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.