Eastern Shore Growth • Kent Island Memories Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Fall 2007
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- Summertime family Lighthouse Overnight dates coming soon.
- To the Point
- To the Point
- Dick Day in his Southern Maryland machine shop. He is an expert on the marine engines built by Palmer Brothers.
- Day shows CBMM Curator of Collections Pete Lesher
- Some of the tools (right) Day uses in his restorations. If he doesn’t have the right tool, he makes it. One-lung
- Big Plans for Small Towns New condos dominate the Crisfield waterfront, rising above the harbor and seafood processing buildings.
- The Bay Bridge is just part of the view from Broad Creek on Kent Island.
- Cambridge is undergoing a transformation as condos and townhouses are being built around the harbor. Photos by Cooper Media
- The author (second from left) and his family enjoy a day on the Love Point beach on Kent Island’s northern tip in the late 1940s.
- Boating on Love Point harbor near the ferry dock in 1925. From left, the author’s aunt, Hettie Fisher, her nephew, Walter Gardner, Hettie’s husband, Frank Fisher
- Kent Narrows today bustles with heavy vehicle and boat traffic.
Lighthouse Overnight Program Scout, Student, and Youth Groups Become a lighthouse keeper. Experience the life of a 19th-century keeper through planned activities. Take a hands-on tour of the lighthouse, perform the tasks of a traditional keeper, participate in an induction ceremony, and more…. Fridays and Saturdays in April, May, June, September, and October. Dates are filling up for the spring—book now for fall 2008. Cost: $650 for up to 15 people. Cost includes program activities, Mister Jim cruise, and two days’ admission to the Museum. Special lighthouse badge and Chesapeake Bay patch available for Brown- ie, Junior, and Cadet Girl Scout groups.
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The Academy provides a diverse range of courses, includ- ing classes in ecology, literature, history, and gardening, as well as field trips. Go to www.cbmm.org and click on “Educa- tion & Outreach” to find a course list. To register, make course suggestions, or to get more de- tailed information about upcoming activities, contact the Academy for Lifelong Learning at the Chesapeake Bay Mari- time Museum, 410-745-2916 ext. 111. The annual member- ship fee is $25 for a single membership and $40 for a couple membership. Membership in ALL is required for course par- ticipation. Museum membership does not apply. Safety Training Pays Off The CBMM marina crew helped rescue three boaters who fell from their vessels in separate incidents during the sum- mer, says Visitor Services Manager Paul Stearns. Visitor Services Assistant Melissa Faulkner rescued two of the boaters. The first accident occurred when a boater slipped on the swim platform of his boat tied up at the Museum’s A- Dock and could not get out of the water. “Melissa jumped down on the swim platform and pulled him out,” Stearns says. In the second case, a woman fell into the water while Me- lissa was helping her dock. She grabbed the woman’s hand and guided her to a ladder. When another woman fell from her boat at the dock, Se- curity Officer Rick Thalmann and Visitor Services Assistant Rachel Roman helped her get to a ladder. Stearns says it is unusual to have water rescues. “Last year, we didn’t have any, zero.” He says that the staff is trained in how to handle safety issues each year. “Marina Management 101 is what we call it,” he says. In a letter to Melissa, the woman she helped wrote: “I thank you with all my heart for your help. You have all of the qualities of a level-headed, kind, intelligent, and courageous person. St. Michaels is lucky to have you as an employee.” To the Point Two Johns a-Teaching CBMM Vice President of Advancement John Miller and Facilities Manager John Ford leave their Eagle House offices each week for 90-minute sojourns in the land of academe. With their unique, tag-team approach to teaching, they have led classes at the Museum’s Academy for Lifelong Learning (ALL) for the last five years that range from a study of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sweep- ing novel One Hundred Years of Solitude to one-act plays to Literature of the Chesapeake Bay. Miller, a former college professor, and Ford, who had no previous teaching experience, found they share a love of lit- erature and volunteered to teach at ALL, an adult-education program sponsored by CBMM. Miller says he and Ford started teaching together after Ford