As the composer of Elvis Presley’s first single, ‘That’s All Right’—and a dozen other hits—Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup has been called the ‘Father of Rock ’n’ Roll.’ So why did the blues legend spend the last years of his life living in poverty on Virginia’s Eastern Shore?
By Joe Sugarman
There are no historic markers along Virginia’s Route 13 noting that the “Father of Rock ’n’ Roll” lived and died here. No signs point toward his gravesite in Franktown, Va., which, until the late 1990s—25 years after his death in 1974—wasn’t even marked by a headstone.
Ask many in this close-knit region if they’ve heard of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and they’ll shake their heads. If you had asked that same question 40 years ago, many people—at least in the white community—would have responded that Crudup was the tall, soft-spoken crew leader who oversaw migrant laborers picking vegetables on the Nottingham Brothers farm. But a blues legend who wrote Elvis Presley’s first-ever hit and whose work was covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Elton John? Not a chance.
The truth is, unless you’re a fan of the blues, you’ve probably never heard of Arthur Crudup either. (And likely don’t realize his name is pronounced “Crood-up” not “Crud-up.”) Like many African-American blues musicians of the 1930s and ’40s, he was cheated out of royalties for his compositions while music publishers, record companies, and the white artists who covered his music got rich.
But there’s something even sadder about Crudup’s story. No other blues artist can boast such a strong connection to Presley, who recorded two other Crudup songs—“My Baby Left Me” and “So Glad You’re Mine.” And, at the end of his life, Crudup, who was born into poverty in Forest, Miss., came tantalizingly close to finally receiving those back royalties, only to be denied at the last second by a calculating music publishing executive.
Arthur Crudup may have been dubbed a king, but he spent all his days living as a pauper.
FINDING TRACES OF ARTHUR CRUDUP on the back roads of Northampton County is like following a trail that isn’t marked. Crudup, his wife, Annie, and their five children lived in a variety of glorified shacks, none of which remain standing.
The Malibu Inn, Crudup’s legendary juke joint, where the bluesman and his musical sons, Jonas, James, and George, held court and made and sold moonshine is long gone.
So I’ve enlisted a local, Billy Sturgis, to take me around. Sturgis, 53, may be Crudup’s biggest fan on the Shore. A blues fanatic who co-hosts a radio show every Saturday night on WESR-FM, he produced an album featuring the three Crudup brothers in 2000. The record, “Franktown Blues,” features Big Boy’s sons performing their father’s hits as well as original tunes. Sturgis, also a devotee of the Blues Brothers movies, owns one of the “Blues mobiles” from the second film, but it has a flat tire, so we step into his slate-colored Mercedes instead.
We drive past old farms and small, tidy houses, a pond where Crudup, an avid fisherman, likely cast his line. We end up at the bluesman’s gravesite in the Bethel Baptist Cemetery, overlooking the Nottingham farm, where he toiled for so many years as an overseer. Next to the gray tombstone someone has left a vase of fake flowers, now cracked and faded by the weather. Sturgis tells me that the family was too poor to afford a headstone when Crudup died and his gravesite lay unmarked for years. “This is where we assume he’s buried,” says Sturgis. “Jonas [Crudup’s third son] said there was a tree nearby,” he says, motioning toward a stump.
Crudup’s wife, who died in 1963, lies in an unmarked grave, as does his mother, Minnie. Crudup’s youngest son, James, who gained unwanted notoriety for robbing a local bank and then using the Crudups’ van—emblazoned with the family name—as his getaway car, lies nearby. “When James sang, he sounded just like his father,” comments Sturgis, as we stand by his headstone.
Sturgis tells me at Big Boy’s funeral someone delivered a huge bouquet of flowers—much more grand than anyone in town could have afforded. “Some people say Elvis sent it,” says Sturgis, though he hasn’t been able to verify it.
A combine rumbles past on the road as we climb back into Sturgis’ car, Muddy Waters singing about love gone bad on the satellite radio. We drive a few miles to the site of the Malibu Inn in a thick woods a half-mile west of Route 13. Sturgis has been here before, but as we fight our way through the heavily overgrown underbrush, he can’t seem to find the building’s remains. “Wait, wait, here it is,” he suddenly shouts, pointing to one of four concrete blocks outlining the building’s frame. “You got the cornerstone of rock ’n’ roll right here,” he says. “Look at it!”
We poke around at what’s left of the structure—pieces of old wood, carpet fragments, a screen window frame, and a few rusted bus seats likely used as chairs.
According to Prechelle Ames, Crudup’s granddaughter, and the only blood relative still living on the Eastern Shore, the Malibu was demolished in 1982. “I remember being in there as a little girl,” says Ames, Jonas’ daughter, now 39, who works as the operations manager for Maryland Food Bank Eastern Shore in Salisbury. “There was always somebody there. They would gamble, roll dice, play cards. It was a typical juke joint—open for business 24/7.”
But now there’s nothing left but scraps. Still, to Billy Sturgis, this is hallowed ground. “This is the real deal here,” he says, as we stand surveying the ruins. “I get choked up being here. I really do.”
Sturgis bends over to unearth a couple of rusty, 1970s-era Ballantine beer cans. “He wrote his songs and Elvis took them,” he says of Crudup. “Elvis became famous and Arthur went into obscurity. Somebody was gettin’ that money and he knew it. It’s a tragic story. … But that’s why they call it the blues.”
BY THE TIME ARTHUR CRUDUP permanently moved his family to Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the 1950s, he was already fed up with the music business. Crudup, who didn’t learn to play guitar until he was 32, had moved to Chicago in the early 1940s to pursue a career in music. As the story goes, he was living beneath the city’s elevated train tracks in a cardboard box when music producer Lester Melrose, who recorded many of Chicago’s famous bluesmen, heard him playing on the street. Melrose invited him to perform at a party thrown by legendary blues guitarist Tampa Red, and after some initial stage fright, Crudup impressed Melrose enough that he signed him to a contract. Crudup, then 36, recorded his first song for Bluebird records, “If I Get Lucky,” in 1941.
Crudup stood 6-feet 5-inches tall (thus, the “Big Boy” label), but he sang in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. His unique sound, clever lyrics, and preference for electric guitar at a time when most blues artists were still playing acoustic attracted listeners and his records sold well. Some, most notably, “Rock Me Mama,” “Mean Ole Frisco,” “Keep Your Arms Around Me,” and “So Glad You’re Mine,” were legitimate hits and would later be recorded by other musicians who made them famous.
According to Dick Waterman, the longtime manager of blues legends from Buddy Guy to Bonnie Raitt, and who served as Crudup’s booking agent during the blues revival of the late 1960s, “There probably wasn’t a week during the decade of the 1970s when there wasn’t an Arthur Crudup song on the Billboard Top 200 albums,” he says, rambling off a list of seminal rock albums from Clapton’s “Slow Hand” (“Mean Old Frisco”) to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Cosmo’s Factory” (“My Baby Left Me.”)
But Crudup, who was paid an upfront fee for his recordings and signed away the copyrights to Melrose (as was typical of blues musicians at the time), only collected scant payments over the years.
“I never knew how much progress I was makin’ because Melrose didn’t tell me,” Crudup said in a 1973 documentary, “Born into the Blues,” filmed in Franktown. “I could hear my songs on the jukebox all through the South. I had a disc jockey tell me, ‘Now, Arthur, you’re supposed to be in good shape. Your records are selling second from the top.’”
In 1946, Crudup recorded “That’s All Right, Mama,” which Elvis covered and released in 1954 as “That’s All Right.” Crudup received credit for writing the smash, which established Presley as a star, but nothing from the singer other than an award plaque, which subsequently burned in a house fire. But Presley, who recorded many other black musicians’ songs, never denied Crudup’s influence. As he told the Charlotte Observer in 1956: “Down in Tupelo, Miss., I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel what old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”
Still, Crudup clearly could have used some help. After his second wife was murdered in Chicago, he returned to farm work and odd jobs in Mississippi and later moved to Florida where he established a business shuttling migrant workers from Florida north to Franktown. He only went back to Chicago to fulfill his contractual obligations with Melrose. As he said in the documentary, “Every time I’d go make a record, I’d ask Lester, ‘How many records would a man have to make that he didn’t have to work on the farm?’”
DURING HIS FRANKTOWN YEARS, Crudup settled into a routine of farm work and selling moonshine to earn a living, putting his musical past behind him. “Pop Crudup was quite a distinguished maker and seller of moonshine,” says Ames. “People traveled from deep within the states to get his [hooch].”
He would perform occasionally at the Do-Drop Inn (now Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn), a licensed juke joint in the area that remains meticulously maintained by its owner, Jane Cabarrus, whose father built it by hand in 1967. These days, the club, likely the last juke joint on the Eastern Shore, is mainly used as a catering hall and community center, but its long bar, pool table, and worn wooden dance floor speak to a time when it hosted musical acts from around the region.
Cabarrus, a teenager in the late 1960s, remembers Crudup acting as the club’s doorman, collecting the $3 cover charge from patrons who would come every Saturday night to drink Schlitz beers and watch his sons play R&B hits. Known as The Malibus, the Crudup brothers band enjoyed decent success and toured throughout the East Coast, but were particularly big on the Eastern Shore. “What Elvis was to the world, is what the Crudup boys were to the community,” says Cabarrus, who notes that both father and sons attracted their share of female admirers. “Every Saturday night they’d pack the house.”
Cabarrus remembers Crudup sometimes opening for his sons or joining them on stage, but she says most of the people came to see The Malibus and weren’t really aware of the blues legend in their midst. “I don’t think people knew how big he was, how great he was,” says Cabarrus. “He didn’t really become great until after he died. … A lot of us weren’t knowledgeable about how great the blues were at that time,” as Motown and rhythm and blues were the dominant sounds in the black community.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Crudup did record and tour again as part of the blues revival that swept the country. Lloyd Kellum, a local pharmacist and a close associate of Crudup’s, recalls the bluesman showing up at his drugstore with a beat-up guitar case and an “awful-looking fur coat.” “I asked him where he was going and he said, ‘I’m on my way to England to play for the queen.’ I thought, ‘This man is crazy.’” (Crudup did tour England and then Australia, but he never performed for Queen Elizabeth.) Later, Kellum read an article in a Virginia newspaper that referred to Crudup as the Father of Rock ’n’ Roll. “I just couldn’t believe we had this guy living in our town,” he says.
“I had no idea about who he was—and maybe he liked it that way. But after that, we made him a little celebrity around the store.”
CRUDUP HAD WORKED with various lawyers over the years to help him recoup some of the monies he was owed. Finally, in 1973, the American Guild of Authors and Composers reached an agreement with the publishing house that held the rights to his work.
Waterman met Crudup, then 68 and frail, and his children in New York City to sign documents guaranteeing an initial payment of $60,000, plus future royalties. But as Waterman describes it, things didn’t go as planned. “Arthur signed the documents and then we waited 15, 20 minutes for the attorney to come back. He was very shaken and said, ‘[My boss] won’t sign it. He said he feels this gives away more in settlement than you could win in litigation.’
“Arthur looked at me and I said, ‘They’re not going to pay you, Arthur. You’re going to have to sue them. We’re going to have sue Lester Melrose’s widow.’ But the idea of a black man suing an elderly white woman—it just wasn’t gonna happen.”
Waterman says it was a blustery day in Manhattan as the group left the office building and huddled outside. “Them people got their ways of keeping folks like me from getting any money,” Waterman says Crudup told him. “Naked I come into this world and naked I shall leave it. It just ain’t meant to be.”
Resigned to his fate, Crudup returned to Franktown with his children. In March of 1974, he was opening for Bonnie Raitt in Washington, D.C., when he suffered a stroke and died several weeks later at a hospital in Nassawadox, Va.
Disgusted at how things turned out, Waterman met with another lawyer, Ina Meibach, in New York City on his way home from Crudup’s funeral. Eventually, Waterman and Meibach did succeed in securing royalties for the estate, which Waterman estimates has been paid more than $3 million since.
Unfortunately, only a daughter, also named Preshell but spelled differently, and Crudup’s son George, who has battled drugs most of his life, remain alive. It’s unclear as to who’s receiving the money, as the Crudup children each had several marriages between them. All Waterman knows is that a Florida attorney oversees payments to the estate.
The tragedy that “Big Boy” Crudup was never properly compensated for his accomplishments is not lost on his granddaughter, Prechelle. “When I’d listen to his music, I used to be really, really angry and upset cause of what he should have gotten—what it would have meant for our family, what we rightfully deserved,” says Ames, whose 18-year-old son, Pharez, hopes to work in the music industry someday. “But I long got past that. I started to enjoy it and just listen.”
