One August day, some years ago, I made my intermittent pilgrimage to Arlington National Cemetery. I always manage to choose the hottest day of the season. The heat and the whining of the annual cicadas have become emblematic since my first visit as a ten-year-old walking behind the horse-drawn caisson carrying my step-grandfather to his gravesite.

Over the years, I’ve followed the horse-drawn and flag-draped caissons three times, the sound of hooves on macadam as solemn and eloquent as the bugle call, Taps.

I began to know the place by heart: from the asynchronous Greek- Revival pillars of the Amphitheatre to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its revered precision of the Changing of the Guard, Kennedy’s Eternal Flame, and Arlington House, once Robert E. Lee and the Custis family residence. During one visit, I discovered that Custis Walk took me to the gravesites of the US Colored Troops, an adjacency of wry and poetic justice.

Only recently, I have come to learn that several sections of the cemetery I traversed had been a “Freedman’s Village” of 50 residences, with a community kitchen, school, and hospital surrounding a pond. There, freed slaves began their lives free from bondage. The village continued to exist for almost 30 years. More than 28,000 residents of Freedman’s Village are buried in Section 27 of the cemetery.

It was one of those days, walking from the Changing of the Guard toward the cemetery’s entrance, that I had an odd encounter.

Pausing to decide on my route—the cemetery is a maze of hilly paths and narrow roads—I noticed a man holding a sheet of paper and staring at me with that expression only the lost can project. I knew he was about to ask me for help as he approached. He was tall, with close-cropped silver hair and wearing a suit, the tie long gone. He held out the sheet of paper and uttered “Brown Bomber” as a question drenched in a heavy German accent.

He was holding a map, a sort of tourist guide for Arlington visitors, and he wanted to see Joe Louis’ memorial. I had no idea Joe Louis, the illustrious boxer, was interred at Arlington.

We found the famous boxer’s memorial stone in minutes. My acquaintance stood before the monument, its bas-relief of the fighter eternally posed in a boxer’s stance. I hung back
listening to the cicadas in the stifling furnace of the afternoon. He turned and nodded his head, as if to thank me.

He said he was a young boy in Prussia when he listened to the famous 2-minute fight at Yankee Stadium between Louis and Max Schmeling on the radio. Schmeling, having beaten Louis in a previous fight and heralded by the Reich’s propagandists as the Nazi’s golden boy, was decimated in the first round of the rematch and sent to the hospital for ten days with a broken vertebrae. A Black man had beaten him.

As we walked down the hill toward the entrance, he told me that he was Trappist monk in Germany and promised himself a trip to honor Joe Louis and to thank him for a small sense of triumph over adversity, homage to the man who gave so many a shred of hope in a Europe quickly being ravaged by Hitler’s quest to crush Europe. “That fight was what we needed at the time,” he said.

Over the years, I thought about that moment at Arlington and have come to learn of another dimension of the fight heard by 70 million people worldwide. Louis and Schmeling were complicated products of their time with cultural, political, and racial implications. Schmeling walked a tightrope: he had tea with Hitler and gave the Nazi salute after one fight, had a Jewish manager, but he was not a Nazi, nor was he a racist. He even personally saved two Jewish children by hiding them at his residence. Louis, revered by Blacks during an America in the thrall of Jim Crow racism where even the Northern press traded in racist headlines, had become the hope of an America as a land of opportunity. Both were caught in a drama bigger than boxing. They were avatars of contradicting ideologies.

After all this and the “great rematch,” Schmeling and Louis became lifelong friends, the German even assisting the “Champ” financially until his death in 1981.

And I thought about the little boy in Prussia glued to the radio, hoping for a hint that at least for a moment the world could be right.

As I left, I looked back up at the Arlington hills where 400,000 souls lay buried: Union, Confederate, Black, white and brown, men and women, families of the fallen. The sacrifices, the loss.

I was standing next to a small marker inscribed with “Infant Civilian.” Where it all begins.

 

 

 

In a few weeks, Americans of all sorts will be celebrating the traditional Memorial Day weekend. And in between family BBQs and trips to the beach, many of them will attend ceremonies or parades that honor those who have died while serving in the military for the United States of America.

One of them will be Chestertown’s Michael McDowell. With long ties to the military, the Irish-born retiree quickly connects to America’s servicemen and women when reporting for the CBC, being a scholar at Harvard, or while serving The Citadel’s board of directors. His enthusiasm was so positive that he nor his wife, Susan, thought twice about their son attending a military academy nor a future career as a Marines.

But Memorial Day has meant something entirely different for the McDowells since they received word that their son, Conor, their only child, was killed in an planned military exercise accident in California two years ago this month.

Conor, who had only recently graduated from college, was training in an armored vehicle with several others when it unexpectedly fell and rolled into a exceptionally large crevasse in the practice zone.

It is impossible to comprehend the loss of this magnitude on any parent, but for Michael, the pain was so much more intense once he discovered that Conor’s death could have been entirely avoidable.

After flying out to California to comfort Conor’s fiancé and meet with officers about the tragedy, a simple Google search told the veteran journalist that his son’s accident was just one of a long pattern where men and women were dying during similar rollover accidents.

