Eastern Shore Growth • Kent Island Memories Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Fall 2007
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Kent Island Robert de Gast, CBMM collection 23 So few students at the high school were thinking about go- ing to college that a joint class of tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders was created, called the “academic class.” Mostly one teacher, Emily Roe Denny, who was also the school librarian and had written books, headed it. One of the books, The Indi- ans of Kent Island, is still available. She had once worked as an editor for a New York book publisher. She encouraged me to be a writer. She picked me to be the editor of the school newspaper. More than once, she offered to lend me money for some school trip I could not afford. Years later, her behind-the-scenes support got me started in the newspaper business. I went on to write for the now-gone Baltimore News American for 17 years and The Philadelphia Inquirer for 22 years, but not without some false starts. My school friends were the athletes from the basketball and baseball teams, and we felt grown-up when we drove to Baltimore to attend Orioles games. My Love Point buddies were guys, like me, who thought we were sort of beachcomb- ers, since we spent so much time in our little boats and around the old, abandoned ferry slip and on the beach at night. I can remember watching the glow of the coke ovens at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant across the Bay after dark and wondering what kind of life awaited someone brave enough to cross over and explore there. I went there eventually to study engineering, after flirt- ing with the possibility of attending the Naval Academy and learning that people who were deaf in their left ear, like me, were not qualified. I returned a few years later more sure than ever that writing was what I was meant to do. I also came back with a broken heart. My first love out in the real world married someone else. My friend Mark Miller, a top investigative reporter, always wanted me to tell him stories about my Kent Island upbring- ing. He loved the tales of beachcombing fun, and crabbing and moonlit ramblings along the riverbanks and Bay shores. His father was a career diplomat, and Mark spent some of his younger years in boarding schools. “Boy, I really wish I had grown up on Kent Island,” Mark said to me many times. Kent Islanders were prideful, but they had an inferiority complex, as well. Life there meant the shunning of many mod- ern methods. The schools were tiny. Outsiders could always point to advantages they had that were “bigger and better.” That all ended, I believe, when the island officially was declared the third oldest English-speaking settlement in the U.S., behind only Jamestown and Plymouth. It was then that I, too, finally began to appreciate my heritage. My ancestors came to the island in August 1631 with Cap- tain William Claiborne, from the Jamestown, Virginia, colony, who was sent by the English traders to open commerce with the Chesapeake Bay Indian tribes. I once saw a map of the original land grants on Kent Is- land. I still have relatives there with the last names of almost everyone who was given land. No wonder we are intermarried and related, like the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Even today, heaven help you if you are trying to make your way on Kent Island and were not born there. There was the time my brother and I were buying soft crabs on a Sunday morning in Dominion, a watering com- munity on the lower end of the island. The seller was there with his wife, who did not remember me, but whose brother had been in my class, been a good friend, and played on the same high school baseball team. But the man had only so many to sell and he was trying to keep them for his regular customers. We looked like outsiders to him. Another islander standing nearby, a man my brother’s age
24 who had gone to high school with us, nodded in that almost imperceptible way Eastern Shoremen have that we were ac- ceptable as crab customers. “Are these Kent Island boys?” the seller asked the other man. “Original, original,” the man said. To be a Kent Islander was to be what famous Lower Shore boatbuilder Jim Richardson once told me all Eastern Shore- men are:
“If you have something an Eastern Shoreman wants, he’ll try to buy it from you,” he said. “If you won’t sell, he’ll ask where you got it. If he can’t get it, he’ll try to make it. If he can’t make it, he doesn’t want it anymore.” It was being independent, and glaringly determined, and a survivor. Money was scarce in the watering villages of Kent Island when the winters were hard and the freezes lingered. The wa- termen could not break their workboats out of the creeks and harbors to tong on the oyster bars. There were no rainy-day bank accounts to fall back on. It was bean soup and biscuits, jars of canned vegetables from the summer garden, if you were lucky, and a lot of potato dishes. I attended a two-room schoolhouse that had no plumbing, in Chester, a community in the center of the island where I had been born in a farmhouse in October 1941. To this day, my mother, Edna Lewis, 86, insists on embarrassing me by telling people how I refused to use the school’s wooden out- houses because I was so scared of spiders. Every weekday after school, I did my homework with my ear glued to a huge floor-model radio. My two favorite shows were “Straight Arrow,” about a man who went into a cave and emerged as an Indian warrior bent on helping the oppressed, and “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” which later became a TV program. I always did well in school, and my father said I followed every twist of plot on the radio, and got all of my homework answers right. My father, Rufus M. Lewis, never really got a chance to go on in school. He had to quit in the fifth grade to help support his parents and their six children besides him. He worked first catching oysters with Captain Lester Lee, since immortalized in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beautiful Swimmers, in the famous chapter “Lester Lee and the Chicken Neckers.” The tale is about outsiders who ruin Lee’s trotline