For Sturgis and Cabarrus, they’d like to see the county or state or somebody establish an official Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup Blues Trail, with historic markers on Route 13 and signs pointing the way toward his grave and Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn, where Cabarrus hopes to once again host live music regularly.
“Franktown people need to know about what happened here,” says Sturgis. “Big Boy didn’t necessarily create the music here, but this is where he lived and died. They should know that this is where the Father of Rock ’n’ Roll called home.”
In the early 20th century, amusement parks on the Chesapeake promised sand, surf, and wild rides aplenty.
By Mary K. Zajac
For city dwellers in the early half of the last century, urban amusement parks offered cheap escapism. For a small fee and a streetcar ride across town, you could test your luck on the midway, kiss your sweetheart in the Tunnel of Love, or scream away your troubles as you rode the Racer Dip. Shore parks, however, did one better. Clustered along the eastern and western beaches of the Chesapeake Bay and along Maryland’s rivers, these parks boasted the same amusements as their urban brethren, plus the lure of surf and sand. From Mago Vista and Chesapeake Beach on the western shore to Tolchester in Kent County, parks and resorts offered a day (or week) of blissful respite from urban life.
Tolchester Beach Amusement Park, Kent County
Tolchester opened in 1877, and like other parks of the Victorian era, saw most of its visitors in the first 40 years of its existence. Getting there was half the fun. “Bring your lunch and forget your troubles out on the deep blue sea. Wonderful tonic and salt air for the babies,” read the slogan for the Tolchester Steamboat Co.
Up through the early 1950s, it remained a popular excursion for families and church groups. A 1948 Sun article, for example, heralded the opening of the new park season with the arrival of 1,800 Catholic schoolchildren from Baltimore in “rented swimsuits … eating hot dogs and soda.”
The park offered a plethora of amusements from goat-drawn carts to Shoot the Chute, on which patrons whooshed down a steep track in a boat-shaped car. Rides cost anywhere between 10 and 20 cents, and the entrance fee in the 1950s was a quarter. A sign, now on display in the Tolchester Revisited Museum, requests patrons to “Pay as you leave,” a remnant, says museum curator Bill Betts, of “an era when people trusted each other,” and offered small tokens of kindness—like the engineer of the Little Jumbo train who, as a service to young mothers, heated baby bottles on the train’s engine.
Betts’ museum is full of memorabilia that captures the spirit of Tolchester. Most interesting might be the advertisement urging folks to “Go see the whale at Tolchester,” which was an enormous carcass of a whale whose mouth cavity was carpeted and used for ladies’ teas and men’s oyster dinners, according to Betts.
Although it received state subsidies, Tolchester was “always in debt,” says Betts, and the park often failed to turn a profit. It was finally purchased for development in 1962.
Mago Vista, Anne Arundel County
Mago Vista (its name meant “large view”) was one of several parks on Anne Arundel County’s waterways. But unlike Kurtz’s Beach on the Patapsco or Crystal Beach on the Magothy, Mago Vista disallowed alcohol and gambling, making it a valued spot for families and church groups. “A small Disneyland on the Magothy,” one publication called it.
“We always went to Mago Vista,” remembers Harry Greenwell, a member of the Ann Arrundell County Historical Society’s board of trustees. “Every year St. Alban’s had a picnic there.”
Founded by builder Robert Benson, Mago Vista began offering amusements, in addition to the beach, picnic, and dance pavilion, in 1938. There was a carousel, pint-sized burros for children to ride, kiddie jeeps, the Toonerville Trolley, and the loping Little Dipper roller coaster, whose U-shaped track extended 120 feet over the water.
One of the park’s oddest attractions was its alligator pond, a concrete pool surrounded by an 8-foot fence, that held the live alligators that Robert Benson’s son, Harold, bought from the Baltimore Zoo.
In an article in The Capital, Harold Benson’s son, Robert, recalls: “When his pair of gators reached 7 feet long, becoming more difficult to manage, Dad would go up there [to Baltimore] and trade them in for a smaller set.” While the alligators were an exciting attraction for children who would catch fish and toss them to the gators, the reptiles took on a more sinister role during the ’60s when Harold Benson would leash a pair to intimidate groups who protested Mago Vista’s “Gentiles Only. No Negroes” policy. The park eventually became known as the Mago Vista Beach Club Association and sold park passes only to those who passed inspection by the clerk at the front gate.
In 1964, Harold Benson sold the park’s 14 acres to developers for $300,000.
Brown’s Grove, Anne Arundel County
Brown’s Grove, near Rock Creek, was one of the earliest waterfront amusement parks run by and for African-Americans. Founded by Capt. George Brown, who would become the first African-American member of the Master Mates and Pilots Association, the park billed itself as “the black community’s first, last, and only seaside resort with its own to-and-from excursion boat,” according to
a Sun article.
Folks would take Brown’s boat, the Starlight, from the pier at the foot of Broadway in Fells Point to the park where they could ride the merry-go-round, brave the Racer Dip, try their luck on the midway, or enjoy a simple picnic. Brown’s Grove flourished during the ’20s, but was consumed by fire in 1938.
Betterton Beach, Kent County
By the time it was incorporated in 1906, Betterton was already a bustling resort complete with hotels, restaurants and saloons, and amusements. Its location, just above the confluence of the Sassafras, Elk, and Susquehanna rivers, made it easy to reach by steamers, like the Bay Belle. Folks of means came from Philadelphia, as well as day trippers from Baltimore and Annapolis, to spend time away from the city.
There was plenty to occupy them. A postcard of the beach shows the long amusement pier that held a bowling alley and a room of pocket billiards stretching over the water. In the foreground, men in suits with hats and women in white dresses and parasols or thigh-length bathing suits rest on the beach. Other amusements included a skating rink, bumper cars, and a movie house.
Dot Wright, now a volunteer at the Historical Society of Kent County, worked as a waitress at the Betterton Restaurant in the mid-1940s when she was 13. She recalls Saturday night dance parties held in an open-air dance hall above the bowling alley and the three colorful cooks at the restaurant who whipped up everything from fried chicken to “the most marvelous dinner rolls and pies.” She says that someone at the restaurant would call daily to find out how many people were on the excursion line from Baltimore. “Somehow they always knew how many dinners to prepare.”
By the 1950s, the beach resort had begun to fade due to the opening of the Bay Bridge, which took visitors farther afield to Ocean City. Today, it’s a public beach.
Chesapeake Beach, Calvert County
Chesapeake Beach embodied the classic “if you build it, they will come” philosophy of development. Otto Mears, a Russian immigrant and railroad tycoon living in Colorado, moved east in 1895 specifically with the idea of opening a resort on the shores of the Chesapeake and a railroad connecting it to Washington, D.C.
The first train arrived at the new resort on June 9, 1900, and by the 1920s, more than 10,000 people would make the trip on busy weekends.
The resort’s 1,600-foot boardwalk was built over the water and boasted a crab house, casino, dance hall, bowling alley, band shell, and the Great Derby, an enormous roller coaster that ran over the water.
Many day trippers took the 50-cent, 60-minute express train from D.C., but overnight guests could stay at the luxurious Belvedere Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in 1923. “It was a terrible fire,” recalls resident Elizabeth Stinnett in one of the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum’s oral history interviews, “and we didn’t have no fire engines—no equipment at all. So they had a bucket brigade and everybody in Chesapeake Beach had a bucket and carried water, trying to put that fire out.”
The hotel was never rebuilt, and the park was relaunched as Seaside Park in 1930. By 1935, facing competition from the automobile and the continuing Great Depression, the railroad stopped operating. The park, under new management, was reinvented again in the 1940s as the Chesapeake Beach Amusement Park, which finally closed in 1972. Eventually the land was developed into what is now Chesapeake Station, a residential community. The only vestiges of Otto Mears’ dream can be found at the railway museum, located, fittingly, at 4155 Mears Ave.
Carr’s and Sparrow’s Beaches, Anne Arundel County
Opened in 1927 by two African-American sisters, Elizabeth Carr Smith and Florence Carr Sparrow, Carr’s and Sparrow’s Beaches, just south of Annapolis, were the destination spots for African-Americans from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., looking for sun, surf, music, and amusements.
The beaches drew huge crowds for church outings, bay swimming, beauty contests, rides, and music concerts featuring popular entertainers, from Billy “Mr. B” Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie to James Brown and Chuck Berry. (Similar concerts were held at Henry’s Beach in Somerset County.) During the late 1950s, it was not unusual for up to 50,000 people to drive to Carr’s and Sparrow’s and pay $1.50 before noon and $2 after for a 3 o’clock Sunday performance.
“Carr’s was kind of groovy, be-boppy,” says National Public Radio commentator, writer, and social activist Daphne Muse. “Beaches were a real novel concept for us [urban African-Americans]. You saw them [beaches] in magazines. You saw them in National Geographic.” But to actually go to a beach, she explains, was a tremendous coup.
Life in the city could be tough, but the beach, says Muse, “was a place you could go and be relieved of the burdens and everyday droning of black life.” Frank Zappa played the final concert at Carr’s Beach in 1974. The property was sold in the 1980s and today is the site of Chesapeake Harbour Condominiums.
Public Landing, Worcester County
A merry-go-round and a bowling alley. A movie theater and a penny arcade. Billiards, food concessions, and a whopper of a waterslide, taller than any other buildings around it. This was Public Landing, a resort community just 6 miles east of Snow Hill. Located on Chincoteague Bay, Public Landing was an amusement hub from the late 19th century through the 1930s. But unlike other parks that were built along water, Public Landing was built on a series of piers and boardwalks that extended out over the water. One can imagine that the combination of sea spray and bay breezes acted as natural air conditioning on the walks, making the boast, “where it’s always cool,” in a 1929 advertisement for the park, a truthful claim. The park was destroyed by hurricane in 1933.
Colonial Beach, Va.
Colonial Beach on Virginia’s Northern Neck has a long history of luring tourists by steamer to its shores, earning the nickname of the “Playground on the Potomac” not long after its inception, in the late 19th century. Initially, the attractions were bathing beaches, fishing, and boating. Later, in the 1950s, Washingtonians and Baltimoreans flocked to the town’s casinos which were located on a pier that extended into the Maryland waters of the Potomac where gambling was legal. But throughout the years, there were always amusements. “Back in ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, there was a skating rink,” remembers Jackie Shinn of her hometown, “and dance parlors like the Joyland and Palm Gardens where, in earlier years, folks would dress up to hear the big bands play.”
But if 20th-century Colonial Beach had its charms, it also had its fair share of challenges. Its location—on a flood plain surrounded on three sides by water—made it a ripe target for hurricanes (one in 1933 wiped out the Ferris wheel), and a tremendous fire in the 1960s destroyed the town’s casinos. Still, some of its Victorian buildings—like the Alexander Graham Bell House—remain. And the town has since reinvented itself by offering off-track riverboat gambling as well as the beach and easy access to historical sites, like the birthplace of James Monroe. It’s also adopted golf carts as a legal means of transportation throughout its streets.
Still, says Shinn, the town’s amusement park holds the most memories. “There was a beautiful merry-go-round, a whip, a bullet [which] looked like a capsule on top and bottom. It rotated and made you very sick.” She adds that she knows this from experience.
Freelance writer Mary K. Zajac loves a good amusement park.
Former students recall days spent in a historic one-room schoolhouse.
By Mary K. Zajac Photographs by Kirsten Beckerman
For more than 50 years, African-Americans attended Kent County’s one-room Worton Point Colored School No. 2. Now a museum, its former students share memories of attending a segregated school without indoor plumbing or running water. Despite these shortcomings, many say it was the best education they ever received.
They sit around the long table in the old Worton Point Colored School No. 2, seven African-American men and women in their 60s and 70s, all but one former students of the school, sharing memories of their days here in the 1940s and ’50s. They mention teachers: Miss Taylor, Miss Turner, Miss Gibbs. They remember games of dodgeball and Annie-over, collecting ferns in the woods, a pot of soup set to simmer for lunch on the potbelly stove at the front of the room.
The green-shuttered, whitewashed building, built in 1890, looks much the same on the inside as it did when they were students, they say, except for the wood paneling that covers the walls, the drop ceiling, and the thick gold carpet on the floor. The old red water pump and green enamel sink where students washed out their cups are still in the same corner. The Lord’s Prayer is written across the blackboard in the front of the room, and you can still catch a glimpse of the coal house from the side window.
