Editor’s note: This is a new Spy series that will be sharing historic news clippings on Chestertown from the perspective of the newspapers of Washington, D.C. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. While the Shore’s local newspapers have faithfully recorded Chestertown’s life and times since 1791, when this small town periodically finds itself being the subject of a major daily story, it’s always been greeted, like any small community, with extreme interest. For when those occasions occur, now or in the past, it gives the community a rare opportunity to see how the rest of the world may view it. And thanks to such powerful databases as newspapers.com, we can now able to share some of that coverage from the West of Chestertown.
For a special moment in time, the entire world paid special attention to Chestertown when Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the Washington college campus on October 22, 2033 and declared that his war against the country’s economic depression would recover faster than under a dictatorship.
Daily News (New York, New York) 22 Oct 1933
Jack Stenger says
FDR’s visit to Chestertown was a major event. There is a photo of the event hanging in Ellen’s restaurant, which shows the president speaking to a large crowd assembled on the lawn in front of William Smith Hall. I recognized several citizens recorded there. The man on the right in your photo is “Colonel” Hiram Brown, then chairman of the Washington College board. My father took me to see the president, but, since I was a mere five year old, I was most interested in the helium balloon which he bought me there. To my great dismay, I unintentionally let it fly away.