier. State government offices moved out to Route 40. (The state multi-service center eventually brought some of those back). Even the Victorian-era lock-up, the county jail, abandoned downtown for a home in a cornfield outside of town. And factories that had hummed along producing motors, wire, and automobile engine parts shut down, draining workers from the old district’s economy.

As the years passed, the county seat’s new retailing area continued enlarging south of the old business district. Commercial real estate sprang up along South Bridge Street on what was once undeveloped land. Out on Route 40, shopping centers and other commercial development expanded.

When planners first studied Elkton’s old business district (1963), it was the County’s dominant retail center. Almost half of the county’s retail dollars changed hands there, the only major competition coming from downtown Newark and Wilmington shops. Business outlets along Route 40 then mainly consisted of gasoline stations, motels, and roadside restaurants serving the highway traveler. But those planners warned that aggressive steps were needed to preserve the central business district.

Loss of the Courthouse Accelerates Trend

In 2008, Main Street suffered a staggering blow when the county moved most of its employees to a new office building on the Delaware State Line. Suddenly overnight, the loss of over 200 workers, and the hundreds of people conducting business in their offices created a noticeable emptiness on the town’s streets.

Because of commercial expansion along Route 40, the town’s commercial life has shifted south toward that artery, and its retailing role has remained strong. For the centuries-old business district, it has become an arts and entertainment district.

The Story of Elkton’s old business hub is like many towns throughout the country – towns forced to adapt to changes. And, like other towns, Elkton is addressing the changing times.

Elkton’s depression era station replaced a depot that had somehow managed to outlive its usefulness in just 80 years. It was in 1855, that the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad Company decided to replace the first station, which had been built when the railroad first arrived in town in the late 1830s. The company purchased five acres of land on the Howard farm at the edge of town and proceeded to building a “handsome brick station house,” which was similar in size and appearance to the one in Chester. It included separate waiting rooms for the ladies and gentlemen, as well a ticket and telegraph office. But by the time the great depression rolled around the county seat needed a modern facility. Once the 80 year old structure was no longer of use to the railroad company it was sold and moved to Locust Point where it was used as a summer cottage.

In the middle of the Great Depression, the Pennsylvania Railroad electrified its mainline between New York and Washington and this resulted in a number of improvements in Elkton.  In the center of town, a sharp curve in the tracks created a hazard so company engineers straightened the right-away, eliminating the dangerous bend. While they were at it they also eliminated three grade crossings and built two bridges to carry traffic safely over the busy railroad, one on North Street and the other on Bridge Street. Blue Ball Road was also slated for a bridge, recalls railroad historian Mr. Richard Hall, but the owners of the land demanded such a high price the plan was dropped.  Since the goal was to do away with grade crossings the company built an improved road known as Elkton Blvd., to connect Blue Ball Road with Bridge Street.  This first phase of work was completed in 1934.

The realignment also caused a need to replace the old Elkton Railroad Station, which had somehow managed to outlive its usefulness in 80-years.  Thus in February 1935, The William M. Francis Company of Wilmington started building a new one, a one-story brick structure with a green slate roof. In a few months, the station opened to travelers. This modern facility, with all the latest conveniences, included baggage and waiting rooms, as well as an agent’s office. A pedestrian tunnel underneath the tracks connected the main station on the Philadelphia side with the tracks for southbound traffic.  It replaced a structure built-in 1855.

Once the Elkton Railroad Station opened the company had completed the extensive improvements started by the railroad more than three years earlier.  The sharp curve in the company’s tracks between North Street and the Big Elk Creek bridge has been eliminated, the tracks being about one-quarter mile further north than previously.  The total cost of improvements made here, not including electrification were estimated at over $1-million.

For a generation of residents, the Elkton Station was an important community center, the place that linked them to the larger world. Passengers arrived and departed here, the mail came and went, and the Railway Express Agency brought in the freight, while morning and evening newspapers arrived from the cities.  But as the golden age of railroading faded, regular passenger service ground slowly to a halt here by the mid-1960s. A brief attempt at providing commuter service ended in 1981. After that the station became little more than a storage shed and a workshop used by Amtrak’s right-away crews.

Today that symbol of the community’s railroad age still stands quietly alongside Amtrak’s mainline as Acela’s rush by. Mayor Joseph Fisonia has said that restoration of service to this station is important to the economic well-being of the central business district and for the region’s transportation needs.

Note:  Thanks to Mr. Richard Hall for reviewing this article and providing additional information

John Berry, Jr., an African-American living at Mt. Zoar was authorized by the Cecil County Board of Education to raise money to help build a school at the small community a mile or so outside of Conowingo late in 1871.  He successfully raised local funds and the school board matched it with the school tax that was paid by “the colored people.”   Thus a contract was awarded to J. Dixon West and the Cecil Whig wrote:  “Soon now we shall have a good house for the colored children in the 8th District and in the most central place, which will accommodate at least seventy-five children (Cecil Whig, Dec. 17, 1870).”

On February 25, 1871, a Pilot Town News Item in the Cecil Whig announced that “The colored public school in this district commenced on Monday.  They have a very fine school room in the basement of Thad Stevens Hall on the road from Conowingo to Port Deposit.”

While we can say with certainty that there was an African-American School in Conowingo by 1871, it is not the building that survives there now as the physical description does not align with the surviving structure.  For example, for the original Mt. Zoar School the article states that the contractor was to build a schoolhouse with a hall over the classroom.

When Mr. Berry died in 1879 his real estate was sold at an estate sale and the listing included:  “All the interest of said deceased in the property known as Thaddeus Stevens Hall and School House (Cecil Whig, Sept. 27, 1897)

The Maryland Historical Trust reports the “Mt. Zoar Colored School” near Conowingo opened about 1875.  But the building pictured in this post went up in 1914, the Board of School Commissioners inspecting “the new colored school house at Mt. Zoar” that October, the Whig reported.¹ The School Commissioners had allocated $2,000 for the project, but competitive bids came in and the contract was awarded to S. M. McCardell for $1,674.² This current structure was used until the start of the 1941/42 school year.

The Cecil County School Board Records provide a partial listing of some of the teachers assigned to the school: 1918-Miss Lucy D. Jackson, Conowingo; 1921 – Miss Katharine Whiteside, Conowingo; 1931 – Bessie C. Harris, Conowingo & Albert B. Wilson, Conowingo; 1932 – Bessie C. Harris & Mrs. Ada J. Berry; 1934 – Bessie C. Harris, Rowlandsville & Mrs. Ada J. Berry, Rowlandsville, 1935-36 – Mrs. Bessie C. Harris, Goldsboro, and Mrs. Ada J. Berry, Conowingo; 1939 – Mrs. Ada J. Berry, Conowingo.

It closed for the 1941-42 school year, according to the minutes of the Board of Education (5/13/1941).  After that, the children from the Mt. Zoar School were transported to the new school in Port Deposit.

For more photos of the Mt. Zoar School, click here

1. School Commissioners, Cecil Whig, October 17, 1914[↩]
2. Schools Commissioners, Cecil Whig, August 1, 1914[↩]