The large cross studded with small light bulbs hanging above the blackboard is a remnant of when the schoolhouse was used as a church in the 1980s while the current church, St. George Methodist, was being rebuilt nearby, they explain.
“I wasn’t fortunate enough to go to a one-room school,” says Kay Somerville, the one adult in the group who was not a student here. “But I’ve been in this community for 50-some years, and this building is very important to me because we have used it so spiritually.
“Every community needs a church,” she continues, “’cause when you go past it, even if you don’t attend, you know it’s there. The school is the same way.
All those precious memories.”
Under the guiding hand of Somerville’s daughter, the gospel and jazz singer Karen Somerville, the precious memories of the individuals who attended this more-than-a-century-old Kent County school are being preserved. Renamed the African American Schoolhouse Museum, the small building has become a repository for the Eastern Shore’s largest collection of 19th-century photographs of African-American life, according to Karen Somerville. It also contains pictures and memorabilia from the community, whose 70 members are direct descendants of freed slaves from the nearby Gale plantation, now known as Andelot Farm.
Somerville didn’t intend to establish a museum when in 1994 she put out a call for community photographs and artifacts to display at the former schoolhouse. Her effort was part of a fundraiser for the completion of St. George Methodist Church next door. She intended to dismantle the schoolhouse exhibit after the fundraiser, “but there was such a great following, I ended up having to leave the exhibit up,” she explains. “I never thought it would be long term, but once I realized what I really had, then I just decided that’s exactly what we need to do is turn this into a museum.”
Somerville has since added to the schoolhouse’s historical collection, and recently received a grant that will allow her to compile a CD of stories and songs gathered from people who attended school or church here.
Visiting the museum is a view into a community both typical and yet utterly particular of the African-American experience on the Eastern Shore. Inside, church pews and school desks speak to the building’s varied uses over the years. (After the school closed in 1958, the church purchased the building from the Kent County Department of Education and used it variously as a meeting hall, community center, and church.) On side displays, an old wooden ironing board and iron, a soup ladle, and a handsaw sit side by side with school report cards and diplomas. There are photos everywhere—of a female student, dated 1956, in a neat white blouse, her hair pulled back; of the Heavenly Echoes, a gospel group who performed in the five-county region. A hand-lettered sign sitting atop a glass case filled with undocumented photos, reads “Who are they?” and Karen Somerville admits that “occasionally people come in and recognize photos of their families.”
But it’s the stories of the former students who lived and learned in Worton Point that create a true portrait of life in this small community north of Chestertown. Says Somerville, matter-of-factly: “Before Hillary Clinton went to Africa and learned it takes a village, we lived that way.”
One-room schoolhouses were an integral part of the African-American educational experience on the Eastern Shore in the late-19th through the mid-20th century, and although exact numbers are tricky to pin down, records show that in 1927, there were 16 “colored public schools” in Kent County in historically African-American communities like Morgnec and Melitota. Although they eventually became part of the Kent County school system, schools like the one at Worton Point were established by the community, not by the local government. “The establishment did not really see a need to see us educated, but our ancestors did,” says Airlee Johnson, a retired real estate professional who attended Worton Point in the 1950s. “And I’m sure they worked very hard to have the schools in their own community. [It was] a grass-roots movement.”
The Worton Point school served grades 1-6, after which students attended the all-black Garnett High School in Chestertown.
Karen Somerville’s father, Alton Somerville, was a student at Worton Point in the 1940s. A tall man with an engaging grin, he recalls how hearing the ringing of the morning bell on his way to school was his cue to start running. He’d fly down the wooded path dressed in knickerbockers and long stockings, passing through the old cemetery, past the boys and girls outhouses behind the school, to be in his seat at 9 o’clock in time to join the teacher and 30 or so students in singing “My Country ’tis of Thee” or another devotional song.
If you were late, remembers Joan Freeman, another former student, the teacher would recite a rhyme—“Dollar, dollar, 10 o’clock scholar/You used to come at 9 o’clock, but now you come at noon”—and you wouldn’t be allowed to come to school until noon the next day, a shameful situation you wouldn’t want to have to explain to your parents.
Absences from school were a matter of course; young men were needed to work the fields during harvest, and young women, like Irene Moore, the museum’s chief docent, whose mother kept her home every Monday to help with laundry, had household chores to attend to. But lateness was never tolerated, as an old report card in the museum suggests. Alice Phillips may have missed 51½ days in 1925, but she was never late, and her grades were more than acceptable.
School days, the former students remember, had a comfortable routine. The recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the latter said outside while one of the boys raised the flag to the top of the flagpole if the weather was good, followed devotions. Roll call came next, and then the teacher opened the windows for some fresh air to accompany morning calisthenics before lessons began.
The students in each grade sat together, explains Alton Somerville, and while the teacher worked with the handful of students who made up each grade (there were eight in his class), students in other grades would read their lessons or study. Basic subjects like reading, arithmetic, and spelling were taught by grade, but sciences and social studies were taught to the whole school. This arrangement “worked well,” says Airlee Johnson, “because we could learn from each other.”
Interspersed with lessons were music and art appreciation. Emma Lively, a classmate of Alton Somerville, remembers a song the class learned to help them identify ferns in the woods.
Johnson, who attended the school a decade after Lively, recalls the teachers the county sent in for weekly art lessons. “They were the only white teachers we had,” she says. “We did finger painting and clay, but we used real clay. None of that Play-Doh. And that was fun because we had a chance to play in real dirt.”
Discipline was ingrained from the start. “There was none of that speaking out, you know,” says Alton Somerville. “You had to ask. You had to raise your hand to say something.”
Punishments ranged from being hit with a switch that students would fetch themselves to standing in the corner to a ruler’s smack across the palm of the hand. Irene Moore recalls having to write “I must be quiet in class” over and over on the chalkboard—but only once. “I learned my lesson,” she says. Greater transgressions might result in a letter home to parents or the ultimate shaming, a public dressing down in church on Sunday by your teacher.
“There was an awful lot of order in class,” says Johnson. “Teachers didn’t lose control. Because then your parents would hear about it and that was the worst thing.”
School discipline involved physical work as well. Students were assigned chores, from cleaning the outhouses to bringing in coal from the coal house to keep the potbelly stove burning to patrolling the cloakroom to make sure all the coats and hats were hung up tidily. “We had to sweep the floors every day,” recalls Rudolph Black, a student at the school in the 1950s.
“The only thing we didn’t do was cut the grass.”
Local students often went home for lunch, but during the winter months, explains Lively, each child could bring their own bowl to have a hot lunch that the teacher had simmering on the coal stove at the front of the room. It was beans or soup, often thick with hominy, and its smell filled the classroom. When the coal stove was replaced with gas heat, Rudolph Black remembers, the teacher would go to Irene Moore’s family home next door to cook the soup.
The school day ended at 3 o’clock when students heard the bus rumbling over the hill and lined up orderly for dismissal. “You’d go home, and you couldn’t wait until the next day to go back,” says Alton Somerville. “School was fun to me [then].”
What is most clear in conversations with former students is that in the era of segregation, this closed, intimate community of the classroom was a boon, rather than a burden. “A lot of children now, they don’t like to go to school, but it was like family here,” says Moore. “We sang together, we learned together, we prayed together. And I just loved it.”
School was less engaging, the former students say, when they moved on to Garnett High School. Despite the fact that it was a treat to go to a school with running water and indoor bathrooms, larger classes and less attention from teachers made students treasure their one-room schoolhouse experience even more. “I learned more out here than I learned at other schools,” says Alton Somerville, echoing what other former students express. “When [the teacher] taught you something here, you knew it.”
“When I see other classmates that were here, it’s like [seeing] an old family member,” says Airlee Johnson with a smile. “It’s like our own little private school—with a lot of love.”
Freelance writer Mary K. Zajac wrote about historic Chesapeake cookbooks in our last issue.
During the midtwentieth century, Southern Maryland boasted flashy casinos, leggy showgirls, and three times as many slot machines as Nevada. With the popularity of instant bingo and a legislature open to the return of slots, what can we learn from the past?
By Stephen Janis
During the mid-twentieth century, Southern Maryland boasted flashy casinos, leggy showgirls, and three times as many slot machines as Nevada. How did the gaming industry ever get so big in Maryland? And what lessons can we learn from its demise?
The October 1958 cover of Man’s Conquest magazine, a pulp monthly that during its 1950s prime existed as an adrenalized alternative to Playboy, features a rugged, straight-jawed man battling a peeved-looking black bear with nothing more than a knife, plaid shirt, and gritted teeth. In the uppermost corner, a sleek cover line touts a tawdry article within: “Route 301! The eyewitness story of the wide-open Sin Strip.”
Inside, the writer, one B.W. Von Block, reports: “Charles County seems to offer everything—women, dope, and gambling. To me, it looked drunken, dirty, and debauched.” Claiming to have been “hustled” by nine prostitutes during his stay at a motel in Waldorf, Block sums up the 301 stretch called “Felony Row” as “one of the most tawdry, squalid, and sordid stretches of the autobahn I’ve ever seen.”
Block’s story offers a glimpse—albeit a sensationalized one—of the history of Southern Maryland between 1949 and 1968, when nearly 5,000 legal slot machines operated around the clock in Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary’s counties. Back then, Route 301 buzzed with nightlife, roadside glitz, and rural glamour, so much so that it was known as “Little Vegas.”
It’s a scene that seems unimaginable cruising down 301 through Waldorf today. KFC, Hardee’s, McDonald’s, a shopping plaza, and then, a few more miles down the road, another KFC, McDonald’s, and a shopping plaza. Apparently, Sin Strip has morphed into strip malls.
There is little along Route 301 to remind visitors of Southern Maryland’s slots heyday. The worn-down Cadillac Motel’s once glittering Las Vegas-like sign now towers dejectedly above the roadway, just north of Waldorf. And the Bel Alton Motel south of La Plata, still harbors guests, albeit fewer big spenders than it once did. The Wigwam, more recently Walls Bakery, known for its foot-long éclairs, once sported dancing girls, fine food, and performances by Doris Day and Brenda Lee.
There’s also the Waldorf Motel, smack-dab in the middle of an eight-lane bend in the road, right where it has stood for more than fifty years. Like its neighboring artifacts, it doesn’t look unkempt, just out of place—like an outdated tuxedo in the midst of Friday casual.
The Waldorf appears to be a transient rest stop now, not a destination resort. Visitors are not allowed in the lobby; a side-door entrance leads into a booth covered with thick glass. Communication is garbled through a scratchy squawk box. The motel itself looks empty, with hardly a car parked in front of the horseshoe-shaped split-level buildings that surround the restaurant, now called Annapolis Seafood.
No one on the current staff worked at the Waldorf during the slots era, but if you proceed a few miles down the road, and past a tiny but well-kept cemetery and small brick church, you’ll find seventy-four-year-old William “Whitey” Roberts.
Roberts not only ran the motel and restaurant during its prime in the 1960s, but also fixed and maintained the slot machines. Now retired, he is a classic old-timer, dressed neatly in plaid shirt and suspenders and sporting a healthy head of white hair and a resigned, I’ve-seen-it-all smile.
Roberts’ home is a practical storehouse of both social history and technical information on slot machines and gambling in Southern Maryland. The centerpiece is the collection of antique machines and other gaming devices he accumulated during his tenure at the Waldorf. In short order, he produces Lottery Luck, a Boggle-meets-poker dice game that paid out on a five-card roll; a Jackpot! Bingo board, which looks like a cross between a paper Keno game and an Advent calendar; and the ancient innards of a Callie machine, a mechanical penny roulette wheel that Roberts claims was the progenitor of the slot machine.
Needless to say, Roberts has a more positive take on gambling in Maryland than Man’s Conquest. “It was a nice, honest, family-owned business,” he recalls. “Great cheap food, live entertainment, plus the old slots machines were random—you could win three jackpots in a row if you knew how to work them. Bright lights, lot of celebrities like Guy Lombardo, Paul Newman, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton. They all performed on the Strip. I met them, just regular people enjoying themselves.”