mentioned that Moby Dick was read every year at Mystic Seaport and suggested that it should be done in St. Michaels. “I said, ‘I’ll do it if you do it. Why don’t we co-teach.’” The two pick a topic they think will be fun to teach and then set up a class. “One of us writes the syllabus. We usually meet the day of class and get a sense of what we want to do in case we come into class for an hour and a half and nobody says anything, but that has never happened,” Miller says. “What is particularly fun about it is we do not coordi- nate exactly what we are going to do,” Miller says. “So John might be outraged by what I might say and vice versa.” The classes have proved very popular with classes rang- ing from 20 to 25 for the six-week session. The largest class ever, 35, signed up to read and discuss One Hundred Years of Solitude. This winter, the duo is leading a class on the short stories of William Faulkner. Ford says the partnership has developed a “following with the usual cast of characters showing up. They tell us they wouldn’t care of we did the phone book.” “With the whole ALL concept, you have almost exclu- sively senior citizens who bring all these various life experi- ences and perspectives to the class,” he says. “You end up seeing whatever piece of literature we are talking about from so many different angles.” John Ford and John Miller, CBMM’s literary tag team. Melissa Faulkner to the rescue, twice. 10
New Boat Yard Apprentice Cliff Mumford has joined the Boat Yard crew as an apprentice. Boat Yard Manager Rich Sco- field say that Mumford, of Milford, Delaware, comes with woodworking and some boatbuilding experi- ence. “He is a sponge; he learns everything he can,” Scofield says. “He wants to make a living working on boats.” He said the CBMM ap- prenticeship is for a year and the Museum can extend it for a second year at its discretion. Helen Van Fleet, George Merrill Honored CBMM Operations Assistant Helen Van Fleet and vol- unteer and ALL instructor George Merrill were honored in September by the Talbot County Commission on Aging for their contributions to the community. They were presented with certificates at the second annual “Senior Celebration of Life” luncheon sponsored by Londonderry Retirement Com- munity in Easton. Lighthouse Draws a Crowd Spending a night in the Hooper Strait Lighthouse has be- come one of the Education Department’s most popular pro- grams, especially with the Brownie and Girl Scout crowd, says CBMM’s Director of Education Robert Forloney. More than 300 visitors this year, most of them Brownie and Girl Scout groups, brought their sleeping bags to the Mu- seum and slept on the historic lighthouse’s hardwood floors. “We have four weekends booked for fall ’08 already,” he says. The scouting groups have merit badges that focus on lighthouses. “Many of the groups come here to help the girls earn their badges,” he says. Overnight participants receive an introduction to Chesa- peake Bay lighthouses, a guided tour of the lighthouse, and a chance to perform some of the duties of a traditional light- house keeper. In addition to the educational activities and overnight accommodations, they receive two days’ admis- sion to the Museum and a souvenir patch. For more information on the Lighthouse Overnight Program, contact Youth Programs Coordinator Rachel Dolhanczyk at rdolhanczyk@cbmm.org, or call 410- 745-2916 ext. 103, or go to www.cbmm.org and click on “Education & Outreach.” Community Outreach More than 30 members of the Union United Methodist Church in St. Michaels attended a special open house at the Museum in September as part of an expanded program to create new partnerships. The men, women, and children explored the Museum on special docent-guided tours, went aboard the Lady Maryland and Sigsbee, two of the traditional Bay vessels maintained by the Living Classrooms Foundation, and participated in a variety of children’s activities. The visit grew out of a similar event when CBMM opened its doors to the church congregation during the Annu- al Homecoming Celebration at the end of August. This past winter, the church hosted a monthly Docent Meeting when the Museum auditorium was not available. Rosella Camper and Marla Baines, who serve on the CBMM Community Ad- visory Committee and are active in the church, discussed the video they created documenting African-American history in the area. The video was included in the recent “Waters of 11 Cliff Mumford, new Boat Yard apprentice. Young sailors on Lady Maryland during an open house. Girl Scouts enjoy a lighthouse sleepover.
