Window on Cecil County's Past

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

This new local history blog, “History Surrounds You,” by Kyle Dixon takes up the subject of a largely unknown Cecil County Civil Rights Story from 1866. The Freedmen’s Bureau had assigned teachers at Elkton, Port Deposit, Rowlandsville, Cecilton & Chesapeake City, and one, Ella Jackson, challenged discrimination under the new Civil Rights Act of 1866…

One night late in 1917 or early 1918, the electrical age arrived in Cecilton. As darkness descended, current flowed through wires causing lights to flicker on in businesses and homes, while lamps on poles illuminated streets. The Cecilton Electric Light and Power Company had launched this important undertaking in July 1917 when the investors told…

Now that a blast of cold Canadian air is moving in, we started thinking about another time that an arctic blast held a tight grip on the area for an extended period. It was the winter of 1852, the coldest in many years, and the temperatures dipped far below zero each night.  This caused the…

On the long journey between Philadelphia and Baltimore in the 19th-century, travelers looked forward to arriving in Rising Sun. There, the Maryland House provided some of the finest accommodations to be found in northeastern Maryland. Recently an inquiry about a hotelier, S. C. Konigmacher, who briefly operated the Maryland House in the 1870s, had us…