Legalized slots come up often these days, given former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s efforts and now Maryland Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller’s desire to bring slot-machine proceeds to bear on the state’s financial ills, but few people on the pro-slots side ever mention Maryland’s history with the devices. Perhaps that’s because in 1963, despite filling up the coffers of Southern Maryland counties to the tune of $1.6 million a year and bringing an economic boom to an undeveloped rural section of the state, then-Gov. J. Millard Tawes introduced legislation to abolish them. This was mostly in response to pressure from citizens groups and local politicians, including an Anne Arundel County citizens committee that claimed slots were “destroying the fabric of family and economic life in our county.” And despite charges of bribery and intimidation—what former gubernatorial press secretary Frank DeFilippo described in a Jan. 21, 2003, Sun editorial as “slots barons skulking the hallways and glaring down from galleries” of the statehouse—Tawes prevailed, signing a law on the last day of the 1963 legislative session that phased out slots over a five-year period. Thus, on July 1, 1968, the last slot machines were hauled out of the bars, taverns, and roadhouses of Southern Maryland, piled onto trucks, and hauled away to be destroyed.
Slot machines reportedly made their first appearance in the Old Line State on amusement piers on the Potomac River in Southern Maryland—and, according to some accounts, on the river itself. According to historian Susan Hickey Shaffer’s 1983 thesis “Slot Machines in Charles County, Maryland 1910-1968,” former state Sen. Paul J. Bailey (St. Mary’s County) recalled seeing slot machines on a boat called the Macalister, which cruised the Potomac around 1921. The machines were advertised as being “for amusement only,” much like the poker machines found in many Bay-area drinking establishments today.
In 1935, state Del. Phillip J. Wallace of Baltimore introduced an amendment to the Maryland constitution calling for a statewide referendum to repeal the legislature’s previous ban on legal lotteries. In 1936, reflecting on the realities of then-rampant illegal gambling, prominent state Sen. J. Allan Coad, a Democrat from St. Mary’s County, added his voice to the debate in the Nov. 10 edition of the News-Post: “I don’t suppose there is a county in the state where the slot machine is not illegal, and yet everywhere you go you find these slot machines operating.” And despite promises from legislators that the proceeds would be used to lower taxes and fund public works, the referendum was soundly defeated on Nov. 8, 1938, by a margin of 123,365 to 90,805.
Yet the legalization of slots in the Southern Maryland counties was planted in the seeds of Coad’s failure. The state lottery referendum bill also allowed for the licensing of “coin play” machines that paid “merchandise premiums” instead of cash to help counties suffering from the dual affliction of the Great Depression and a sagging market for tobacco to raise money—namely, Southern Maryland. As the machines spread, formal legalization of cash-pay slot machines was accomplished through a parochial Maryland legislative tradition know as “local option,” which allowed county delegations to propose and approve legislation that affected their districts only. Thus, special “local option” bills were introduced in the Maryland legislature to legalize slot machines over a period of roughly six years: Anne Arundel County in 1943, Calvert County in 1948, St. Mary’s County in 1947, and finally Charles County, the home of the Sin Strip, in 1949.
What followed, former Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, Jr. recalls, was the type of free-for-all that typified the state’s past experiments with gambling.
“I remember driving down 301 to Richmond with my family in the Fifties,” says Curran, seventy-six. “I pulled into a gas station and saw people lined up out the door. But they weren’t waiting to buy gas or a soda—they were in line to play a slot machine.”
State Sen. Roy P. Dyson, fifty-nine, who grew up in Great Mills in St. Mary’s County and now represents an area that includes parts of St. Mary’s, Charles, and Calvert counties, recalls a similar sort of saturation: “The only place I never saw them was in churches—otherwise they were pretty much everywhere else.”
George E. Snyder, a former House delegate, state senator, and state Senate Democratic majority leader from 1971 to ’74 from Hagerstown, concurs. “Slots were everywhere, in gas stations, barbershops, in restaurants,” he says. “That’s how Southern Maryland earned the nickname Little Vegas.
Ironically, Maryland wasn’t so little in relation to Las Vegas, according to a Sun feature that ran on Feb. 24, 1963. Titled “Gold in the Spinning Wheels,” Maryland had three times as many federally licensed gambling devices as Nevada. In addition, according to the report of the state Slot Machine Committee, a special investigation of gambling completed that year, the four counties’ total take was $24 million in 1963 alone. In comparison, the highest-grossing casino in Nevada, the Harrah’s Club in Lake Tahoe, garnered a total take of $20 million in 1961, according to Gambler’s Money: The New Force in American Life, a 1965 book by Wallace Turner. But Harrah’s had at its disposal higher stakes games such as blackjack and craps, thus Southern Maryland and its slots were keeping pace, albeit a nickel at a time.
“I grew up with slots,” remembers current Maryland House Speaker Michael E. Busch, the primary political opponent to slots legislation in the State House. “When I was nine, my grandfather would take me to the corner grocery store and give me a couple nickels to play the one-armed bandits. Anne Arundel County was wall-to-wall slot machines,” he says. “Slot machines were like the Wal-Mart of entertainment—once they moved into town, they took over everything.”
Yet as the slots spread, so did the growing specter of outside influence and power, as Busch remembers. Once slots were established, the powerful slot-machine distributors, a consortium of eleven state-licensed manufacturers who built and sold the machines in Maryland, and the multitude of small-business owners who had slots on their premises, all had reason to make sure that the business stayed healthy and unopposed.
“The slots people ran the county governments,” Busch says. “They used to fill up A&P bags with $20 bills and hand out ‘walking around money’ during election time, so the slots people were firmly in control.”
Local opposition to the ubiquity and ostensible corrupting influence of slots found an outlet in 1960, when a special grand jury in Anne Arundel County convened to investigate slot machines and organized crime. It rendered a clear verdict, calling the state of gambling in Anne Arundel “sordid and disgraceful.” Heightening the controversy was a special Anne Arundel citizens committee that reported that slots “have a stranglehold on the basic economic life of Anne Arundel County” and charged, among other things, that a combination of “organized crime” and “youth gambling” had “tragic consequences for the people of our county—upsetting healthy patterns of family life.”
Curran recalls two key factors that drove the anti-slots issue even further in 1963: the gubernatorial candidacy of little-known Del. David Hume in 1962 and the growing consensus among Southern Maryland residents that slots were not worth the cost and the trouble. “The people from the areas where slots were most pervasive felt that slots were hurting the locals, from homemakers to regular wage earners,” Curran says. “Lots of people were losing money for the profit of a few.”
In the 1962 Democratic primary race for governor, Hume ran a single-issue anti-slots campaign and garnered a healthy 101,319 votes vs. incumbent Gov. Tawes. Hume’s position forced the governor to announce in Sept-ember 1962, just prior to the general election, which Tawes won, that slots were “no longer a local issue,” and thus “should be abolished.” On Feb. 18, 1963, Tawes introduced legislation to abolish all legal slots, stating his intention to “preserve and promote the fine reputation of Maryland.”
For three months during the 1963 legislative session, a battle raged between gambling lobbyists and anti-slots legislators. Charges of intimidation and bribery were rampant, including an accusation by the legendary Clarence M. Mitchell III, then a young state delegate representing Baltimore City, that “a man wearing dark glasses” accosted him in the lobby of the state capitol and offered him $300 not to vote on the issue. When the anti-slots bill failed to pass the House in its first vote, accusations of “slots barons” tampering with politicians became so fevered that a special Anne Arundel County grand jury was convened to take testimony from Mitchell. The investigation ended without any indictments, but The Sun commented in an editorial that the controversy “almost ripped the House of Delegates asunder.”
Finally, on March 29, 1963, the second to last day of the session, Tawes got his way. Curran was one of twenty-five senators to vote through the final version of the bill, mandating a freeze on all new slots licenses and a phase-out of the machines by July 1, 1968.
“I trusted the judgment of the people from Southern Maryland,” Curran says now. “They believed slots were draining the economy of Southern Maryland, that it was destroying families. Gambling was not a good thing to them.”
But George Howard Post, a retired schoolteacher from Charles County, whose family owned a restaurant with slot machines in Benedict, Md., remembers it differently. Although the larger casinos on the 301 strip may have had problems, he says most of the smaller mom-‘n’-pop operations were wholesome places. “I thought it was positive for our family,” says Post, whose parents enjoyed a fifty-fifty split in revenue with slot machine supplier Southern Maryland Novelty. “I never saw anything shady in the slightest. People were very businesslike and professional. It was a draw to get people from Washington down there. They would have something to eat. Maybe go for a swim and play a few slots. It wasn’t like people continuously pumping nickels mindlessly into the machines.”
But Post does recall the mayhem among locals the day slots were outlawed. “We were at the southern end of the county, and I remember Southern Maryland Novelty coming down and turning off the machines at each place and a crowd of people were one step ahead of them trying to get in one last game.”
As to the argument that gambling hurt the people of Charles County, Whitey Roberts contends, “All the talk about people losing their shirts was untrue. We used mostly nickel machines, because dimes were made of silver then, too thin and jammed the machine. And believe me, in the Fifties a nickel wasn’t much.”
Organized crime, Roberts says, was “nonexistent.” In fact, he pins the downfall of slots on a different sort of organization. “There are two mobs now—the Democrats and Republicans,” he says. “They got rid of slots here in ’68 so they could clear the way for their own racket—the numbers racket, the state lottery.”
The state legislature authorized the creation of a state lottery in 1972, and it began business under the auspices of the Maryland State Lottery Agency in 1973. “They take [gambling] away from the little guy, then get the money for the state,” he says. “That’s a real racket.”
Roberts’ perspective on gambling is not a matter of pro and con; for him, gambling is just a part of life, and the only issue is who controls it. “Back in the Sixties, the church and the state said gambling was bad and took it away,” he says wryly. “So my wife is out supporting the church today, playing bingo.”
Still, if you can’t wait for a slots bill to pass and want to find a little action right here in Maryland, then simply visit one of the many “Instant Bingo” machines popping up in Anne Arundel County as well as in Southern Maryland.
At Chesapeake Beach’s classic Rod ’n’ Reel, there’s a small room next to the bar with about a dozen machines that look an awful lot like slot machines. Insert your money, push play, and if you’re lucky, you get a pull-tab that shows the winning combination, redeemable at the bar fora cash pay out.
Why “Instant Bingo” is legal and standard slot machines are not is a result of some cagey legal work and interesting interpretation of the rules of bingo. Technically, the machines follow the rules of bingo, simply spitting out the winning combinations in seconds instead of playing them over time. Thus, the innards of the machine allows anyone with a license for legal bingo games to have pull-tab machines as well.
Between the duplex Keno screens, the organized bingo game, and the so-called “Instant Bingo” machines, the Rod ’n’ Reel offers a nice variety of gaming options. Add flat-screen televisions, live music, and the hotel spa across the street and it’s a mini-casino, and it all begs the question: What’s all the fuss about slots if we’ve already got them?
Perhaps the Rod ’n’ Reel is just a reprise of the way slots made their way into Maryland’s law books some sixty years ago—on the sly, with a little nod and a wink. At the very least, one of the bar’s young tenders, who refused to give her name, is fully supportive. “I went to Jamaica and lost all my money on slots,” she says with a sly smile. “Now I’m addicted.”
A version of this story appeared in Baltimore’s City Paper. Stephen Janis is a senior investigative reporter for the Baltimore Examiner. Additional reporting by Joe Sugarman.
Every time writer Tom Horton returns to Holland Island, he finds a little more of it gone. Will the once-bustling island’s sad fate foretell the future of other islands in the Bay?
Written By Tom Horton
Photography By David Harp
My first visit to the last house on Holland Island was nearly half a century ago. I took time from a fishing trip with my dad to play baseball with some local kids in the yard, a modest swatch of green sandwiched between Chesapeake Bay on its western edge and washed by Hollands Strait on its east. As I recall, the house was set back comfortably from the water, perhaps a hundred feet or more. We could follow a path that ran north a few hundred feet from the yard through a small forest of big persimmon and hackberry trees.
Enjoy it while it lasts, my father told our hosts as we went back to our fishing boat that day. The erosion of the island he referred to meant little to a ten year old. But when I returned decades later, at age forty, it was to a scene so different that the old house on Holland was the only way I could be sure it was the same place. It was now perched on the merest sliver of ground, the waters of the main Chesapeake lapping close on its front, and Tangier Sound nearly touching its back door on a high tide. The forest to its north was reduced to a thin line of trees, the earth nearly carved away from their huge old root systems. From the water, they gleamed like bones in the late afternoon. Two old tombs had eroded from the bank, and their gravestones lay flat on the hard, clay-bottomed shoreline.