crabbing and threaten him with a gun. “For six weeks, I never saw the light of day at home,” my father said of that time. They left home before daylight and did not return until late every day. My late father, who eventually grew to tolerate his dif- ferent name, taken from a goofy novelty song of the era, was our clearest link to Kent Island history. His mother, Caroline, was a Thompson. There were Thompsons with Indian trader Claiborne, and they became Kent Island boatbuilders. Her brother was Kirby Thompson, a noted duck carver of the island. Her father, Joseph Alexander Thompson, built a boat that is in the collection of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. It is the Alverta, a five-log canoe that is described as an impor- tant example of early motorized Bay craft. We ended up on the northern tip of Kent Island because my mother’s aunt, Hettie Fisher, ran the once-grand Love Point Hotel, where my father and mother met at a Saturday night dance. She also owned Althea Cottage, a bed-and-breakfast across the lake. One man used to fly down in his seaplane and anchor it on the Chester River shore for the duration of his visit. We had hunters who stayed in our little cabin on the Althea Cottage property, shot every rabbit in sight, and strung them up in long lines for photographs. People from the Saint Martin’s summer camp up the road would stay with us. We lived with Aunt Hettie for the four years my father was away in the Navy fighting in World War II. He built us a house in Chester, and we lived there until the third grade, when we moved briefly to Centreville, the county seat. Then we moved back to Love Point because Aunt Hettie was sick and could no longer live alone. By then, the Love Point Hotel was a shambles of broken glass and splintered wood. People used to roller skate in the old grand ballroom. I heard of many sexual liaisons between young people in the many-roomed derelict, but I cannot swear any of them actually happened. On Sundays, my sister, Nancy, me, my brother, and our aunt and uncle, Rosie and Harvey Smith, would pick huge bunches of wild asparagus along the abandoned railroad track on the Love Point Road. We fished, crabbed, and hauled floating wood to build a pier in the lake and a log cabin in the woods. In frozen win- ters—and there were many—we skated on the lake. Incredibly, a small flotilla of World War II landing craft Author’s grandmother, Hattie Eleanor Collier Blizzard, and an unknown gentleman friend. Believed to have been taken in Baltimore when she worked for the Salvation Army. 25 for troops and tanks was scuttled in shallow water at the Love Point ferry pier. For years, we played on the rotting hulks of the ships, making them our headquarters. We would tie our small boats to them, eat our lunches aboard, and leave peri- odically to look for crabs clinging to the old ferry pilings. There was Paul Mylander, whose lawyer father had pri- vate planes, and his pal, David Leonard, who were always overhead somewhere skydiving. Leonard was killed in a plane crash before his horrified mother. “Karl the Russian” was the mysterious member of the Love Point gang. He could speak only a few words of English, and lived, at first, in an up- graded chicken coop and, later, in a renovated railroad car. No one knew where he came from. Samuel “Dockie” Marks had a large collection of arrow and hatchet heads gleaned from the tall, eroding Bay cliffs. He displayed it at his father’s store. We used to play baseball over those cliffs. Sometimes a long drive would go over the cliff and the beach and land in the water. Once, when I climbed down long wooden stairs to get a baseball, I came upon two lovers on the beach, heavily engaged. I kept my eye on the ball, pretended I saw nothing, and went about my business. They did, as well. There were dark times, too. One friend killed himself af- ter, it was believed, he saw his former girlfriend standing on a darkened porch kissing another boy. He went out on a boat, tied an anchor around his neck and jumped overboard. One family I knew lost several children in a farmhouse fire. Their mother later was killed in a farm accident when she fell from a tractor into a mower. Alcoholism was widespread among the watermen, who carried whiskey with them, they said, to nip on to keep warm in the winter. Many nipped on into the spring, summer, and fall. I played Little League baseball. Once we played in an old, abandoned Hot Stove League ballpark in Centreville. It was painted green. Our stocky catcher, Wayne Clark, hit a ball that rolled to the centerfield fence. Of course, he got an inside-the-park home run out of it. Wayne later had most of his hand shot off in a hunting accident with a shotgun. The watermen hung out at Earl Stevens’ Stevensville Pool Room. I learned to shoot pool there, waiting for my father to finish a few beers. One day, a good player actually gave me a lesson. Hit the cue ball high to make it roll. Hit it low to make it stop on a dime. Hit it on the right top to pull the balls to the right. Reverse to pull balls to the left. It was a fruitful afternoon. My father clearly inherited some of my family’s boat- building skills. One afternoon, in our backyard, he had some free time, so he gathered unused lumber from the garage and outbuildings there and built us a perfect skiff we could use around the lake and the Chester River. There was no oystering in the summer, so watermen had to find other jobs. My father built houses, without plans, and he laid the brick for a church wall on Route 50 at Queenstown that still awes me with its complexity every time I drive past it. One of my earlier memories is of going fishing with my father and catching a tiny fish on a hand line. We also found a rotting net in a cove, and my father caught a large fish snared there with his hands before it could escape. We all prided ourselves on how well we could handle dip nets and catch fleeing crabs. I once saw my father dip five feet into the currents along the edge of the Kent Narrows from our fast-drifting boat to pick up a ripe peeler from the bottom. We had run out of bait while fishing and we broke the peeler apart for another hour of angling. It was the best catch with a dip net I ever saw.