That search result was all that was needed for the McDowell family to transition from profound grief and turn it into a campaign. Using long established Washington contacts and the support of the Maryland delegation in Congress, the McDowells did something that is rarely done in the federal government; as private citizens they convinced the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to launch an independent review of military training and oversight. The GAO will release that study and its recommendations to Capitol Hill next month.

The Spy talked to Michael at his home in Chestertown last week about this painful journey and the special mission of truly memorializing his son Conor.

This video is approximately six minutes in length. 

 

 

With news that President Biden plans to overhaul the Northeast Corridor Amtrak railway system with an infusion of $80 Billion as part of his infrastructure proposal, it was good timing to meet historian and author Lorett Treese and learn about the history of railroads on the Eastern Shore. 

Even if the infrastructure plan prevails, however, the Eastern Shore will never see another golden era of railroad transportation, and except for a few small spurs still operating, railroad history will languish on the shelves of museums or found piecemeal as artifacts like the 1902 Chestertown train station.

Treese, who holds a master’s degree in American History from Villanova University, spent twenty years as a Bryn Mawr archivist, and has long had a fascination with railroads. Three of her books describe a complicated growth, countless changes in rail ownerships (and names), bankruptcies, mergers, buyouts, and blue-sky dreams that never materialized as railroad companies large and small tried to connect

In her newly published Railroads of the Eastern Shore (The History Press), Treese writes an extensive history of the Delmarva Peninsula’s many bids to create north-south rail lines between the Eastern Seaboard and Norfolk, Virginia via a line southward through the Shore to Cape Charles, 60 miles south of Chincoteague.

The America of the early 19th-Century sought a faster and more reliable transportation system than the rough overland stagecoaches, canals, and steamships. As early as the 1830s, plans were made, and State “charters” were given to independent railroad companies to connect the Shore with mainland markets. Most of the rail lines were never built but exceptions like the 16-mile railroad New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad was completed in 1832. 

 Treese says that the earliest evidence she found for an Eastern Shore railroad was an 1833 plan for a rail line that would have run from Elkton to Tangier Sound near Crisfield. “Unfortunately, it was one of the many, many chartered railroads that were never built. It would have been called ‘The Eastern Shore Railroad,” and would have been the first of the railroads to bear that name.” 

Planned for decades and interrupted by the Civil War, it wasn’t until the 1880s that a north-south railroad was finally built to traverse the Eastern Shore.

The New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk Railroad carried freight and passengers to a steam ferry connecting Cape Charles and Norfolk. Eventually, the massive Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the line. This system and an ever changing network of “feeder” lines connecting towns on the Shore endured almost a century. 

The building of the Bay Tunnel Bridge and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the 60s brought the rail system to a close. Aside from the Amtrak station in Wilmington, DE, still connecting the Northeast Corridor, Baltimore, and Washington, only a few small feeder lines continue to operate in the region.

Lorett Treese’s book is a great lesson in historical explication: her three years of research uncovered original documents clarifying the intricate puzzle of rail plans and ownerships. She employs a clear narrative to document the story. Even if you are not a railroad buff, the story holds interest for its portrayal of American commerce and its effort, failures and successes 

The historian tells the Spy that many of her historical discoveries were gleaned from rummaging through countless cardboard boxes found in the Pennsylvania Archives, Temple University, and Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, to name a few.

“The old records of the Pennsylvania Railroad were split up, but The Hagley had the records of the subsidiaries I wanted, including the NYP&N and the PWB, and none of that stuff is online or microfilm. It’s in big cardboard boxes, and I would go down a couple of times a week, and I would say, give me box number this, this, and this, and I would take out the files one at a time and look at every piece of paper.”

Only vestiges of the railroad era remain today—a restored station here, a small museum there— but for a century, the iron-horses and diesel locomotives were an integral part of the transportation landscape. Still, a few local connector trains will trigger flashing red lights and bring down a crossing gate to stop highway traffic.

“Trains are still running on the old Kent County Railroad, thanks to its modern-day successor, called the Maryland and Delaware Railroad but only as far as Worton. Originally, the train traversed the Shore form Chestertown to Woodland Beach (Smyrna) Delaware where it met steamboats from the Delaware City, Salem, and Philadelphia Steamboat Company.

For us, the 117-year old Chestertown passenger station—and the short run in Worton— remain our only link to the Shore’s railroad past.

Treese writes, “At the base of Chestertown’s Cross Street, there’s a passenger station built circa 1902-03, a time when the Kent County Railroad had been liberated from its New Jersey connections to come under the control of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

Lorett Treese’s other books include, The Storm Gathering; The Penn Family and the American Revolution, Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol, A Serpent’s Tale: Discovering America’s Ancient Mound Builders, Railroads of New Jersey, and Railroads of Pennsylvania. She has also published widely in magazines. 

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. Railroads of the Eastern Shore may be found on Amazon and at historypress.com.

 

Spy readers may remember the name of Neil King from a few months ago when he generously contributed a masterful treatment of Frederick Douglass and the historic landscapes of the Eastern Shore. But he is best known as the well-respected global economics editor for the Wall Street Journal, who now calls Claiborne, a hamlet a few miles east of St. Michaels, his weekend home, where he works on independent projects that capture his imagination. 