I had just moved to a home ten miles south of Holland, on Smith Island, Maryland’s only remaining offshore community. The very oldest Smith Islanders recalled for me when Holland was a thriving place, with dozens of big white-frame homes similar to this “last” house, which still stood—so close to the water now that spray from big blows on the Bay was beginning to flay its paint away. Settled at least as far back as the early 1700s, judging from the old gravestones now sinking into the marsh, Holland in its heyday had stores, a church, a community hall, and two ballfields. The Holland Island Eagles was a baseball team to be reckoned with in a league that included Smith, Deal, Crisfield, and other watermen’s villages around Tangier Sound. The harbor there held dozens of oyster bugeyes and skipjacks, smaller workboats, and large schooners. Rich upland soils grew fruit trees, wheat, corn, and sweet potatoes. Returning sailors remarked on the sweet smell of blossoms as they neared home after a voyage.
All that changed in just a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century as erosion, the product of a rising sea level, and fierce storms, accelerated. Islanders wrote of lying awake at night, hearing the “crack!” as chunks of their homeland literally broke off. By the 1920s, Holland as a year-round community ceased to exist. Many of its homes still stand today, but in towns like Crisfield and Cambridge and others around the Chesapeake where they were barged.
These days the people wandering its shores are those Smith Islanders and others skilled enough to boat the remote and shallow reaches of Tangier Sound, unmarked by navigation aids. Holland has become mainly a “progging” place—you go there at low tide, particularly after storms have chewed at the shores, to wander the edges, turning up all manner of arrowheads, old coins, pottery, and bottles that date back as far as the American Revolution and the War of 1812, when they were likely cast away by British sailors.
There is a sadder side. The gravestones eroding from the clay and marsh peat as Holland continues to shrink are a reminder to those Smith Islanders that someday this will likely be their fate. One in particular caught the eye of my daughter, Abigail:
“God needed one more angel child” inscribed the resting place of Carol Parks, eleven, the same age as Abby.
“I hate to even say it, but that’ll be our graves here on Smith Island, just washin’ away someday,” my neighbor Janice Marshall noted after a progging trip to Holland with her husband, Bobby. When I lived on Smith, spending three years as an environmental educator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, I would take school kids to Holland to progue around and ponder the “mystery” of the remaining tombstones near the center of the island. The stones, most made of finely carved marble and granite and surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, were evidence that this was no fish camp, rather a solid, prosperous community of long duration.
But the Bay’s appetite for the island has been relentless. A picture taken in 1987, my first year leading school trips to Holland, shows my colleagues and I wading no more than knee deep, with seventh graders across a narrow channel that had recently cut the island in half. Five years later, I returned, along with a National Geographic photographer and I.T. Todd from Crisfield, one of the last babies born there (1917). He posed where I’d once played baseball, in front of the last house (it had been in his family) perched almost in the Bay as waves broke around him. It made a striking illustration for my June 1993 piece on the Chesapeake that ran in the magazine. The trees to the house’s north were gone, and the little cut-through I had waded across with the students was now wide and deep enough to run several workboats through at the same time. I expected that the old house, a landmark on the horizontality of marsh and waters for miles around, would not last more than a year or two, and silently said my goodbyes. We helped I.T. carry off a 250-pound headstone that had marked the grave of a relative, Missouri Parks—“like the Marines coming out from Inchon, bringing the dead and wounded with them,” laughed I.T., a veteran of the Pacific theater, as we struggled through the clingy marsh. The old homestead proved surprisingly tough.
In 2003, two days after Hurricane Isabel swept the Bay with devastating floods, I returned to Holland, expecting to see it houseless for the first time in three centuries. But the last house stood, erect and square, though Isabel had taken out its lower boards, and the Bay swirled freely beneath the dining room light. The place by now was owned by Stephen L. White, a local preacher and former waterman, who had started the Holland Island Preservation Foundation, dedicated to shoring up the banks to stop the erosion. It was a valiant effort, but a Washington Post writer had aptly characterized White’s situation as “batting with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth—and you’re not holding a bat.”
I admired White’s passion to preserve the place but thought that there are times and places where we must just bow to the inevitable. Or maybe White will yet hit an improbable home run. Just in the last few years, farther up the Bay, Maryland and the federal government have begun rebuilding one badly eroded island, Poplar, which lies off the Talbot County mainland. James and Barren islands to Poplar’s south may also be resurrected. It’s hugely expensive but driven by the Port of Baltimore’s never-ending need to dispose of spoil dredged from its shipping channels. It’s too early to say whether Holland might be next in line after Barren Island. Well before any revitalization of Holland, the last house will be erased, and the only traces of humanity that will remain are the gravestones, nearly overgrown by the soft, green spartina grasses of the marsh.
But Holland Island is far from dead, anything but a ghost town. In the virtual absence of people and predators like raccoons and foxes, bird life abounds. In just the last few years, a pair of eagles has nested in a huge old hackberry tree that anchors the island’s middle. All manner of wading birds—three species of egrets and five or six species of herons—festoon the island’s forested hammocks of high ground. Hundreds of elegant brown pelicans have established one of their northernmost nesting beachheads in the United States on Holland. Along the island’s small sandy beaches, diamondback terrapins and horseshoe crabs crawl onto shore each summer to bury their eggs. But this timeless-looking scene will not last forever, either. Geologists project that at current rates of sea level rise, exacerbated now by global warming, most or all of the islands in Tangier Sound—Bloodsworth, South Marsh, Holland, Smith, Tangier—will have vanished within another century or so.
I visit them all regularly and frequently—fishing, hunting, progging, birdwatching, or just seeking solitude and the thrill of sunlight and seasons painting ever-changing portraits across their marshy canvas. I’m following my dad’s advice: Enjoy it while it lasts.
Longtime nature writer Tom Horton is author of An Island Out of Time: a Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake and Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake.
Celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary in July, Stevensville's Camp Wright is as much an Eastern Shore tradition as soft crabs and skipjacks. Campers share their memories of everything from bug juice to skinny dipping with sea nettles.
Written by Kessler Burnett
Photography by Scott Suchman
At 7:11 a.m., Camp Wright counselor Suzanne Carley tiptoes out of her bayfront cabin sporting navy gym shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops — and ten silver rings divided among her fingers. Besides the metallic hum of the cicadas and the drone of a waterman’s deadrise motoring just off shore, the campgrounds are silent on this August morning.
Passing a rouge tennis shoe and a clothes line sagging under the weight of towels still damp from yesterday’s swim meet, she walks over to a large, old-fashioned dinner bell mounted on a pole next to the dining hall. At 7:15 on the nose, she gives its tattered rope several yanks, sounding the morning alarm to begin the day, the equivalent of a fifteen-hour-long recess.
“I see fish jump in the Bay when I ring it,” says the former camper, with a laugh weakened by her still-sleepy state. “It stirs everything up.”
On delayed cue, campers begin to trickle out of their cabins and head to the bathhouse, known as “Mrs. Murphy’s,” wearing pajamas and carrying toothbrushes and toothpaste. Rubbing puffy eyes, they plod along the gravel path like trails of logy ants headed out for a long day of picnic raiding. Breaking the quiet is a pint-size camper, who sprints out of the boys’ room and chases down a counselor to report in a loud whisper that a cabin-mate has had a “stinky accident” on the bathroom floor. With up to 150 seven- to fourteen-year-old campers per each week’s session, these counselors, some international students hailing from the likes of Poland, Colombia, and Singapore, will tell you that it’s never too early for action around here.
“This morning there was some drama in the cabin,” says counselor Claire Riley from Towson, who was also a camper here for six years. “There was some sibling rivalry. Two sisters were upset with each other, and there are also two cousins in the cabin who were fighting about which one is Irish and which isn’t. I’ve never had that much drama before nine in the morning.”
Fifteen minutes later the bell clangs again, signaling the camp to gather at the center of the grounds for the daily flag-raising ceremony, followed by chores, breakfast, and morning devotions. A towheaded camper appears out of the dining hall toting a tightly folded American flag; his bed-head hair, molded to a vertical stance on the back of his head, bounces to the rhythm of his pokey stride. At the flagpole, he meets Fabian Williams, a twenty-one-year-old counselor from Jamaica, where the two exchange a good morning high-five. As Williams hoists the flag, the entire camp recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Easton, this is one place where the pledge’s highly disputed phrase “under God” will never be argued, and its motto, “Learning to live together in a Christian way,” remains a part of the camp’s tradition — and Camp Wright is all about tradition. “Our traditions are a very important part of camp life, but some have changed over time,” says Van Beers, who, with his mussed blond hair, white Izod shirt, and khaki shorts, looks more like a camper than camp director, which he has been since 1992. “But what a camper from 1930 is going to have in common with a camper in 2005 is that they both leave having experienced friendship in very deep ways and loving God.”
Camp Wright, located on 130 acres of bayfront property in Stevensville, Md., was founded in 1930 by William Henry DeCourcy Wright Thom and his wife, Mary Washington, of Baltimore. In 1928, they deeded the land to the Diocese of Easton, with the proviso that the land be used for a Christian camp for children living in Maryland and the District of Columbia. For the first thirty-six years, the sessions were single-sex. But in 1966, the camp became coed, with boys housed on the south end of the camp and girls on the north.
“It became clear to me that we were going to have a hard time hiring young people to be counselors for just parts of the summer — kids wanted full summer employment,” says Rev. Allen Spicer, camp director from 1965 to 1983 and camper from 1948 to 1951. “And the campers enjoyed having both boys and girls there. It also allowed families the convenience of bringing their daughters and their sons at the same time.”
“One of the great things for me at that time,” he continues, “was when the swimming pool was built in 1965. We no longer had to fool with the nettles. We filled it with Bay water that was pumped in and filtered, so it was somewhat salty. It was a wonderful luxury.”
A hailstorm and severe rain intruded on Camp Wright’s opening day, July 11, according to a circa-1930 notebook from the camp office. Thirty-three male campers and eight counselors, who enjoyed the first evening’s dinner of soft crabs and iced tea, attended the first week. Back then, camp cost $15 per week, plus a $2 application fee, as stated on the first brochure. These days, camp costs $243 for a four-day session to $486 for a seven-day session.
Until the first span of the Bay Bridge was built in 1952, campers arriving from the Western Shore took the ferry to Love Point and Mattapeake Harbor, where the “Camp Wright buggy,” a red truck, met them and delivered them to camp. “I remember being there the summer the first Bay Bridge was built,” recalls Southey Lord, a Salisbury native who was a camper from 1952 to 1956, and whose mother, sister, son, and three grandchildren all went to Camp Wright. “I remember watching it going up. It was an amazing thing to see it go up across that Bay. You could see the men working on the bridge from camp.”
“But one of my favorite times at camp was at night just before bedtime,” she continues. “The whole camp got in a circle around a campfire, and we’d have vespers and sing a couple of camp songs. Then we’d sneak out after ‘Taps’ and run around the cabin giggling and try not to get caught. I have a lot of good memories from that place. I still think it’s one of the neatest camps out there.”
In the early years, camp was primitive, with the only facilities being a dining hall/recreation room, a pump house/wash room outfitted with faucets for bathing, three eighteen-foot-square bunk houses (which housed eight campers and one counselor) for younger campers, and several sixteen-foot-square tents erected on board flooring for older campers. There were two outhouses, dubbed “Hollywood” and “Beverly Hills,” and all drinking water was collected from a rain barrel.
“There was no electricity in the cabins,” recalls Jane Reillo, a sixty-six-year-old Baltimore native who was a camper from 1950 to 1953, a counselor from 1954 to 1959, and camp director in 1960. “And we swam in the Bay with the nettles. The camp had installed a net, but it didn’t work. They came right through and probably regenerated themselves inside the net. And since it was all girls, sometimes we’d go skinny-dipping. There were handymen who kept up the maintenance, but they were told to stay at the back of the camp. Camp was the love of my life.”
By mid-morning, the camp is shrouded under a haze of ninety-six-degree heat, and, according to the weather report, the mercury has yet to reach its forecasted summit. While the creatures in the Bay and surrounding forests have settled in for a shady siesta, despite the heat, these campers are just getting warmed up.
Jumping and flailing along the sidelines, campers sing deafening, alto-pitched cheers in support of their blue and white teammates (a rivalry that began the year camp opened), sweating it out on the tattered green. With the zeal of the Orioles’ mascot, a shirtless male counselor coated in royal blue paint from his torso up and sporting a cowboy hat, leads a string of raucous cheers chanted so loudly that it’s near impossible to decipher the words. Amid the melee, a bawling camper is consoled by her counselor over an unknown trauma. Within minutes, she’s made a full recovery and is bouncing around, enraptured by the esprit d’corps.