Despair, Waters of Hope” exhibit. As the Education Department at CBMM moves to offer new educational programs, it is also working with commu- nity groups and organizations such as Union Church. CBMM looks forward to strengthening its ties with local communities in new and exciting ways. “Chesapeake Icons” Exhibit Opens Blue crabs, oysters, skipjacks, lighthouses, and waterfowl. These images have become symbols of the Chesapeake Bay. How these Chesapeake icons have evolved and ways they have been portrayed is the theme of a new exhibition at the Museum. “Chesapeake Icons” opened on October 6 on the second floor of the Museum’s Steamboat Building. Used by artists, writers, and salesmen of all types, these five representations of the Bay make up much of CBMM’s collection. This exhibition showcases a number of iconic ar- tifacts—from oyster cans and seafood marketing materials to fine art and models of skipjacks. The “Icons” exhibition will feature special programming (see calendar section of WaterWays for a partial listing of pro- grams) as well as gallery talks in the exhibit. For well over a hundred years, the oyster has served as the defining seafood industry of the Chesapeake Bay. In gallery talks on October 27 and 28, November 17, and December 8, from 1:30 – 2:00 p.m., learn how the oyster, as an iconic image, has been used as a successful marketing and advertising tool. Museum edu- cators will discuss how our extensive collection of oyster cans illustrates the large number of businesses once active in this region and how they have helped shaped the way people iden- tify the area. For more information about the “Chesapeake Icons” ex- hibition, please contact the Museum at 410-745-2916, or visit the Museum’s website at www.cbmm.org/icons.html. To the Point 12 Detail of a lighthouse quilt from the “Chesapeake Icons” exhibit. Annual Fund 2007-2008 “I’ve had a long-term interest in the Museum even before my wife and I moved to the Shore in 2005. For me the Museum is a unique place in many ways. But I have always been espe- cially attracted by its commit- ment to the preservation of the Bay’s historic working water- craft, in particular its dedica- tion to preserving and passing on wooden boatbuilding skills. These skills are an important part of the Bay’s maritime heritage, and I’m delighted my contributions of the Annual Fund help underwrite this unique aspect of CBMM’s program.”
— Tom Seip
Easton, Maryland “I love the water and I love the Chesapeake Bay. Boating and fishing have always been an enjoyable part of my life so it was natural for me to be attracted to CBMM and to be- come a member. I believe that annual giving from members is essential to maintaining and advancing the Museum’s pro- grams and assuring that they are sustained at the very highest level. My Annual Fund gift is an investment I enjoy making every year.”
— Dagmar Gipe
Royal Oak, Maryland Fall marks the beginning of our Annual Fund drive. Our goal is to raise $500,000 by the end of the fiscal year on April 30, 2008. The Annual Fund helps support all aspects of the Museum’s operations including exhibits, festivals, vessel restoration, and education programs for adults and children. Your contribution will also help to make our 18-acre campus a model of sustainability and a center of environmental responsibility. It will permit everyone who cares about the Chesapeake to learn more about its cultural and environmental history and sustain our efforts to preserve the Bay. To make a contribution please go to our website, www.cbmm.org, and click on “Members & Supporters” or contact John H. Miller, Vice President of Advancement at jmiller@cbmm.org or telephone 410-745-2916, ext 129. Tom Seip
Dagmar Gipe The first boat engine Dick Day worked on was a Lacka- wanna one-lunger that came out of a rich man’s motor launch in 1935. The owner had the misfortune of dying young and the unattended launch fell into disrepair. The family chauf- feur didn’t want to throw away the “nice little engine” so he gave it to the inquisitive 11-year-old Day. Over fresh blueberry muffins and coffee on the sun porch of his Southern Maryland creek-front home, Day, now 83, recalls how that little engine started his life-long fascination with all things mechanical. When he went off to fight in World War II, he says he put the engine in his family’s New Hampshire barn, never expecting to see it again. He says his father had given un- wanted metal for scrap during the war, but had not been able to get to the Lackawanna in the rafters. It is now part of Day’s extensive collection of antique marine engines. Day, a retired federal executive, is a nationally recog- nized expert on antique marine engines, especially Palmer Brothers Company engines, the simple but elegant engines that powered watermen’s boats on the Chesapeake Bay, and around the world, during the first half of the 20th century. During a tour of his extensive collection in his machine shop behind his home, Day points out the polished—still working—Lackawanna, sitting on its shelf. Day says that when he was growing up, his family ran an antique business, giving him access to many old engines and radios. He says high school gave him a chance to develop machining skills. “All of my contemporaries worked around engines and farm engines,” he says. “A lot of people had gas engines to run their washing machines, run their water pumps and all that kind of stuff. It wasn’t rocket science, you know.” In 1942, he went into the Army, trained as a radio engineer, and served 18 months in Italy. After his discharge in 1945, he 13
