Window on Cecil County's Past

As darkness settled on Elkton one Friday night in 1978, Union Hospital’s Emergency Department buzzed with activity.  The attending doctor, Peter Stavrakis, efficiently directed care while nurses performed procedures, monitors beeped, and anxious families paced hallways.  When the physician started examining a new arrival, the belligerent man struck him on the head with a metal…

Just days before Cecil County residents celebrated the arrival of a New Year, welcoming in 1886, an aging social reformer, orator, and writer, traveled to Cecil County to lecture on “The Self-Made Man.”  On his way to Rising Sun where the town’s literary society was sponsoring the program, the abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, who’d escaped…

A circa 1910 postcard showing the Turkey Point Lighthouse.

One of the leaders of America’s abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland in 1817. As a young house servant, he was taught to read and write. The brutality he experienced as a slave eventually led him to escape North and in 1845 he published his autobiography, Narrative of the…

Members of Singerly Fire Company stand alongside their apparatus at the new fire station on North Street in downtown Elkton, a few years after operations moved up the street from the originally headquarters.   We’ll see if we can get some of the older members of the organizaton to identify these individuals.

Singerly Fire Companyu of Elkton, MD. will present its twenty-fourth annual Paper American Show on Saturday, January 29, 2011, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.  The show will feature over thirty dealers from several states who are offering for sale antique books, postcards, newspapers, art prints, advertising & regional collectibles, photographs, and general ephemera. Singerly Fire Hall…

It’s always exciting to obtain fresh perspectives and insights on the county’s past, something that is often provided when scholars take a serious look at our history.  These thorough investigations, requiring months of intensive digging into original documents and a critical evaluation of the sources, are valuable as they focus on specific research questions and use…

From ABC 2 News, Baltimore NORTH EAST, Md. – Atop a hill just outside North East, Maryland lays civil war veteran James D. Alexander.  He fought in the famed battles of Gettysburg and Antietam; he was wounded and lost a leg in the skirmish at Spotsylvania Court House. But while he was laid to rest…

As a year filled with exciting events celebrating the 150th anniversary of Rising Sun draws to a close, a new book about the event and the community’s past just came off the press.  This commemorative volume, Rising Sun, MD 150th Anniversary, is loaded with informative articles that chronicle the town’s past and features stories about…