Twelve-year-old Morgan Stein has been coming here for the past four summers and knows all of the cheers in the Camp Wright Song Book as well as the words to Britney Spears’ latest hit. “It’s fun singing the songs because it gets you all excited and energized,” says Stein, a native of Baltimore. “And then at night when we play the bedtime songs, it gets you calmed down and ready to go to sleep so that you can wake up for a new day and have more songs and more cheers.”
Camp songs range in length from one to ten verses, along with a handful of softer-tempo, nursery-rhyme-like songs. Some were penned by Nell Hughes, the beloved camp director from 1951 to 1955, who accompanied campers on her ukulele around the campfire.
“I taught my grandkids those songs when they were just little ones,” says Reillo, whose six grandchildren have all attended Camp Wright. “And when they came to camp, they already knew them all.”
While the soccer game rages on, jewelry is being created in arts and crafts class in Davenport Hall; kids stuffed inside orange lifejackets are maneuvering kayaks and Sunfish on the Bay; and salsa lessons are being given in Clary Hall. Every available inch of wall and ceiling space here is a patchwork of painted, penned, and carved names of former campers and the dates of their stay. Lyrical graffiti intermingles with the signatures, from snippets of poetry by Henry David Thoreau to songs by The Band and The Grateful Dead, to a prayer that reads, “Lord, please watch over me, for the Bay is so big and my boat is so small.” There are even political sentiments, like the warning that reads “This is not a democracy.”
The lunch bell rings at 12:30, and unlike the morning alarm, there’s no hesitation in responding to this call. The kids pour into Brookings Hall, where flags representing the nationality of counselors past and present hang from the ceiling and framed photo murals of past campers dress the walls. The current batch of campers eat with their cabinmates at the table named for their cabin, traditionally named after an Eastern Shore town, river, county, or surnames of families who have been camp benefactors. Once everyone is seated, campers sing grace — once finished, they launch into their cabin’s “table” cheer:
Talbot Cabin, up your nose,
Talbot Cabin, up your nose.
Talbot is up your nose!
Then Pocomoke Cabin:
P-O-C-O-M-O-K-E, dishes stacked and we be ready!
Salisbury Cabin chimes in:
S-U-G-A-R, sugar sweet, that’s what we are,
S-H-A-C-K, the shack is back and we’re here to stay,
R-E-A-D-Y, we ready now and that’s no lie, Salisbury is ready!
By the Bay, by the Bay, by the beautiful Bay,
Salisbury, Salisbury, Salisbury is ready.
Please, please Timmy-o, please, please let us go,
By the Bay Salisbury is ready, we really mean it, yeah!
A bevy of girls from Cambridge Cabin, elbows propped on the table, gossip about a homesick cabinmate spotted earlier running after her visiting mother’s car with tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t know anyone in my cabin, until my cousin came,” defends the forlorn, embarrassed camper, who requested anonymity.
“They call homesickness a disease, and it is — it spreads,” says counselor Riley. “One starts crying, and then you’ve got two or three that are crying. We’ll do anything to try to distract them. I always think, ‘If only my friends were here from home to see me dancing around with marker on my face to get these kids to laugh.’”
“I’m not really homesick,” chimes in first-time, ten-year-old camper Nevis Muir of Salisbury, putting on a brave face. “I probably miss my dog and my dad the most. I have a sister, but…”
And it’s not only the kids who struggle with the malady. “Moms have trouble giving up the kids,” says director Beers. “And they wonder what is actually happening here at camp. Sometimes, if they’re a boating family, they’ll motor by once a week and scope it out and try to catch sight of their kids.”
Campers sitting on the deck and bleachers around the seventy-five-foot, four-lane pool swat at biting flies. It’s just moments before the blue team versus white team swim meet, and those anxious for relief from the heat are splashing around wildly, enjoying the last few minutes of free-swim. But not Lindsay, Sarah, and sisters Kit and Annie. They’ve opted to sit this one out, preferring to huddle up for some quality girl talk. “I’m like not a good swimmer at all, like not at all,” one comments to her friend, while the others discuss the finer points of movie star Orlando Bloom and some TV commercials.
Traditionally, at the end of each session, the blue and the white teams’ points, acquired in athletic and other competitions, would be added up, with a victory cup awarded to the winning team. But these days, there isn’t a cup. “We don’t declare a winner anymore,” explains camp program director, Julia Connelly, a camper from 1989 to 1997 and counselor from 1999 to 2001. “I remember it being really important to win the cup, but my best friend was not on my team so it was hard to be close. Now it’s easier for kids and counselors to develop a bond if there’s not so much competition between them.”
Since 1930, an estimated 75,000 campers have attended Camp Wright, with the past three years witnessing the highest enrollment numbers in its history. Director Beers foresees nothing but growth for the future of this little camp, including long-range plans such as year-round programs and a new dining hall.
“The security and the comfort and the spiritual feeling that they come back with after spending a week here is unbelievable,” says Debbie Etherton Keller, a camper from 1963 to 1970 and mother of eight-year camper Cameron, whose seven cousins have also attended Camp Wright. Her mother was camp nurse and her father was camp chaplain.
“My niece Brittany, who’s been going to camp for the past seven years, calls this her second home. It really becomes a part of your life. You realize that the kids are so fulfilled.”
After dinner, things begin to wind down, with the flag lowering ceremony and “cabin time,” when cabinmates hang out, take a hike, or go for a final swim of the day. The youngest campers hit the sheets at 9:15 p.m.; the older ones get to stay up late, until 10 p.m. Counselors curfew is midnight. The counselors are granted two hours off each day and paid $150 to $300 a week — their job is a real labor of love. “I wasn’t supposed to be here this summer,” explains twenty-year-old, first-year counselor Julia Roca, who was also a camper for four years. “I intended to get a real job. But I came down to pick up my sister, within five minutes of being here I was like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I not here?’ So I came for session three, and the night before it ended, I decided to stay for another. So here I am in session six, and I’ll be back for session seven. When I start thinking of this as a job, I’ll stop doing it. But now it’s still fun.”
“I’d like to come back next summer,” adds counselor Riley. “I feel like when I come here, and I’m without electricity and any luxuries, I go home and I appreciate it that much more. And the view is awesome, too.”
Camp Wright’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration is July 9 & 10. Details and registration are found on the Web site. Camp Wright, 400 Camp Wright Ln., Stevensville, Md. 410-643-4171 or http://www.campwright4life.org.
The historic cemeteries of the Chesapeake not only reveal information about the dead, but also about the lives of those who buried them.
Written and Photographed By Timothy Greenleaf
Cemeteries are intensely personal for some people, representing connections to family and friends. Cemeteries also serve as reminders of our own mortality. Part of the attraction is the gravestones, often looked upon as works of art, from their design detail to the haunting or humbling epitaphs. Most important, gravestones serve as a reminder of a person’s life, offering clues as to who they were: husband, father, friend.
You can tell a lot about a time and place by the way people treated their dead, and the Eastern Shore is no exception. This story encompasses a sampling of Eastern Shore burial traditions, ranging from church cemeteries to family burial plots to unmarked graves along the side of the road. Each cemetery, each gravestone has a story to tell. Here are six.
Wise Cemetery South Chesconessex, Accomack County, Va.
If you had to pick one family that exemplifies the “who’s who” of Virginia social life, the Wise family would be an easy choice.
The Wise Cemetery rests on the original land near where the family plantation house once stood. Surrounded by a five-foot-high brick wall, the cemetery contains approximately two dozen markers, with additional marble stones set into the west wall.
These stones date back to the late 1600s and list the accomplishments of the various family members: colonial leader, speaker of the House of Delegates, member of the House of Burgesses, U.S. Congressman, governor, lawyer, author, professor, doctor, diplomat, military veteran (of both the Union and Confederate armies), and holder of the Distinguished Service Cross. A stone marker memorializes one of the most prominent of the Wise clan, Henry A. Wise (1806-1876), who served in the U.S. Congress, was a minister to Brazil, and was governor of Virginia at the time of John Brown’s hanging.
Broad Creek Cemetery at Christ Church Parish Stevensville, Queen Anne’s County, Md.
The oldest continuous church congregation in Maryland, Christ Church Parish, located in the south end of Kent Island, dates from 1632 and was organized by the Rev. Richard James at Kent Fort. Around 1650, the church moved to Broad Creek and was rebuilt in 1712 and again in 1826. The congregation moved to its current site in Stevensville in 1880, abandoning Broad Creek and its graveyard.
What’s left of the cemetery sits off Route 8 tucked behind a shopping complex and neighbored by a small industrial park and airport. In 1999, members of the Stevensville church embarked on an archaeological project to restore the condition of the graveyard and determine the location of its burial plots. “We have an ethical obligation to the people buried there,” says church member Richard Ervin, who is also an archaeologist with the Maryland State Highway Administration.
Many of the earliest grave markers were likely wood, says Ervin, because there was little native stone in the area. In the approximately 1.5-acre burial ground, only a dozen markers from 1746 to 1903 remain, all clustered in the northwest corner of the cemetery.
To date, the archaeological committee has located and marked off the original foundation stones of the church building. The parishioners are seeking grant money to fund the use of high-tech equipment, such as ground-penetrating radar, to learn what lies beneath the rest of the land. “There could be a hundred-maybe even a couple hundred-people buried there,” says Ervin, “but we really have no idea.”
Cemetery, Hoopers Island Middle Hoopers Island, Dorchester County, Md.
Water is the way of life on Hoopers Island. It’s also the way of the afterlife. Because of an elevated water table, many cemetery vaults are either waterproof or contain concrete slabs or are lined with lead to ensure that the caskets don’t float away when flooding occurs. But sometimes even those precautions fail.
According to local historian, folklorist, and Dorchester County Commissioner Tom Flowers, when the Storm of ‘33 hit, widower Captain Elleck Travers’ wife’s casket washed up to his door. “When the building crumbled, he used the casket to float away from the building,” says Flowers. “There are people still living that will attest to the fact that in death, she saved his life.”
Mechanics Cemetery Chincoteague, Accomack County, Va.
Despite its isolation on a Virginia barrier island, this graveyard, named after a fraternal organization that donated land in the 1800s, reflects trends that were occurring across the country. As the art nouveau movement gained popularity in the United States, its reach even extended into Chincoteague. For instance, the grand tombstone of John E. Lewis, who died in 1917, is possibly the earliest example of art nouveau on the Eastern Shore. The stone is a massive hunk of marble carved into a tree trunk with ivy. It was probably brought by train, transferred to a ship, then unloaded to a cart before being moved to Mechanics, says local historian Gary Turnquist. “It was no small feat to have been brought over here,” he says. And its design was right on the cutting edge for its times. “People on Chincoteague were isolated, but they didn’t feel that way. They felt part of the greater America.”
St. John’s United Methodist Church Graveyard Deal Island, Somerset County, Md.
Perhaps the most famous of the inhabitants of St. John’s graveyard is Brother Joshua Thomas (1776-1853). Thomas, a one-time waterman, earned a reputation by paddling his nearly thirty-foot dugout canoe Methodist around area islands to spread the gospel.
During the War of 1812, when the British made nearby Tangier Island one of their bases of operation, British Gen. Robert Ross gave him the nickname “Parson of the Islands” and summoned him to preach to 12,000 soldiers as they stood ready to attack Baltimore. Even though the British had won easy victories thus far and burned Washington, D.C., Thomas warned them that the attack would fail. In the end, his words proved true.
Toward the end of his life, islanders built a Greek Revival frame church in the graveyard and dedicated it in his honor. He is buried near the southwest corner of the structure. His epitaph reads: Come all my friends, as you pass by, Behold the place where I do lie. As you are now, so once was I, Remember, you are born to die.
Sturgis Plot Franktown, Northampton County, Va.
Like a miniature Stonehenge, five tombstones belonging to the Sturgis family-William, Elizabeth, and their three children-sit in the middle of a barren field just south of Franktown. The Sturgises lived in a house nearby, and when William died in 1903, like many of the area’s deceased, he was buried outside the house.
“There’s a strong tradition of burying people on family land on Virginia’s Eastern Shore,” says Wayne Stith, a Richmond resident with strong family ties to the area. Stith runs a Web site, the GHOTES Virtual Cemetery at ghotes.org, which is dedicated to identifying every one of the estimated 50,000 tombstones that dot the lower portion of the Delmarva peninsula. (GHOTES is an acronym for Genealogy and History of the Eastern Shore.) Since the summer of 2000, more than fifty volunteers have helped him gather photographs of more than 15,000 gravestones, and they’re all posted on the Web site.