By James Boicourt How Dick Day’s “Hobby” Preserves a Nautical Niche married his high school sweetheart, Barbara. He spent the next few years in New Hampshire working a variety of jobs before beginning a radio-engineering career with RCA at the start of the Korean War. During the seven years with RCA, he says he traveled Europe, Africa, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, installing and repairing radio stations. He moved back to the United States and obtained a job as a radio engineer for the U.S. Government, where he contin- ued working on radio installations worldwide. In his lifetime, Day says he has installed and repaired radio stations in over 80 countries. Around 1960, he began using the name “Heritage Engine Collection” to collect, restore, and deal antique marine engine parts. Initially it was a stack of business cards with the name of the company printed on them to be able to buy wholesale materials from industrial supply companies. Day’s love of antique marine engines led him to restore and collect many different makers. His chief interest is in engines built by the Palmer Brothers Company of Cos Cob, Connecticut. He says he focused on Palmer because “out of the 750 or more documented manufacturers of marine en- gines at the time, the Palmer Brothers Company was by far the most dominant of the time.” A reputation for “extraordinarily reliable engines” kept Palmer as the most popular maker of their time. Day is now the primary source for any Palmer parts, infor- mation, and restoration help that collectors or historians need. The collection of engines, parts, and machining equipment are only one facet of what he has preserved. He has doggedly pursued historical information about the Palmer Brothers Company for years. He has published manuals, documenta- tion on each engine type, a history of the company, and an index of existing Palmer engines he updates every year. In these publications, Day has collected enough infor- mation to pinpoint the date of any engine by noting differ- ences in manufacturing processes from year to year. These changes, over time, also apply to other makes of engines, as they mark changes in manufacturing technology. He has preserved the understanding of this technology, not simply the physical artifacts. Day’s documentation of Palmer Brothers’ history is not 14
one of the larger engines in his collection. (Lower right) Brass shines on one of Day’s restored engines. 15 limited just to the models of engines produced, but tells the company’s story as well. The Palmer brothers started making telephone and telegraph parts in 1887. By 1893-1894, they were successful enough that they decided to try to branch out into motorized boats. Most people at the time were rowing, and the engines that were available were not reliable due to several basic design flaws. “Frank Palmer was the businessman, and Ray Palmer was a really good engineer,” Day says. After engineering telephone parts, Ray Palmer, who was born in Chestertown, Maryland, “understood electricity,” Day says. This allowed him to understand the cause of most engine problems was poorly designed ignition systems. Ray Palmer designed a mechanism allowing a strong spark with minimal battery drain, and, as a result, created an engine so successful that in 1895, during the first year of production, they sold 100. As the era of the two-stroke engine came to an end about 1910-1912, Palmer identified their principal interest as the working waterman. Their motto was, “Palmer Brothers, the Fisherman’s Friend.”
They built large four-stroke engines that were more du- rable and reliable than any on the market and were designed primarily for workboats. The NR1 and later the ZR1 mod- els were the most successful, and many of the parts used on the 1912 NR1 were in production until 1962. Total engine production numbers for the Palmer Brothers Company were around 60,000-70,000, Day says. Day’s interest in the history stems from Palmer’s impor- tant place on the Chesapeake Bay and other fishery-based communities. At one time, a Palmer one-lunger in a water- man’s boat meant getting to fish, crabs, or oysters reliably, and getting home safely. “I’ve had old watermen tell me that one of these old one- lungers would outlast three hulls,” Day says. “About every 10 years they’d cut down some Eastern Shore mahogany (loblolly pine) and build a new hull.” Palmers were a fixture of the local waterman culture. Dick Day has preserved the engines and their history. Through the Heritage Engine Collection, he has created a way to pass it on. James Boicourt is the Museum’s Boat Yard Systems Specialist. Some of the tools (right) Day uses in his restorations. If he doesn’t have the right tool, he makes it. One-lung- ers line the machine shop shelves. Photos by James Boicourt and Cooper Media. The Stevensville Cemetery covers a small triangle of high ground near the head of Cox Creek on Kent Island. The head- stones are carved with the names of the families of the early settlers of the largest island in the Chesapeake Bay. To the north and east, the creek quietly rises and falls with the tide. Herons stalk the edges of the creek for soft crabs. Ospreys circle over familiar waters. Light traffic crosses the two-lane bridge over the creek going to and from the Victo- rian heart of Stevensville that has changed little in 150 years. But on its southern edge, the eternal resting place ends at the westbound lanes of Routes 50 and 301 where tens of thou- sands of cars and trucks race along the spine of the island each day, covering the five miles from the Kent Narrows to the Bay Bridge in less than five minutes. In the 55 years since the first Bay Bridge connected Kent Island