Frenchtown, a Lost Village on the Elk River

If you drive down Frenchtown Road these days, you will find it hard to believe that a bustling village once existed where this ancient land meets the Elk River. Steamers came teeming up to its wharf, driving the narrow river into a cauldron of waves and whistling locomotives flew along its shoreline with its loads of human freight, reported the Cecil Whig more than 150 years ago.

Today the quiet county road south of Elkton makes a straight line for the river, past open fields once grazed by cattle, neat modern homes, a centuries-old burial ground and then, at its end the flourishing overgrowth of woods and vegetation.  In the thicket there, just past where the land becomes private property, the water of the Elk River emerges quickly.

The commercial point that grew up in this vicinity two centuries ago was, for decades, a prominent place.  However, it would have remained a quiet setting if it hadn’t been for its location on the western end of a short portage route across the top of Delmarva.

After the Revolutionary War, the popularity of the route for passengers and freight grew.  A regular line of vessels began sailing from Baltimore to Frenchtown.  As boats churned their way to the port, it established itself as a busy relay point on the main line of travel between Philadelphia and Baltimore.  Statesmen and the traveling public came journeying through.

Teamsters driving freight wagons and men cracking the whips on horses pulling stagecoaches gathered at water’s edge as sailing boats docked.  The large volume of traffic eventually led to the building of a turnpike across the narrow neck of the peninsula.

War of 1812

For all of its arresting history, there is none more thrilling than the high-drama that took place there during the War of 1812.  On the morning of April 29, 1813, 150 British Marines roared toward the small village.  A group of anxious defenders awaited the attack as enemy barges loaded with invaders bore down on a hastily erected, poorly equipped fort.

As cannonballs flew through spring air, the marines stormed ashore, forcing the defenders to retreat.  A fishery, warehouses, goods, and vessels lying at anchor were plundered and burned, reported the National Intelligencer.

The era for steam transportation arrived early on this shoreline.  Barely two months after the enemy attack, the first steamboat to float on the bay, the Chesapeake, started plying the route between Baltimore and the village, according to the History of Cecil County.

At the end of the 1820s, new technologies and increasing travel led to the incorporation of a pioneer railroad company, the New Castle and Frenchtown.  One of the first lines in the nation, it was first to penetrate the fields and woods of Delmarva.

Canals and better rails caused the village to fade.  With the completion in 1837 of a rail line through Elkton, one that didn’t require steamboat connections on each waterway, business on the Frenchtown route started declining.  By 1858, stagecoaches, wagons, rail cars, and steamers no longer converged here, crowding down to the old shoreline.

The trackbed had been abandoned by 1858, and the county turned it into a “common neighborhood road,” the Whig wrote.  As the affairs and tools of men changed, it dwindled down to a quiet spot, a place that by that year only had a country hotel, a house for people to use as an untroubled retreat away from the noise and dust of busy life.

With that, the remains of one of the earliest railroads in the country started disappearing.  As the Civil War tore the nation apart, carpenters tore down the old railroad depot.  It had some time ago ceased to be of any use and was “standing only as a monument of the former importance and greatness of Frenchtown,” the Cecil Whig observed in 1863.  Soon, only the road’s desolate banks and a bridge existed as evidence of the enterprise.

These are some of the highlights of a place that is saturated with the past.  Of course, there were happenings before this time.  French Acadians settled there in the years before the American Revolution, according to old records.  Patents of land at the top of the 1700s make mention of the place, but all of that is a subject for another day.

History Isn’t a Stranger at Frenchtown

Off in the thick overgrowth of bushes and trees, a place where the bright sunshine of a spring day has trouble penetrating, are the remains of some of the area’s early settlers.  Here and there a few rays of sunshine make it through the thick foliage, revealing gravestones of people who lived during great periods of America’s past.

All is quiet at Frenchtown right now.  The only thing disturbing the idyllic scene, where history is not a stranger, are faint songs of birds and the occasional drone of a car or a distant motorboat. But that once was not the case.  Angry men cried out in alarm, and cannonballs tore through the spring air, in defense of the shoreline.  The shriek of the steam whistle disturbed the tranquility of woods and fields.  And the locomotive, carrying its human freight chugged along its specially built path

Also of Interest

Relics of What Came Before: Old Family Burial Grounds; from a Window on Cecil County’s Past

$700-M Mixed-Use Project Aims to Transform Elkton, the Cecil Whig. An article about development of land south of Elkton, including Frenchtown.