Stith says it’s a challenge to catalog all the tombstones; many have weathered away or been disturbed by vandals. The Sturgis plot is in relatively good shape since it’s comparatively new. (The youngest child was buried there in 1961.) However, the Sturgis’s property transferred hands years ago and the house was razed. These five tombstones in a barren field by the side of the road are all that remain.
Timothy C. Greenleaf has had a lifelong fascination with cemeteries. He lives outside of Washington, D.C.
In the late nineteenth century, the railroad brought unprecedented prosperity to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. When the era faded, ghost towns took the place of once-thriving villages. But, today, the stubborn shortline keeps chugging along, hauling freight across this rural land.
By Donna Bozza Rich
Photography By Ryan Hulvat
It’s 8 o’clock on a hot summer morning and brothers Jerry and Preston Lewis are waiting for me aboard engine No. 2000. They’ve paused the midnight-blue, 1,850-horsepower diesel-powered locomotive in a knot of woods outside Hallwood, Va., so I can board. “How ya doin’?” says Jerry with the good nature of a host welcoming a friend into his house. He’s a fifty-three-year-old Cape Charles native, sporting well-worn jeans and a neat T-shirt.
He and Preston, fifty-nine, have spent more than two decades hauling freight for the struggling shortline, whose 64-mile-length of track stretches from Pocomoke City, Md., to Cape Charles, Va., running along the original 1884 NYP&N rail line (New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk). Once in Cape Charles, operators load the freight cars onto a barge that travels 26 miles across the Bay to Norfolk, Va., hooking up with another network of rail lines.
On board, Preston greets me from his seat at the controls at the far end of the engine room. He sits snugly between the side window and a console that holds a jumble of levers and switches, the decidedly non-high-tech mechanics of an old iron horse built in 1955.
The engine car is surprisingly roomy—about the size of a VW microbus—and besides the controls, sparsely equipped except for a chair on the opposite side of the compartment next to some side windows. Jerry offers me his seat, kept clean with a makeshift cardboard covering. From the high perch of the conductor’s seat, I’m provided a great view of the approaching track.
With “Pres” driving, it’s Jerry’s turn as conductor, meaning he’ll supervise the train’s operations and keep track of paperwork. The conductor also leaves the engine to shift freight cars on and off the train, while the engineer stays at the controls.
Pres pulls a wooden lever on the console, and the serenity of the wood is filled with the loud blast of a train whistle and the clanking of metal on metal. As the engine begins its slow, rattling progression down the rails, I settle in for what will be a three-and-a half-hour journey to Cape Charles.
Chugging along at a top speed of just 15 miles per hour, the train’s leisurely pace seems to mimic Shore life, but it’s the track’s condition that dictates how fast the train can go. (At one time passenger trains on a parallel track whizzed along at 45 miles per hour.) Before Larry LeMond took over as president and general manager of the Eastern Shore Railroad in 1996 and began upgrading the line, trains were kept crawling at less than 10 miles an hour. It’s an expensive proposition, both upgrading and maintaining the higher-grade track, especially for freight lines hard-pressed for cash.
The brothers long ago grew accustomed to the train’s slow pace. They once worked as watermen but stopped crabbing and oystering when the “water went bad,” says Preston. “Trains are like the water,” he says. “It gets into your blood.”
They find their own unique ways of dealing with the slow-paced twelve-hour shifts. “You have to like doing this if you’re gonna work with your brother,” chides Preston.
“It’s about near as bad as [working with] a wife,” says Jerry.
This morning the brothers began their 1 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift hauling freight from the Cape Charles yard north to Pocomoke City. But with freight drastically down on the shortline, our return trip south is empty-handed.
We continue along the track hemmed in by lush woods, and come to a byway, Mears Station Road, that heralds its locomotive history. As we pass the hamlet of Mears, we catch a glimpse of two old storefronts and a teeny clapboard post office. Nearby is the barrel factory that once cranked out the wooden containers used to ship produce by train. But the spot where the town’s train station once stood is now a tangle of trees and underbrush. It’s a sad sight that will be repeated all along the line.
When Pennsylvania congressman and coal tycoon William L. Scott first proposed a rail line on Virginia’s Eastern Shore to the Pennsylvania Railroad, the only railroad executive interested in the venture was Alexander J. Cassatt. It was Cassatt who explored the Shore on horseback in 1882 to plot the new railroad’s course, with locals lobbying him to place the lines along their lands. But Cassatt opted for a straight route down the center of the peninsula, through thick forests and farms. And he solved what had thwarted plans to build previous railroads: the way to traverse the watery gap between Cape Charles and Norfolk.
An engineer by training, Cassatt designed a system of giant steel barges that were fitted with tracks and could float train cars across the water to hook up with tracks on the other side of the Bay. Construction of the track began in April 1884 and was completed that October.
The NYP&N began passenger and freight service in November 1884. A year later, the barge operation—the first of its kind in the United States—began. It’s been in operation ever since, one of only two train-barge operations (the other runs across New York Harbor) on the East Coast. During its heyday, twelve barges crossed the Chesapeake a day.
A flood of people and commerce traveled through Cape Charles City, the jewel of the railroad, a community Scott began on 2,000 acres of farmland he purchased. Thanks to the line, produce from the South could reach northern markets easier, and passengers could make their way to New York City, Philadelphia, and points north much faster than the inland route.
Cape Charles itself grew to a peak of some 5,000 residents. According to LeMond, more than half worked for the railroad. Many other towns grew up along the line, creating a profound impact on the development of the Shore, which can still be seen today. In 1958, though, the Golden Era ended as the last passenger train pulled out of Cape Charles. Freight continued, but without the flow of passengers. Towns ended up isolated, entire main streets were mothballed, and jobs dried up.
Penn Central took over the line in 1968, but went bankrupt in the early ‘70s.
“This line, along with several others, was going to be abandoned,” says LeMond. “That’s when the two Shore counties [Northampton and Accomack] got together in 1976 and later issued bonds to keep the railroad going.” A series of operators ran it, until it became the Eastern Shore Railroad (ESHR) in 1981. Today, it’s run by the Accomack–Northampton Transportation District Commission, a public transportation entity of the state. The ESHR, like other shortlines, must rely on state grants, with its own matching funds, for its capital improvements.
The Shore’s rural nature, which gave it life, is now one of the main reasons the shortline struggles. “There is no industry on the Shore, which is needed to sustain a railroad day to day,” says LeMond. “Yes, we have grain, fertilizer, propane, and stone during season, but Bay Shore Concrete is basically the only industry on the Shore that goes year-round for us. So we live and die on overhead traffic, where we take it off other railroads like CSX and Norfolk Southern and pull it up and down the Shore and give it to another railroad.”
Most of the nation’s 550 shortlines are struggling like the Eastern Shore Railroad, which employs only twenty-one people. “For us, every year is a fight,” says LeMond. “We make adjustments accordingly, cut back on things, and wait for better times.”
Bloxom is the next stop on the line. As we pull in, a clump of abandoned, rusty grain silos, and remnants of the long shoots that fed grain and other farm products into the train cars, greet us. Nearby, there’s a group of weary wood buildings that once formed a booming downtown. A few old men sit on chairs in front of a defunct grocery store. An old-fashioned sign touting “cigars” peeks out from the boarded-up window.
Unlike many of its counterparts, the Bloxom train station did survive. But it’s not here to welcome us. It was bought and disassembled and is currently being rebuilt as part of an exhibit at the Cape Charles Museum.
The busiest place in Bloxom is its namesake mini-market/gas station. Preston “parks” the train across from the store. We climb off and amble into the mini-market. When the old-timers inside see me, they take the opportunity to jab at the Lewis brothers, “That’s all you do is give people free rides.” A few Cokes and a couple of packages of Nabs crackers later, and we’re back on our unhurried southbound trek.
Ambling through peaceful rural scenery, it is easy to be lulled into the illusion that working this country line is a carefree occupation. But “everyone who works on a railroad has a close call,” says Jerry. He tells the story of fellow railroad man, Thomas “Newt” Widgeon, who nearly lost his life during a switching accident, diverting a train from one track to another. Widgeon, Jerry says, threw the switch to send a train down one track and mistakenly thought he had sent it down another. The train hit Widgeon from behind as he was walking. Amazingly, he wasn’t crushed, but instead the train pulled him under and took his leg. He miraculously survived, tying his own tourniquet to stop the bleeding. “He should have been dead,” recalls Jerry. “He told us he kept reciting the Lord’s Prayer over and over. He never cussed once. He just said the Lord would take care of him, and He did.”
We pass the little town of Parksley next. The attractiveness of a groomed town square and beautiful Victorian homes is a stark contrast to many of the Shore’s rundown railroad towns. Here, the Eastern Shore Railroad Museum resides in the refurbished station that was moved from Hopeton, two miles north. Catching only a passing glimpse of the town, it’s possible to sense what things must have been like during the railroad’s reign on the Shore. Even the locals’ reactions hearken back to a simpler time. A young girl and her mother sitting near the station wave furiously at the engine until they are rewarded with the call of the train’s deep, drawn-out whistle. And the magic’s enduring: A farmer on his tractor and a dozen migrant workers motion for a whistle, while truckers on the parallel U.S. Rt. 13 honk a bright hello.
The brothers enjoy the interaction; it breaks up the monotony. Though they have had some exciting moments over the years, some welcomed, some not. Says Jerry: “It was about 8:30 at night, everything was real quiet, and I heard this tapping sound hitting the engine.” The brothers thought it was someone with a gun firing from the window of a building beside the track. “Me and Pres hit the floor. We called the law but they were long gone. Probably a bunch of kids, but it scared the heck out of us.”
Of course, the pair also has their lighter moments. “One night, this girl, at every crossing we come to, she pulled her top up and flashed us,” says Jerry between laughs. “Then we got to Hallwood, she pulled the whole works up. This happens quite often—it’s the highlight of working the railroad.”
As the morning wears on, the tracks lead us through the town of Tasley, over to the sea side of U.S. Route 13. We pass a community of gray squat buildings, a labor camp for migrant field workers.
In Onley, we see a century-old train station still sitting along the track. According to LeMond, at the height of the railroad’s prosperity, twenty-six stations dotted the railroad’s route through Accomack and Northampton counties.
Down the line in Melfa we again hug Rt. 13 and pass the black and orange billboard proclaiming “Tammy and Johnny’s.” It’s not uncommon to see the ESHR “parked” here while Pres and Jerry run across the highway for what they tout as “the best fried chicken on the road.” It’s too early for a sampling today, but I make a note to return.
Today, our engine looks almost forlorn, with not one freight car in tow. Just two decades ago, seventy freight cars a day was more the norm; nowadays, it’s closer to thirty-five. Its primary freight is concrete structures from Cape Charles’s Bayshore Concrete Products making their way to Iowa. Soybeans head one direction to the Perdue plant in Chesapeake, Va., then come back again as soy meal and soy oil for its Delmarva chicken plants. Fertilizer comes from as close as Chesapeake, Va., or as far away as Mississippi, ending up at farms all along the line, on into Maryland and Delaware. Grain, paper, even cocoa beans on their way to Hershey, Pa., pass through the Eastern Shore countryside.
Some days hobos are part of the cargo, too. “When it starts getting cool up there in Baltimore, we get a spurt of ‘em,” says Jerry. “At night they hop on the cars. I don’t think that will ever change. Some will even ask us when the barge leaves, like we are on a passenger schedule.” Like one hobo named Larry, who, about two in the morning, decided to walk on top of the cars when the train was moving, and up to the engine. “He opened the back door to the engine behind Pres. Now we always lock that door.”
Probably the most beloved tramp of the Eastern Shore Railroad is Fred, a sixteen-year-old orange cat who stowed away eleven years ago on the Norfolk barge, and settled into the railroad’s office in Cape Charles. As the railroad’s unofficial mascot, he has the run of the place; luckily, president LeMond is a cat lover.
The trip is winding down as we cross Rt. 13 and roll into Cape Charles. The main street across from the yard resembles a vintage model train village, a nod to its recent recovery from the long downturn that began when the passengers disappeared. A faded sign proclaims in ghostly writing: Eastern Shore Railroad, The Norfolk Gateway.
In a few moments Engine 2000 will be coupled to another engine already sitting in the yard, where it will await rail cars floated across the Bay on the 414-foot-long steel barge. If our engine had been hauling freight, the cars would have been pushed onto the barge, and then pushed or pulled (depending on weather conditions) by tugboat to the Norfolk side. The entire roundtrip operation, including any reordering of the cars, takes six to eight hours. But now, Preston slows the train to a crawl. He flicks a lever on the console, and, as it has for more than a century, a train whistle echoes over the Chesapeake tide.