to Sandy Point on the western shore, few places on the Chesapeake Bay have been so dramatically changed. Kent Island has gone from an isolated collection of farm villages and fishing hamlets to a major suburb of the Washing- ton-Baltimore corridor. Strip malls line the highway and housing developments have filled most of the buildable land. The state recently stepped in to block the building of 1,350 new homes on 74 acres across the creek from the cemetery. The developer is appealing that ruling. “The way Kent Island has been developed, it is obvious it wasn’t planned,” says Rob Etgen, executive director of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy (ESLC). “It wasn’t cata- strophic, but it certainly wasn’t advantageous. The retrofit- ting of infrastructure and amenities is so expensive and so hard to do in existing communities.” What happened on Kent Island did not stay on Kent Island. The Eastern Shore, bypassed by East Coast urbaniza- tion for centuries, is on the verge of a population explosion. Housing developments, some with thousands of new homes, are in the ground or on the drawing boards in almost every community from Perryville and Crisfield, Maryland, to Cape Charles, Virginia. ESLC, a private, nonprofit organization based in Queenstown that works to protect farmland and help munici- palities with land-management planning, issued a report this year warning for the permanent loss of an additional 165,000 acres of Maryland farmland in the next 25 years. Citing Maryland Office of Planning statistics, the ESLC report states “about 160,000 new residents will make the Eastern Shore their home in the next 25 years, adding more than 70,000 new homes.” By Dick Cooper, Editor Eastern Shore 16
“Between 1900 and the construction of the first Bay Bridge in 1952, the Eastern Shore grew by an average of about 300 people a year,” the ESLC report states. “Today, the Shore adds that many new residents every two and a half weeks.” Office of Planning statistics show that the Eastern Shore population has been climbing since the first bridge, and gained momentum after the second span was built in 1973, rising from 200,000 in 1952 to more than 425,000 today. The influx of new residents is projected to push the population closer to 600,000 by the year 2030. While local groups have been able to get some devel- opments reduced in size, new houses are being built at a record pace. The change has been quick and recent on the Crisfield waterfront. The gritty, leading edge of the town, built out into the water on billions of oyster shells, is now dominated by new seven-story condo towers that have gone up over the last three years. More than 500 new units, complete with breathtaking Bay views, balconies, fireplaces, and mas- ter suites, will rise over the harbor, next to the remains of the shellfish and crabbing in- dustry. From the water, it looks as if the fishing village has been plowed, full-force, into Ocean City. The city that has called itself the “Seafood Capital of the World,” now boasts waterfront residences that cost between $400,000 and $1 million. While talks and studies have been going on for years with no firm commitment, Crisfield and Somerset County officials are still hopeful that scheduled passenger and vehicle ferry service between Crisfield and Reedville, Virginia, would help the economies of the cities on both sides of the Bay. In Cambridge, a town of less than 11,000, more than 4,000 new single-family houses, townhouses, and condo- miniums are being built around the harbor and on farm fields ringing the city. One of the planned communities has been scaled back from several thousand houses and a golf course to 650 homes and no golf course. Maryland agreed to buy 750 acres of the 1,000-acre development along the Little Blackwater River after it was feared that a large-scale community would adversely affect the fragile Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge downstream. Cambridge Mayor Cleve- land L. Rippons says his town was in need of revital- g r
w t h Big Plans for Small Towns New condos dominate the Crisfield waterfront, rising above the harbor and seafood processing buildings. 17
ization. The hardworking town on the banks of the Choptank River lost 10 percent of its residents over the last 50 years as canneries and seafood processors closed or moved out of town. The downtown had fallen into disrepair but it is now go- ing through a rebirth with old buildings put to new uses. “We have to grow incrementally,” Rippons says. He says a major home improvement store will open in Cambridge next year and more national retailers and restau- rant chains are talking about building in the town. “Once you get those, you get a snowball effect,” he says. “Some residents are not happy with the growth, because they liked things the way they were.” “You are constantly weighing one factor against another,” Rippons says. “You cannot grow too big, too fast.” Rippons says that on a recent weekend, Cambridge hosted a skipjack race, a speedboat race, and a street fair. The new town marina on the Choptank was completed this year. “Visitors will tell you it is one of the paramount marinas in the state,” he says. Planners say that several factors are drawing new resi- dents to the Eastern Shore. One of the strongest draws is housing costs. Developers advertise their new commu- nities east of the Bay Bridge by comparing home prices in the congested Maryland and Virginia suburbs on the west- ern shore. They point out that $300,000 can buy a two-bed- room condo in Annapolis or a four-bedroom colonial with two-car garage and a half-acre of land on the Eastern Shore.
