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On December 20, 1947, the largest fire in down­town Elkton’s history erupted in the predawn dark­ness of the bitterly cold night.  At about 5:30 that morning, the fire whistle sounded, piercing the silence of one of the longest nights of the year.

Someone ringing up the telephone operator had reported smoke seeping out of the Janis Shoe Store on Main St., one-half block from the engine house.  At that hour, Police Officer William D. Pinder was nearby, making his early morning rounds in the patrol car. He reached the scene moments later and started awakening oc­cupants of the apartments above the fire.  Then, he helped night clerks Alfred Taylor and Charles Gatchell at the Ritz and New Central Hotels.

That Saturday morning, the coldest day of the year, the temperature stood at 16° before the first ray of sun poked over the horizon. Awakened to shouts of fire and the smell of smoke, about 100 guests rushed from the endangered hotels into the frigid air, newspapers noted.  Arriving firefighters found flames “eating through the first floor” of the shoe store. With Elkton’s full force of pumpers, an Ahrens ‘Fox and Hale, strug­gling to confine the fire to the store, Chief Caspar Dunbar im­mediately ordered a second alarm. Engines from Chesa­peake City, North East and Newark, Del., rushed toward the county seat.

Elkton barber Tony Trotta recalled that morning. In 1947, he worked at the shop where he plied his trade for most of his life.  In those days, though, it was the Anthony Williams’ Barber Shop and Jewelry Store – his fa­ther-in-law’s shop.  Hearing the approaching siren, he walked a few doors up the street to see what was happening. “I got there about the time the firemen did. Some fire was coming through the first floor, but, suddenly, about the time they started to put water on it, flames roared through the building,” Trotta detailed.

Billowing smoke could be seen for miles. Before long, with ice forming on ladders, streets, power lines, and fire trucks, the blaze burst through the roof of the building, and high winds fanned it into the next-door A&P Food Store. From the grocery store, the fire spread to the Ritz Hotel and Restaurant.  It was spreading rapidly through the old brick, wood, and plaster buildings of Main Street. The whole downtown was threatened. Chief Dunbar called for a third alarm, bringing aid from Perryville, Port Deposit, Rising Sun, and Oxford, Pa., Fire apparatus and firefighters were now beginning to jam the narrow, ice-glazed street, Elkton’s principal thoroughfare.

     Despite the attempt to quell it, the conflagration continued its eastward march. Next in its path was the New Central Hotel, which also contained the New Theater, a restaurant, a liquor store and a photographer’s studio. A call for further assistance, a fourth alarm, went out on telephone lines to Wilmington, Aberdeen, Havre de Grace, Mill Creek and Christiana. 

Former Singerly Fire Company President Henry Metz, calling it “one of the worst fires” he’d seen, remembered that day. “In that area, many buildings were tied together and the roofs were all tin. The fire mushroomed under those roofs.”  Metz and a crew of men spent most of the morning manning hose lines in the building west of the shoe shop, an auto parts store. Aided by a favorable wind, they checked the conflagration’s westward spread. It wasn’t until Wilmington’s ladder truck ar­rived that the eastward march was stopped, Metz recalled. “Those buildings were mostly three-story in the front and four-story in the back. We didn’t have the ladders to get above it.”

        The Wilmington Bureau of Fire’s Engine Company 7 and Lad­der Truck Three, manned by a squad of 14 firefighters, started from the city at 9:14 a.m., the Democrat observed. By the time com­panies from those places started arriving, the fire had eaten through the wall of the New Central Hotel building and was threatening the adjoining J.J. Newberry’s Five and Ten Cent Store.  At the height of the fire, Chief Dunbar directed a force of well over 100 firemen and 25 pieces of apparatus. As more of the town engines began tapping the municipal water mains and with the town pumping at full capacity, water pressure dropped. Six pumpers were taken to the Big Elk Creek to pump water to en­gines battling the inferno.

         Flying low over midtown, taking photographs, were “new planes” from the daily papers, the Maryland News Courier ob­served.  Some of those photos show hose crews on the roof of J.J. Newberry’s and in the street. They’re pouring water into the burning New Central Hotel, trying to keep the fire from spread­ing into the five-and-dime store.  When the Wilmington squad arrived, they went into action with a 100-foot ladder truck. High above the fire on the ladder, one city firefighter shot water onto the blaze, saving J.J. Newber­ry’s and checking the eastward spread, the Baltimore Sun said.

         Shortly after 12 p.m., the fire was declared under control. “A potential disaster in the hotels,” fire officials told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “was averted by the quick action of the Elkton Patrolman and hotel employees who ran quickly from room-to-room to awaken guests.”   The fire had raged for almost seven hours and burned a “half-million dollar” hole in the center of Elkton’s business district, de­stroying some of the largest and most important structures in town and damaging others.  The buildings on the south side of Main Street destroyed by the blaze were those clustered around the foot of North Street.