There are no historic markers along Virginia’s Route 13 noting that the “Father of Rock ’n’ Roll” lived and died here. No signs point toward his gravesite in Franktown, Va., which, until the late 1990s—25 years after his death in 1974—wasn’t even marked by a headstone. 
So I’ve enlisted a local, Billy Sturgis, to take me around. Sturgis, 53, may be Crudup’s biggest fan on the Shore. A blues fanatic who co-hosts a radio show every Saturday night on WESR-FM, he produced an album featuring the three Crudup brothers in 2000. The record, “Franktown Blues,” features Big Boy’s sons performing their father’s hits as well as original tunes. Sturgis, also a devotee of the Blues Brothers movies, owns one of the “Blues mobiles” from the second film, but it has a flat tire, so we step into his slate-colored Mercedes instead. 
He would perform occasionally at the Do-Drop Inn (now Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn), a licensed juke joint in the area that remains meticulously maintained by its owner, Jane Cabarrus, whose father built it by hand in 1967. These days, the club, likely the last juke joint on the Eastern Shore, is mainly used as a catering hall and community center, but its long bar, pool table, and worn wooden dance floor speak to a time when it hosted musical acts from around the region. 
Tolchester Beach Amusement Park, Kent County
The park offered a plethora of amusements from goat-drawn carts to Shoot the Chute, on which patrons whooshed down a steep track in a boat-shaped car. Rides cost anywhere between 10 and 20 cents, and the entrance fee in the 1950s was a quarter. A sign, now on display in the Tolchester Revisited Museum, requests patrons to “Pay as you leave,” a remnant, says museum curator Bill Betts, of “an era when people trusted each other,” and offered small tokens of kindness—like the engineer of the Little Jumbo train who, as a service to young mothers, heated baby bottles on the train’s engine.
Mago Vista, Anne Arundel County
Chesapeake Beach, Calvert County
Many day trippers took the 50-cent, 60-minute express train from D.C., but overnight guests could stay at the luxurious Belvedere Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in 1923. “It was a terrible fire,” recalls resident Elizabeth Stinnett in one of the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum’s oral history interviews, “and we didn’t have no fire engines—no equipment at all. So they had a bucket brigade and everybody in Chesapeake Beach had a bucket and carried water, trying to put that fire out.” 
For more than 50 years, African-Americans attended Kent County’s one-room Worton Point Colored School No. 2. Now a museum, its former students share memories of attending a segregated school without indoor plumbing or running water. Despite these shortcomings, many say it was the best education they ever received.
The large cross studded with small light bulbs hanging above the blackboard is a remnant of when the schoolhouse was used as a church in the 1980s while the current church, St. George Methodist, was being rebuilt nearby, they explain.
Somerville didn’t intend to establish a museum when in 1994 she put out a call for community photographs and artifacts to display at the former schoolhouse. Her effort was part of a fundraiser for the completion of St. George Methodist Church next door. She intended to dismantle the schoolhouse exhibit after the fundraiser, “but there was such a great following, I ended up having to leave the exhibit up,” she explains. “I never thought it would be long term, but once I realized what I really had, then I just decided that’s exactly what we need to do is turn this into a museum.” 
One-room schoolhouses were an integral part of the African-American educational experience on the Eastern Shore in the late-19th through the mid-20th century, and although exact numbers are tricky to pin down, records show that in 1927, there were 16 “colored public schools” in Kent County in historically African-American communities like Morgnec and Melitota. Although they eventually became part of the Kent County school system, schools like the one at Worton Point were established by the community, not by the local government. “The establishment did not really see a need to see us educated, but our ancestors did,” says Airlee Johnson, a retired real estate professional who attended Worton Point in the 1950s. “And I’m sure they worked very hard to have the schools in their own community. [It was] a grass-roots movement.” 
If you were late, remembers Joan Freeman, another former student, the teacher would recite a rhyme—“Dollar, dollar, 10 o’clock scholar/You used to come at 9 o’clock, but now you come at noon”—and you wouldn’t be allowed to come to school until noon the next day, a shameful situation you wouldn’t want to have to explain to your parents. 
Johnson, who attended the school a decade after Lively, recalls the teachers the county sent in for weekly art lessons. “They were the only white teachers we had,” she says. “We did finger painting and clay, but we used real clay. None of that Play-Doh. And that was fun because we had a chance to play in real dirt.”
The school day ended at 3 o’clock when students heard the bus rumbling over the hill and lined up orderly for dismissal. “You’d go home, and you couldn’t wait until the next day to go back,” says Alton Somerville. “School was fun to me [then].”
During the mid-twentieth century, Southern Maryland boasted flashy casinos, leggy showgirls, and three times as many slot machines as Nevada. How did the gaming industry ever get so big in Maryland? And what lessons can we learn from its demise?
Legalized slots come up often these days, given former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s efforts and now Maryland Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller’s desire to bring slot-machine proceeds to bear on the state’s financial ills, but few people on the pro-slots side ever mention Maryland’s history with the devices. Perhaps that’s because in 1963, despite filling up the coffers of Southern Maryland counties to the tune of $1.6 million a year and bringing an economic boom to an undeveloped rural section of the state, then-Gov. J. Millard Tawes introduced legislation to abolish them. This was mostly in response to pressure from citizens groups and local politicians, including an Anne Arundel County citizens committee that claimed slots were “destroying the fabric of family and economic life in our county.” And despite charges of bribery and intimidation—what former gubernatorial press secretary Frank DeFilippo described in a Jan. 21, 2003, Sun editorial as “slots barons skulking the hallways and glaring down from galleries” of the statehouse—Tawes prevailed, signing a law on the last day of the 1963 legislative session that phased out slots over a five-year period. Thus, on July 1, 1968, the last slot machines were hauled out of the bars, taverns, and roadhouses of Southern Maryland, piled onto trucks, and hauled away to be destroyed.
Ironically, Maryland wasn’t so little in relation to Las Vegas, according to a Sun feature that ran on Feb. 24, 1963. Titled “Gold in the Spinning Wheels,” Maryland had three times as many federally licensed gambling devices as Nevada. In addition, according to the report of the state Slot Machine Committee, a special investigation of gambling completed that year, the four counties’ total take was $24 million in 1963 alone. In comparison, the highest-grossing casino in Nevada, the Harrah’s Club in Lake Tahoe, garnered a total take of $20 million in 1961, according to Gambler’s Money: The New Force in American Life, a 1965 book by Wallace Turner. But Harrah’s had at its disposal higher stakes games such as blackjack and craps, thus Southern Maryland and its slots were keeping pace, albeit a nickel at a time.
My first visit to the last house on Holland Island was nearly half a century ago. I took time from a fishing trip with my dad to play baseball with some local kids in the yard, a modest swatch of green sandwiched between Chesapeake Bay on its western edge and washed by Hollands Strait on its east. As I recall, the house was set back comfortably from the water, perhaps a hundred feet or more. We could follow a path that ran north a few hundred feet from the yard through a small forest of big persimmon and hackberry trees. 
At 7:11 a.m., Camp Wright counselor Suzanne Carley tiptoes out of her bayfront cabin sporting navy gym shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops — and ten silver rings divided among her fingers. Besides the metallic hum of the cicadas and the drone of a waterman’s deadrise motoring just off shore, the campgrounds are silent on this August morning. 
“This morning there was some drama in the cabin,” says counselor Claire Riley from Towson, who was also a camper here for six years. “There was some sibling rivalry. Two sisters were upset with each other, and there are also two cousins in the cabin who were fighting about which one is Irish and which isn’t. I’ve never had that much drama before nine in the morning.” 
“One of the great things for me at that time,” he continues, “was when the swimming pool was built in 1965. We no longer had to fool with the nettles. We filled it with Bay water that was pumped in and filtered, so it was somewhat salty. It was a wonderful luxury.” 
In the early years, camp was primitive, with the only facilities being a dining hall/recreation room, a pump house/wash room outfitted with faucets for bathing, three eighteen-foot-square bunk houses (which housed eight campers and one counselor) for younger campers, and several sixteen-foot-square tents erected on board flooring for older campers. There were two outhouses, dubbed “Hollywood” and “Beverly Hills,” and all drinking water was collected from a rain barrel. 
Twelve-year-old Morgan Stein has been coming here for the past four summers and knows all of the cheers in the Camp Wright Song Book as well as the words to Britney Spears’ latest hit. “It’s fun singing the songs because it gets you all excited and energized,” says Stein, a native of Baltimore. “And then at night when we play the bedtime songs, it gets you calmed down and ready to go to sleep so that you can wake up for a new day and have more songs and more cheers.” 
While the soccer game rages on, jewelry is being created in arts and crafts class in Davenport Hall; kids stuffed inside orange lifejackets are maneuvering kayaks and Sunfish on the Bay; and salsa lessons are being given in Clary Hall. Every available inch of wall and ceiling space here is a patchwork of painted, penned, and carved names of former campers and the dates of their stay. Lyrical graffiti intermingles with the signatures, from snippets of poetry by Henry David Thoreau to songs by The Band and The Grateful Dead, to a prayer that reads, “Lord, please watch over me, for the Bay is so big and my boat is so small.” There are even political sentiments, like the warning that reads “This is not a democracy.” 
Talbot Cabin, up your nose,
Campers sitting on the deck and bleachers around the seventy-five-foot, four-lane pool swat at biting flies. It’s just moments before the blue team versus white team swim meet, and those anxious for relief from the heat are splashing around wildly, enjoying the last few minutes of free-swim. But not Lindsay, Sarah, and sisters Kit and Annie. They’ve opted to sit this one out, preferring to huddle up for some quality girl talk. “I’m like not a good swimmer at all, like not at all,” one comments to her friend, while the others discuss the finer points of movie star Orlando Bloom and some TV commercials. 
After dinner, things begin to wind down, with the flag lowering ceremony and “cabin time,” when cabinmates hang out, take a hike, or go for a final swim of the day. The youngest campers hit the sheets at 9:15 p.m.; the older ones get to stay up late, until 10 p.m. Counselors curfew is midnight. The counselors are granted two hours off each day and paid $150 to $300 a week — their job is a real labor of love. “I wasn’t supposed to be here this summer,” explains twenty-year-old, first-year counselor Julia Roca, who was also a camper for four years. “I intended to get a real job. But I came down to pick up my sister, within five minutes of being here I was like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I not here?’ So I came for session three, and the night before it ended, I decided to stay for another. So here I am in session six, and I’ll be back for session seven. When I start thinking of this as a job, I’ll stop doing it. But now it’s still fun.” 
Wise Cemetery 
Cemetery, Hoopers Island
Mechanics Cemetery
St. John’s United Methodist Church Graveyard
Sturgis Plot
It’s 8 o’clock on a hot summer morning and brothers Jerry and Preston Lewis are waiting for me aboard engine No. 2000. They’ve paused the midnight-blue, 1,850-horsepower diesel-powered locomotive in a knot of woods outside Hallwood, Va., so I can board. “How ya doin’?” says Jerry with the good nature of a host welcoming a friend into his house. He’s a fifty-three-year-old Cape Charles native, sporting well-worn jeans and a neat T-shirt. 
The engine car is surprisingly roomy—about the size of a VW microbus—and besides the controls, sparsely equipped except for a chair on the opposite side of the compartment next to some side windows. Jerry offers me his seat, kept clean with a makeshift cardboard covering. From the high perch of the conductor’s seat, I’m provided a great view of the approaching track. 
The brothers long ago grew accustomed to the train’s slow pace. They once worked as watermen but stopped crabbing and oystering when the “water went bad,” says Preston. “Trains are like the water,” he says. “It gets into your blood.” 
When Pennsylvania congressman and coal tycoon William L. Scott first proposed a rail line on Virginia’s Eastern Shore to the Pennsylvania Railroad, the only railroad executive interested in the venture was Alexander J. Cassatt. It was Cassatt who explored the Shore on horseback in 1882 to plot the new railroad’s course, with locals lobbying him to place the lines along their lands. But Cassatt opted for a straight route down the center of the peninsula, through thick forests and farms. And he solved what had thwarted plans to build previous railroads: the way to traverse the watery gap between Cape Charles and Norfolk. 
Penn Central took over the line in 1968, but went bankrupt in the early ‘70s. 
Masthead Photo by