Increasingly, members of the aging East Coast Baby Boomer generation, a demographic group blamed for every trend—good and evil—in the nation, are choosing the Eastern Shore for their retirement homes. For them, the attractions are the slower pace of life, the moderate climate, and the abun- dance of outdoor recreation, such as golf, fishing, hunting, and boating. Plus, they are just a few hours from their former homes, friends, and relatives. Several of the new housing de- velopments are marketed as 55-plus, active-adult communities with clubhouses, pools, and planned social events. Etgen says development of the Eastern Shore became in- evitable after Maryland’s “Reach the Beach” campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s made it easier to get from the western shore to the Atlantic beaches. By building new bridges and expanding the highways, the “commuter shed” for the western shore jobs expanded rapidly eastward. “People could suddenly commute from Cambridge to Baltimore and Washington every day,” he says. “The result- ing sprawl hit almost overnight.” He says the counties of the Eastern Shore have become increasingly protective of their rural zoning, pushing devel- opment into and around the existing towns. Denton, once a bustling port on the upper Choptank Riv- er in Caroline County, has a population of 3,000. More than 4,000 new homes are in the building or planning stages. Wal- mart plans to build in Denton. Trappe, in Talbot County, a crossroads village off Route 50, midway between Easton and Cambridge, has just over 1,100 residents. It could see as many as 3,000 new homes go up in the next sev- eral years. In St. Michaels, a quaint village with almost 1,200 residents, a develop- ment that would put almost 300 houses in a cornfield just north of town has been work- ing its way through the plan- ning stages. As the workforce moves east, so have some of the employers. The Chesapeake Bay Business Park, north of the Bay Bridge’s landing on Kent Island, is the home of sev- eral small businesses. The Easton Bypass, once intended to route traffic around the historic downtown, is morphing into a retail hub with a new shopping center and national chain stores. The “money” jobs, however, still draw commuters west over the Bay Bridge every day. Despite the growth and population pressures, the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay has retained much of its charm. Ernie and DeNyce Becker found their waterfront retire- ment home in Romancoke, The Bay Bridge is just part of the view from Broad Creek on Kent Island. 18
on Kent Island, 12 years ago. Ernie Becker says he worked for the federal government and lived in Chevy Chase, Mary- land, for 30 years. For several years, the Beckers had a beach house in Ocean City and spent weekends in traffic, driving across Kent Island. “We never knew this was here,” he says. DeNyce Becker says that when they decided to look for a retirement home, the western shore was too crowded and Ocean City was too remote. After they bought their island home, the Beckers say they drove over the Bay Bridge on a regular basis. “We still felt that life was on the western shore or ‘the Dark Side’ as we call it now,” Ernie Becker says. “But then we began to realize everything we needed was right here.” “This place is very tranquil,” he says. “There is such a big contrast with what we have and city life.” DeNyce Becker adds, “We have a real community, in the sense of a small town.” Cambridge is undergoing a transformation as condos and townhouses are being built around the harbor. Photos by Cooper Media 19
20 The Kent Island boys I grew up with there in the 1940s and 1950s had little reason to think they were anybody special. Our days were spent quietly on a backwater island in the Chesa- peake reached primarily by boat, a life where little had changed in more than three centuries. Most of us were the sons of watermen struggling to put food on the table and pay the bills by selling oysters, crabs, soft-shell clams, fish, eels, and tiny grass shrimp taken from the Bay and rivers with back-breaking work. Our families had been in Queen Anne’s County so long, most of us were related. I was at least second or third cousins with half of all my school classes. My bus driver was my father’s cous- in. Another cousin delivered our newspaper, and I played school baseball against his son. My un- cle, his wife, and their two sons lived across the road from us on Love Point, the northern tip of Kent Island where I grew up. My grandparents lived next door. The world seemed to leave us alone, and we did not complain. That summer of 1952, I was 10, and doing what I always seemed to be doing on days off from school—working on the water or at other odd jobs for spending money. I was work- ing five or six days a week helping a neighbor named Carlton “Picksharp” Councill deliver copies of the afternoon Balti- more News American all over the island from his van. The first Chesapeake Bay Bridge from Sandy Point near Annapolis to Kent Island opened to fanfare on July 30, 1952, and I rode across to the western shore and back with my newspaper-delivery boss that afternoon. He thought crossing the bridge the first day was a big deal, and he was driving. I was unimpressed. By Larry Lewis The trip actually was not that smooth. The ride across was free. But, as I recall, we were not allowed to return until after 6 p.m., when tolls had begun. We waited, got back home by paying the money, but delivered our newspapers late. I was too young at 10 to think thoughts any deeper than where our next vacant-lot baseball game would be held, but, even then, some part of me must have known that the iso- lated life was over, whether I wanted it to be or not. It was kind of like watching “Gone With the Wind” in time-lapse photography. The streams of traffic over the bridge from Baltimore, Washington, and Virginia to the seashore became gushers. Traffic jams sometimes stretched 15 miles. Commuters braved longer drives. Housing developments went up everywhere. Route 50/301 across the heart of Kent Island to the ocean be- came a maze of overpasses, cloverleafs, and traffic circles.
