Window on Cecil County's Past

Someone recently asked us about the old hotel in Warwick, and we promised to share some information about the Gillespie House.

In the 19th century, Warwick was a lively place with several merchants taking care of the trade from nearby Cecil County farms. One of those businesses was Samuel Gillespie’s Hotel. In 1868, the Middletown Transcript noted that it was a “fine, large building, capable of accommodating a larger number of persons.” His table was spread with luxuries of the season and the bar was well supplied with choice wines and liquors. In connection with the hotel, there was a half-mile racetrack.

The native of Lancaster County, PA died on Aug 6, 1889, according to his obituary in the Cecil Whig. After clerking in a store in Conowingo, he came to Warwick in 1857 and opened the hotel, which he kept until 1886. The Whig also noted in 1861, that Gillespie had just finished and was occupying his new hotel in Warwick. According to the 1858 atlas, this replaced an older hotel.

For additional photos of Samuel Gillespie’s Warwick Hotel, see this photo album on Facebook.

Cecil County once had many thriving villages, each with a cluster of homes, a few shopkeepers and tradesmen, a schoolhouse, a physician, and almost everything one needed for daily life. While most of these places continued into the 21st century as residential communities, they no longer hummed with enterprising commercial activity the way they did in the past.

We recently visited one of those places, Bay View, once a bustling village in the center of the county. It was ideally situated in an area of fine farms, abundant harvests, access to the two major railroads, and nearby mills.

The village was initially called Shelemiah, a scriptural reference in the Old Testament. The first Methodist Church, the Shelemiah Methodist Church, was built there around 1830. The present church was built in 1879 ¹

Later generations were not entirely satisfied with the ancient name of the place so they sought a new one. They finally agreed upon the name Bay View, as from elevated points in the village there was a magnificent view of the head of the Chesapeake Bay and the North East River.

A post office opened in Shelemiah on Aug. 7, 1851, and the postmaster was Elihu B. Hall. On Aug. 25, 1856, the name was changed to Bay View. The office closed in Bay View on March 31, 1903. ².

There were a number of enterprises in the village. Joseph T. Reed & Son were merchants in the community in 1893, according to the Star, They had been doing business in Bay View for 35 years. The Providence Woolen Mill owned by John F. Johnson produced a fine grade of bed blankets, horse blankets, cassimere’s, flannels, jeans, and yards. It had been erected in 1841 and had always been in the Johnson Family.³

Gilpin Falls flouring and grist mill was built in 1844 by John Patridge. He was succeeded by Coopers, who still owned the place. The mill excelled at brands of flour and feed.

Gilpin’s Rock, one of the most beautiful spots in the county, was a favorite picnic and resort spot during the summer months. A. T. Tyson was the village blacksmith and wheelwright. William Gamble’s cider mill was another attraction, especially for the thirsty types. The capacity of the mill was about 2,000 gallons per day. The gravel pit was owned by Matthew Russell

Sixty people lived in Bay View in 1882 (Peninsula Directory). The businesses included a stonemason, cooper, shoemaker, carpenters, auctioneer, millers, a music teacher, tobacconist, general store, a hotel and a blacksmith ⁴.

During January 1961, a Cecil Whig photographer visited the village and noted that the State Roads Commission has spelled the time’s name two ways. When entering the town from the south it was Bayview, while on approaching from Zion to the north it was Bay View.⁵

For Additional Photos see the Bay View Album on Facebook.

Endnotes

1. Cecil Whig, Sept. 5, 1979[↩]
2. Postal History of Maryland, the Delmarva Peninsula and the District of Columbia[↩]
3. Cecil Star, North East, Sept 9, 1893[↩]
4. Delaware State Peninsula Directory, 1881[↩]
5. “One Word, Two Words,” Cecil Whig January 19, 1961[↩]

Harford Community College is offering a talk and continuing education course on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. It involves three sessions starting on May 5, 2022, at 1:30 p.m.. The first is a classroom lecture and that is followed by two field trips to towns along the C & D Canal. The course is presented by Mike Dixon.

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal has fascinating stories to be told. Along the 14 miles of the nearly 200-year-old waterway, every town and village, every lock and bridge, and every camp spot used by Union soldiers during the Civil War contributed to the engaging narrative. Discover the role that mule-drawn barges, locks, steamboats, and changing methods of transportation played in the evolving history of the Canal and the region.

For additional information on the C & D Canal talk and registration, click this link

Blank (harford.edu)

The nation was deeply saddened and shocked when news flashed around the world that President Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Sulfur Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. The president’s body was transported by train from Georgia to Washington, D.C., for a state funeral. Afterward, the fallen leader’s body was placed aboard a Pennsylvania Railroad funeral train for the last trip to the final resting place at Hyde Park, New York.