It is summertime in Cecil County, and before these warm days are over, you may jump in your car to join a steady procession of people cruising toward the beach, mountains, or some other vacation spot.  Perhaps your outing will take you to quiet forests, ocean-cooled breezes, or clear mountain waters.  Whatever the case, this is the time of year when the road calls, and we steer toward some rest and relaxation.  Automobiles make our vacation trips relatively simple these days, but getting away long before President Eisenhower made “interstate” an everyday word was much more difficult.

When the first decade of the 20th century rolled around, there was no I-95, Route 40, U.S. 213, or other improved road to ease the way as people headed to getaway spots.  A railroad excursion or leisurely steamboat ride provided the means to escape to that relaxing place in the era before automobiles dominated transportation.  However, as the 1900s slipped all too fast toward World War II, good-hard surfaced roads started connecting towns, Americans began hitting the road in record numbers, and gas stations popped up.  The allure of easier car travel and the desire to find refreshing, cool waters during hot months caused many from Wilmington, Philadelphia, Chester, and Baltimore to come to Cecil County to sit under the sun, enjoy the refreshing Chesapeake Bay, and relish the scenic shoreline.

Vacation Spots

As word spread about Cecil’s first-rate beaches, day-trippers and folks on short escapes started heading this way with bathing suits, beach towels, and picnic baskets.  Holloway Beach, Port Herman, and White Crystal Beach were some sandy spots that called out to vacationers.  Though these spots could be reached by other means, the automobile had a tremendous impact on opening them up for ever-larger crowds.  As early as the Fourth of July 1916, you could see its effect on little resorts at the top of the Chesapeake.  That year, not so long before young men would march off to war in a faraway place, the Town Point Improvement Association held a grand celebration on the “beautiful Elk River at Port Herman,” the Cecil Whig reported.  Signing, sack and tub races, baseball, river trips, night illuminations, fireworks, and a phonographic concert, what more could one ask for?  Come any way you could, boat, auto, or carriage, the association urged.  When the sun set on the Chesapeake, hundreds of visitors, many in automobiles, had enjoyed the patriotic celebration, the newspaper wrote.

As vehicles helped put the roar in the 1920s, an Elkton newspaper, the Cecil Democrat, noted that if plans were carried out, Charlestown would be “one of the most popular summer spots in this section of Maryland.”  Over the past couple of years, cottages had been erected there” by city people. By 1923, Holloway Beach’s popularity was rising, according to the newspaper.  That summer, before the nation knew anything about the dark, dark days of the Great Depression, thousands of people visited the beach at one time, the Democrat observed.  The next season, the newspaper noted that J. W. Holloway had one of “the most attractive resorts to be found in the entire country.”  If you visited any day during the season, you would realize that “a miniature Coney Island, right here in our own county,” was easily accessible by auto, the reporter said.

Charlestown Becomes One of the Most Popular Destinations

Once summer was underway, a ride in a car around Cecil’s shoreline would turn up beaches crowded with day-trippers and people on short jaunts during a number of decades in the 20th century.  As sinister war clouds gathered over Europe, mobs crowded county beaches, guests rented cottages, and children merrily played at the water’s edge.  Down in Cecilton, traffic heading to the beaches has been a problem since the 1930s, Henry Mitchell recalled in an interview in the News Journal in 1991.  “Visitors to the resort area of Crystal Beach” jammed the highway through town every weekend.

Nevertheless, the times were changing.  The Chesapeake Bay Bridge between the Eastern and Western shores opened in July 1952.  This shortened “the long automobile trip around the head of the Bay” and eliminated the “uncomfortable slow trips” of the ferry to Kent Island, the State Highway Commission reported.  The John F. Kennedy Expressway (I-95) opened in 1963, providing even faster cruising to more distant destinations.  All this time, jumping in the car and heading to the Atlantic Ocean or other distant resorts was getting easier.

The Times Changed

Now that the summer season is well underway, chances are you will pile in the car and brace yourself for traffic jams on I-95, Route 50, or Delaware 1 as you head to your vacation spot.  While taking that outing, think of how hard it would have been to reach those places on the narrow, rough roads of the early 20th century.  Of course, you may have other thoughts — perhaps a Cecil County vacation spot — if you are sitting on a traffic-choked highway.

The Chesapeake pulls into the Elkton Station on April 30, for its inaugural run as a crowd waits.

In this piece, we’ll continue with a little more on the return of rush hour commuter rail service to Cecil County from 1978 to 1980.  See our earlier post for more information on this Amtrak passenger train.