Island
Growing up on the remote 21 Time
I think what I have missed most since the days before the bridge—and then a second bridge—is the solitude. Simply, the quiet, unhurried days, when my brother, Bob, and I could head down to the Chester River beach to catch soft crabs, and be the only ones in sight. Bob and I would catch a dozen soft crabs, sell them to a neighbor for 25 cents apiece, and spend our money on candy at Marks store and tavern on Love Point. You could walk through other people’s properties to go down to the beach, and play on their vacant lots, and leave your car doors and house doors unlocked. The kids could stay out at night. We would leave home early on days when there was no school and stay away until dark, and no one worried a bit. When there were storms, we would catch a bushel of hard crabs just by dipping them off the top of the roiling water from the abandoned ferry pier down across the large marsh in front of our house, where the Smoky
from Love Point to Light Street in Baltimore and back. We shed peelers into soft crabs in floats at the pier, and no one pilfered any. I have wondered if it was the peace, and time to reflect, that made me a writer. I re- member often taking a small boat out onto Lake Anne, now sometimes called Lake Matta- pex, behind our house, tying to a pole stuck in the bottom out in the middle, and lying in the skiff for hours just looking at the sky and reading books by O. Henry and Hemingway. I decided early that I did not want to work on the water. I could not have been more than eight or nine when I started oystering Saturdays with my father and another man. My job was to stand at the culling board where they dumped the oysters and shells and gunk they brought up in their tongs. I threw the good oysters of keeping size onto the pile in the bottom of the boat, and everything else back overboard. I had hard rubber gloves and a little culling hammer to knock shells off the oysters. I remember most being cold. And later, when my father changed to clamming, I remember working with snow blow- ing into our faces. Most of the boys left school at 16 to work on the water. The high school, grades seven through 12, had 120 students. My graduating class had 20, and 15 of them were girls. We Love Point kids shared a school bus with Kent Point, at the opposite end of the island. Half of the year, they went home first and we waited 30 minutes for our turn. The other half, we went first. Boating on Love Point harbor near the ferry dock in 1925. From left, the author’s aunt, Hettie Fisher, her nephew, Walter Gardner, Hettie’s husband, Frank Fisher, owner of the boat, and the author’s grandfather, Charles Blizzard. shores of the Bay. continued, page 23 22 K ent Island, the largest island in the Chesapeake Bay, was settled by Wil- liam Claiborne, who built a fort on the southern tip of the island and claimed it for Virginia in 1631. He named the island after his home in England and set up a trading post to buy furs from the Indians. It became the third permanent English settlement, after Jamestown, Virginia, and Plymouth, Mas- sachusetts. King Charles I granted what is now Maryland, including Kent Island, to Lord Baltimore, two years later, touching off decades of armed conflict as Claiborne fought in vain to keep it part of the Virginia colony. It was the first of several disputes between the neighboring colonies over land and religion. Aloft Aerial Photography Laurence G. Claggett Collection, CBMM Kent Narrows today bustles with heavy vehicle and boat traffic. Queen Anne’s County Historical Collection Courtesy of Betty Thomas Schulz
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