The train rolled slowly through the countryside at 35 miles per hour, and the coaches entered Harford County as Saturday night gave way to Sunday Morning (around midnight). Despite threatening weather and occasional light rain, a spontaneous crowd had gathered along the right-of-way at stations in Harford in Cecil counties.

In Havre de Grace, people began gathering at the station around 11 p.m., the Havre de Grace Record reported, and by midnight, a large crowd waited solemnly. The Congressional Special, carrying members of Congress, officials, and security personnel, chugged by Havre de Grace at about 12:15 a.m.

The long, dark train carrying the president’s body passed the station at 12:30 a.m. As it loomed slowly out of the midnight darkness, a sudden hush came over the people. Military police, shore patrol, and ten members of the Senior Patrol of Troop 337, Boys Scouts, with the railroad police, acted as an honor guard at the Havre de Grace Station.

Chief of Police Walker, Officer Bullock, and the entire Havre de Grace Police Department, along with Mayor Lawder, were on hand. Also, a detail of regular army men from Aberdeen Proving Ground policed all streets and approaches to the railroad station and tracks.

At the Perryville Station, the crowd sadly peered into the deep gloom of the unusually dark night, looking toward the Susquehanna River. Soon the locomotive’s light pierced the night, as the train crossed the bridge. The engineer on this run was a former Perryville resident, Clemson (Cotton) Body. He piloted the train from Washington D.C. to New York, where it was switched over from Pennsylvania to the New York Central for Hyde Park, the President’s final resting place. On this route, another engineer completed the trip.

The cars passed through Elkton at 12:45 on Sunday Morning (April 15). Over 1,000 people crowding the station platform and nearby tracks “watched with bowed heads the last ride of the President over this route.” Military police were stationed on the two twin bridges in Elkton, prohibiting anyone from viewing the train from that angle. Also, on the train escorting the remains of the wartime leader was the new President, Harry S. Truman. “All lights on the train were extinguished except for the coach in which rested the body of the late president, the Cecil Whig reported. In the crowd at Elkton were many workers from Triumph.

Out of respect for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, crowds of people gathered all along the way in Harford and Cecil counties to honor the deceased executive. Before the train came the crowd waited under threatening sky and light drizzle, keeping an eye on the northbound tracks. At each station, the special slowed and after it passed they left quickly and silently.

This scene would be repeated again in June of 1968 when Senator Kennedy’s Funeral train passed along the same tracks.

Sources: Cecil Whig, April 21, 1945; Cecil Democrat, April 14, 1945; Havre de Grace Record, April 21, 1945

For additional photos, see this album on Facebook.

A new blog by Kyle Dixon, “History Surrounds You,” remembers Ellen Garrison Jackson, a freedmen’s Bureau Teacher working in the Port Deposit area.

Ellen Garrison Jackson “applied to the American Missionary Association as early as 1863 to serve as a teacher in schools for African American children in the south,” Kyle writes. “When Ellen’s application was approved, she was eventually assigned to teach in Port Deposit, Maryland. Davis states that Ellen taught two sessions of school daily along with running a night school for adults. It is also noted that she gave public speeches advocating for the rights of African Americans to an education and to raise money to pay rent for the school location, furniture, and supplies for her students. Davis also cites two incidents of resistance by members of the community including harassment by white children and the burning down of her boarding house in the middle of the night. During her tenure teaching in Port Deposit, Ellen became one of the first to openly challenge laws that were meant to protect the rights of African Americans. . . . .”

Continues on the new local history blog, “History Surrounds You” by Kyle Dixon.

For women’s history month, we are sharing this post about the first-time women served on a jury in Cecil County.

Although women gained the right to vote in 1920, they had to push for equal rights when it came to jury duty. The new voting privilege did not automatically allow them to sit on juries, the Baltimore Sun reported: “Merely because she may help decide who shall be elected sheriff, court clerk, mayor or president it does not follow that she may also decide who is guilty of murder, arson, or wife-beating.”

The first time in the history of Cecil County women were selected to serve on the county’s petit (trial) jury for the September 1947 term of the court, the Cecil Democrat reported. Alice H. Kinter, of Chesapeake City, was the first county woman to be picked for the service, in a drawing made by Judge Floyd J. Kintner on Aug. 19, 1947. Other women selected for that term included Mazie B. Boulden, Beulah E. Gorrell, and Edith L. Wilson. By the way, there were also two African-American citizens, Lewis Williams and Harry Briscoe, on the jury pool for that term.

Recently we were asked if had any information on Elkton’s first and only television station, CATV Channel 5. Here’s our response.