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On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1978 (April 30), two normally quiet railroad stations in Cecil County buzzed with activity.  At Elkton, more than 150 people gathered, and a larger crowd of over 200 stood trackside in Perryville.  They were there to celebrate the return of commuter rail service between Philadelphia and Washington D.C. to Cecil County.  After the inaugural run, the train made weekday trips between the two cities. Stopping at Elkton at 7:52 a.m. and Perryville at 8:06.  In the evening, it was scheduled to arrive at Perryville at 5:58 p.m. and Elkton at 6:09.

The formerly quiet Perryville Amtrak Station is crowded on the morning of April 30, as the crowd waits for the commuter passenger train, the Chesapeake, to come into site.

At Elkton, Mayor Paul C. Dennis is joined by a large crowd for the return of passenger train service to the county seat.  The mayor is holding a ticket for the inaugural run.

The last time a regularly scheduled passenger train stopped at the Elkton Railroad Station was April 25, 1981. The Chesapeake, train 420, scheduled to arrive at the depot at 6:29 p.m. on its run north from Washington, D.C., completed its final run that spring evening a quarter-of-a-century ago. Passenger service had returned in 1978, when the Chesapeake, a new Amtrak train, started running between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. When it made its first run across the top of the Chesapeake on the morning of April 30, 150 over people greeted it at Elkton. Once the dignitaries disappeared after the inaugural run, a small cluster of passengers gathered along the southbound track each morning, waiting for the locomotive around the bend east of town so they could continue their journeys to Baltimore and Washington. In the evening, as people in Cecil County settled down for dinner, the train screeched to a stop at Elkton, as tired workers climbed off to head home for the night.

Since 1981 the quiet at the old depot has not been broken by the conductor shouting “All Aboard,” though many Acelas and other fast trains thunder past the old station that once served as an important commuter station in Cecil County.

   Forty years ago on Saturday, June 8, 1968, a hot sweltering day, thousands of people lined the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks in Cecil County, waiting for the funeral train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s (RKF) body to pass through on its trip to Washington, D.C. The coaches carrying the Senator’s coffin on this special run departed from New York City on time at 1 p.m. It was scheduled to arrive in the District of Columbia at 5 p.m., but because of the millions of people huddled along the line waiting to pay their respects the special was running about four hours late.

I was a teenager waiting near the Elkton Station in ’68, and as I recall it was around 6 p.m. when it passed through the county. I remember seeing the flag draped casket through the window as the passenger cars passed by as members of the Kennedy family sadly waved to those huddled along the right-of-way. An Elkton Police Officer, Marshall Purner I believe, was at the station, helping to make sure the shocked crowd stayed safe as the funeral train passed by. It was largely a scene of grief and shock here. The people were stunned, many had tear stained faces and some individuals were holding hands as it became obvious that the train was nearing the depot. Some people in the quiet, respectful crowd carried flags. All along the road at North East, Charlestown, and Perryville, as well as at bridges and others spots, residents stood quietly by to pay their respects. A photographer for the Cecil Democrat, one of our weekly papers, snapped a shot of the rear passenger platform as it passed through here. Three members of the Kennedy family on the rear platform, grief obvious on their faces, acknowledged the Elkton crowd.  The newspaper estimated that there were 2,000 people at Elkton, 1,500 at Perryville, 1,000 at North East and smaller groups at almost efvery railroad crossing in the county.

Click here to see another Cecil County photo of RFK’s funeral train passing through Eklton

Welcome to a Window on Cecil’s Past. On this blog, I will post articles on the history of our county, both old and modern, and the personal stories of its people, first and secondhand. Installments may include pieces on places, folkways, events, the built environment, people, and about any aspect of our past that catches my attention. Additionally, I may periodically contemplate current happenings, as I investigate the convergence of dynamics that are changing our corner of northeastern Maryland in the 21st century. History, after all, is a continuum and understanding what happened in the past provides context for current developments.

The county’s history has fascinated me since 1968 when I started volunteering at the Historical Society of Cecil County as a teenager. For nearly a half-century now, all of my adult life, I’ve had a wonderful time discovering historical traces in photographs, oral histories, documents, and the material culture. In addition to rummaging through old books, documents, and crumbling newspapers as a way of investigating our past I had the privilege of learning so much from many knowledgeable people during those rapidly passing decades. I hope to share some of those insights here. As I search for windows on Cecil Past and post entries, I hope you will find them interesting since the county has so many stories waiting to be told.

I’ve been blogging on local history since April 2007, so I have a number of articles in the blogosphere. To start this weblog off, I will cross post some of my columns from other sites here as I begin reflecting on yesterday in Cecil County with some original essays.

Thanks for reading this piece and feel free to post comments.