Frank Muller retired as the county’s director of Cecil County Emergency Services in October 2007, after spending over forty years responding to car wrecks, heart attacks, barroom fights, fires, chemical accidents, and almost any type of emergency you might name. He got his start in a line of work that often stretched from dawn to…
Senator Robert Kennedy’s Funeral Train Passes Elkton
Late in the afternoon of June 8, 1968, the long-delayed funeral train carrying the body of Senator Robert F. Kennedy to Washington passed through Elkton. It was around 6 p.m. and the train was about 4-hours late. Larry Beers, a teenager, took his 8-mm home movie camera and captured the scene that hot June afternoon…
Cecil County History
On a daily basis, social media networks distribute a hefty volume of content, creating a public square that is jammed with posts. This crowded universe suggests that additional approaches are needed to help readers quickly find subjects of interest and we’ve been contemplating the best approach to this opportunity. After experimenting with alternatives we’ve decided…
A 1927 Accident Takes Life of Harford County Fire Chief
When Maryland Public Television started working on the Conowingo Dam documentary a research question came up about workers killed on the project. Since this matter hadn’t been investigated previously, a registry was compiled containing information I was able locate through archival records. On Labor Day 2015, I wrote a blog post identifying twelve fallen workers,…
Eder on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
Eder was a station on the B & O Railroad. It was located near the bridge that carries Nottingham Road over the tracks and is about one mile east of Mechanics Valley. It was named for William H. Eder, who owned a large farm nearby. The Baltimore & Ohio railroad began providing service between Baltimore…
The Great Rising Sun Train Robbery
RISING SUN, Jan 2, 1885 — A passenger train that was making its way through the gloom of a winter night was robbed outside Rising Sun 131 years ago. Admittedly, it was not a great holdup, for it only involved a watch or two and small sums of money. Nevertheless, a raid on the rails…
The Cecil County History Conversation Continues on Facebook
Since we published our first Cecil County blog post on April 13, 2007, we have kept up with evolving social media platforms, maintaining multiple channels of communications. As the digital publishing transformation continued, some outlets became more media rich, interactive, and extremely simple to use. Thus over time we found that we were publishing most…
History Lecture – “What Does Archaeology Tell Us About the Lenape?” by Dr. Jay Custer
What: History Lecture – “What Does Archaeology Tell Us About the Lenape?” by Dr. Jay Custer, Dept. of Anthropology, U of DE Where: Historical Society of Cecil County, 135 E. Main Street., Elkton, MD. Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2016 at 6:30 p.m. Sponsored by: Archeological Society of the Northern Chesapeake… FREE “Recent archaeological studies of…
When Ice and Water Overflowed the Susquehanna River, the Media Descended on Port Deposit
There are floods and there are cold snaps in Cecil County. But in Port Deposit there were “ice gorges” and there were floods. So frequent before the building of the Conowingo Dam, the ice jams periodically brought destruction to the old river town and other communities on the lower Susquehanna River. They occurred when a…
When Ice Jammed the Susquehanna River and Threatened Port Deposit Photographers Were Quick to Respond.
Port Deposit, Havre de Grace, and other communities on the lower Susquehanna River have a long record of damaging ice floes and floods. When the towns were paralyzed by the ice jams, photographers rushed to the area to capture the scene. And when picture postcards arrived at the top of the 20th century, these regular disasters became…