“Mary Maloney was worried about her lipstick, and Harry Shivery forgot to take the coffeepot off the burner, but otherwise things moved along just fine when local television came to Cecil County,” The News Journal reported on Sept. 5, 1973. Things went so well that it wasn’t a minute after the first local “telecast had become history that one of the county’s true celebrities, Rodeo Earl Smith, called in his congratulations.” Maloney, then the president of the Board of County Commissioners, “came off like an old pro on camera,” with Shivery introducing her “as the First Lady of Cecil County,” according to The News Journal.

The county’s first local television show, produced and aired by Head of Elk Productions Inc., was on the air from downtown Elkton one hour a day in black and white. But soon color was added and local programming increased.
Shivery was, according to Morning News reporter Robin Brown, a “television star; a newscaster; often a newsmaker; a scriptwriter; set designer and builder; ad salesman and producer; cameraman and crew; programmer; and handyman. He was everything a studio needed, but his versatility was a matter of necessity.”

The shows aired on channel 5 on Elkton’s first cable TV system, Madison Cablevision. Shivery got the idea after reading a local newspaper and thinking “that Elkton-area residents were missing something — a local television station,” Brown wrote in the Morning News in 1977.

Shivery’s visionary dream of bringing local television to the area came to an end in October 1977 when the broadcasts ceased.

Add Photos/Videos

For More on Elkton Televison see

The day television broadcasting came to Elkton, an album of additional photos on Cecil County History on Facebook.

When Television Came to Cecil County

With the beginning of women’s suffrage in the autumn of 1920, the ladies of Charlestown promptly exercised their full responsibilities of citizenship by voting in the national election.

And when the annual Charlestown election came around for the town on January 13, 1921, they took to the polls in large numbers, casting more than one-half the ballots, the Morning News reported on Jan. 14, 1921.

“They opposed those who had been holding office for years and named a new set of men as follows: Horace Graham, Bayard Black, Isaac Heisler, William T. Henry, W. P. Morrison. Those defeated were Harry W. McKeown, Elmer Murphy, Marion Lewis, H. T. Heverlin, and W. E. Black.

NOTE — Thanks to Jeannette Armour for sharing this piece of research she did. The subject of women’s suffrage is one of our research interests and this was a fascinating piece.

FOR MORE ON WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN CECIL COUNTY —

General Jones and the Suffragists Occupy Cecil County

In Historic Election in Rising Sun, Women Vote for the First Time in Cecil County

It’s not exactly a big family holiday unless everyone gets together to sharp for bargains, but today is Presidents’ Day.  To celebrate this occasion, we are looking back at a few times when the nation’s chief executives came our way. We’ve done this before, but since Cecil County has always been on the highway of American history, the great and the near-great, including many men who served as the nation’s leaders came traveling through. Thus in this post, we’’ continue our tradition of looking back at some visits of these men.

We’ve previously reported on our founding father, George Washington’s, frequent visits to Cecil on this holiday. By some accounts, we have noted that he was here 46 times. It’s not hard at all to pick up a local history book and see some sort of comment about the first president dining and lodging here or there in the county as he toured about.

We know, too that Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and John F. Kennedy all stopped here, along with Warren Harding and Harry Truman. In fact, Grant spent the night in Elkton in 1872.

Still, there are others, so let’s take a quick look on this Presidents’ Day at a few more: 

The seventh president of the United States 1829-1837. Andrew Jackson rode Cedi’s first little railroad, the New Castle and Frenchtown, during his administration. Though less than 18 miles long and connecting the waters of the Chesapeake with those of the Delaware, it was one of the pioneer railroads in our country.

Our eighth president, Martin Van Buren, served the nation between 1837 and 1841. In the years before his election, the man from New York visited the McLane family estate in lower Cecil, known as Bohemia.  He was there on July 21, 1829, Ernest Howard wrote in the Almanac of Cecil County. 

One of Van Buren’s letters, dated July 15. 1529. published in part in Alice Miller’s “Cecil County. Maryland: A Study in Local History” said: “I shall leave here for McLane’s on Monday morning. Will stay there a day or two and return to Washington by Cape May.”

As modern times started allowing presidents to fly quickly over northeastern Maryland, sightings of the leaders on our roads and rails decreased. But once, during the administration of our 34th president (1953-1961), Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Cold War leader, was flying north to make a speech. As his helicopter departed Washington and started its trek northward, bad weather set in.  The pilot landed at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where a motorcade stood by to transport him to the meeting.  On that foggy day. up Route 40 came the general who faced Hitler during World War II.

So as you are out and about today, you might be traveling a route that was known to our nation’s chief executives.  They often came our way.