So shortly after he completed one of those projects for the Spy, he fulfilled a long-term aspiration this spring by opening the front door of his house in Washington, D.C. one morning and walking to the heart of Manhattan over the next 26 days.

There were several motivations for this particular journey. Neil had wanted for some time to retrace the steps of many of the founding fathers in the 18th Century who were required to make similar trips between the new country’s northern and southern regions. He also thought the experience would make an interesting book that continued the tradition of such travel writers as de Tocqueville and Dickens in documenting Mid-Atlantic America. 

But what King didn’t anticipate during this leisurely stroll (he stayed at B&B’s and hotels along the way) through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey was how his daily encounters with “real Americans” would result in what he could only describe as a religious experience. For it was not only the sense of connection with people who were so different from his own background and political beliefs but how stunning and meaningful this old pathway had become for him and his hopes for America’s future  

The Spy sat down with Neil at the Claiborne Village Hall last week to talk about that experience as he prepares to collect his journals, images, and thoughts for a book we can hardly wait for. 

This video is approximately ten minutes in length.

 

Already renowned for its fall course “Chesapeake Semester,” an interdisciplinary study of the Chesapeake Bay region, Washington College’s Center for Environment & Society (CES) is offering another unique summer course, “Headwater to Bay,” a journey geared to inspire artistic interpretation.

Chesapeake historian, writer, and CES instructor Kate Livie will co-direct the summer program with husband and Program Manager of “Chesapeake Semester” Ben Ford. Together they will introduce a group of students to the Bay region as they “hike, paddle, cycle, camp to meet the Chesapeake’s people and landscapes, up close and personal”— and interpret their experience through various art forms.

Since 2012, Ford directs the College’s CES academic course “Chesapeake Semester” a 16-credit initiative that spends one-third of the semester in the field meeting with farmers, artists, poets, and watermen along with a comparative study that includes an 11-day trip to Guatemala and Belize where they study similar environmental conditions in different parts of the world. 

“I like to say that we’re using the Chesapeake as a case study to understand more deeply that the issues that are facing any coastal community worldwide,” he says.

Livie, author of the acclaimed book Chesapeake Oysters: The Bay’s Foundation and Future, notes that the success of the Fall program inspired a different approach to learn about the Bay history and culture but through the lens of a creative.

“The fall program has been so successful, the College is really interested in how we can maximize the summer months to provide more experiential programs across disciplines within the College…so Ben and I saw an opportunity to have a summer spin-off that capitalizes on the way the Chesapeake has been a source of inspiration for artists, photographers, and writers for generations,” Livie says.

With the hope of attracting students and non-students interested in the arts, the four-week program will explore the Bay from the Susquehanna to the coastal bays where the Chesapeake meets the ocean and experience and interpret it from the vantage point of working artists using their skillset, may it be sketching, photography, videography, or creative environmental writing.

“Headwater to Bay” is a partnership between the Center for Environment and Society and the College’s newest major, “Communications and Media Studies Department.”

To find out more about “Headwater to Bay,” contact Ben Ford at bford2@washcoll.edu and to register, go here 

The Spy, for one, would be signing up tomorrow for this creative and learning adventure.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length.

 

As mass vaccination centers propel the nation’s rising immunization rate, businesses large and small are calculating a year’s worth of damage and trying to define the contours of a “new normal.”

There is encouraging news. The government stimulus spurring last month’s 8% rise in retail sales along with a new report that jobless claims have fallen to a pandemic low are spurring optimism in a reemerging business climate with many companies predicting a return to pre-Covid profitability by the end of 2021.

This is tempered, however, by the thousands, if not millions, of small businesses that have closed forever in the immense shadow of half a million deaths.

The Spy reached out to Benchworks CEO Thad Bench to talk about managing his business during Covid and what the “new normal” might look like going forward.

Benchworks is a comprehensive marketing services agency founded in 1991 and headquartered in Chestertown with offices in Philadelphia and Boston. Throughout the decades the marketing and branding company has been recognized with countless awards for its leadership qualities and innovative production accomplishments.

Still, the CEO has not lost sight of his beloved Kent County and the need for business strategies beyond the setbacks of the pandemic.

“I think that quality retail establishments and restaurants are clearly important to the vibrancy of Chestertown. The more we have, the better in that we can become more of a culinary/shopping destination,” Bench said.

He adds that he sees a real opportunity to scale commercial activity and employment in Kent county is to attract knowledge workers and organizations that employ them. Data centers, software companies, etc., are no longer geofenced.

“The question is what can we can do to attract tech companies and provide them with quality employees. Recruiting talent from Philadelphia, Annapolis, and beyond is feasible given the lessons we have learned from the pandemic.”

Bench, a two-year member of Washington College’s Board of Visitors and Governors, says Washington College is considering sponsoring a technology incubator with a focus on environmentally focused businesses. This makes a lot of sense and plays to Chestertown’s unique geography and rural character.

This video is approximately ten minutes in length.