A graceful skipjack sits on serene blue-green waters; its sails are massive and powerful, emanating a sense of dignity and elegance. John Moll’s impression of this tradi- tional Chesapeake sailing craft shows how art can inspire, evoke feelings, recall memories, and influence people in unique ways. John Moll’s artwork, focusing on subjects and themes that have become iconic specifically to the Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore, has captured the attention of Marylanders, as well as visitors and newcomers. The artist’s work can be found throughout the region on post- cards, notecards, sketches, prints, lithographs, watercol- ors, oil paintings, and even murals. Moll’s view of the area has become a trademark of Maryland, and the artist has become a part of the state’s artistic traditions. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1908, Moll initially began to cultivate his interest in drawing wharves and fishing grounds while at the Wilmington Academy of Art. He moved to Oxford, Maryland, in 1946, and began his freelance career producing much of his most well-known work. His illustrations have appeared in books such as Gilbert Byron’s Delaware Poems (1943) and St. Michaels, the Town that Fooled the British (1971). Moll’s skipjack print represents a significant icon of Chesapeake Bay history and culture. Originally called 26 John Moll Chesapeake Bay Artist Laurence G. Claggett Collection, CBMM Gift of Juliette E. McLennan, CBMM collection bateaux, these boats were built to dredge oysters, one of the Bay’s most important economic resources. In the 1890s, boat- builders began to experiment with the “deadrise” hull. Skip- jacks had become a fixture in every port on the Bay in the early 1900s; the vessels dominated the oyster bars by 1910. Within the Laurence G. Claggett Collection of Maryland postcards, a promised gift to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, numerous John Moll postcards show the artist’s popularity and demonstrate how his work idealized Chesa- peake commercial boats and working waterfronts. One postcard features a historic location commonly as- sociated with maritime culture and the Chesapeake Bay specifically, the Hooper Strait Lighthouse. Moll’s illustra- tion reveals an in-depth understanding of the location’s his- toric significance, its importance to the people of the East- ern Shore, and its potential for representing the Chesapeake Bay. The artist’s choice in presenting the Hooper Strait Lighthouse, one of the few surviving screwpile lighthouses, now on the grounds of the Museum, in a commercial context (for postcards and other memorabilia) shows his purposeful intent in depicting subjects relating directly to the area. Another postcard features an illustration of an oyster shucking house in Oxford. Oystering on the Chesapeake Bay has historically been a source of growth, profit, and business. Shucking houses, life on the water, and oyster processing 27
Gift of Edith Wood in memory of Daniel P. Barnard IV & Eleanor G. Barnard, CBMM collection have become an important part of Maryland folk life. Moll’s interpretation of this active part of Maryland her- itage shows his appreciation for the region’s culture. As John Moll’s popularity and recognition grew, he was asked to expand his repertoire into mural paint- ing. His murals have been featured in prominent loca- tions such as the Tidewater Inn in Easton, the Woman’s Club of St. Michaels, and the Robert Morris Inn in Oxford. The Talbot Bank in Easton features two John Moll murals. One work focuses on representing an ar- ray of Bay vessels, including an oyster sloop, log canoe, bugeye, skipjack, and Bay schooner. The other departs from Moll’s maritime themes to explore the agricultural aspects of Eastern Shore life as a family reaps their har- vest among farm animals, with a rural landscape in the background. In 1970, John Moll painted a pair of commemorative watercolor paintings for Gus and Vida Van Lennep in honor of their work in the formation of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. The painting for Vida Van Len- nep features multiple icons of the Bay and its folk life—a screwpile lighthouse, a skipjack, and a waterman with tongs for collecting oysters. This work shows Moll’s knowl- edge of Bay symbols and the significant individuals critical to regional history. Moll’s interpretation of the Eastern Shore and the Chesapeake Bay reveals an intimate understanding of the area’s folk life, culture, and traditions. His work reaffirms the ideas and symbols associated with Maryland, becom- ing a staple of the region’s iconography. Moll’s art shows a unique representation of Maryland’s heritage and the value placed on maritime traditions and icons. He died in Easton in 1991. Bibliography Reid, John P. “The Art of John Moll, 1908-1991.” Reid, 1995. July 31, 2007. Turbyville, Linda. Bay Beacons: Lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis: Eastwood Publishing, 1995. Vojtech, Pat. Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks. Centreville: Tidewater Publishers, 1993. 28
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earth friendly. Jim Wortman, model shipwright/restorer, has created a limited-edition collection of traditionally built ships-in-bottles. Bogan crab stoneware, hand-thrown locally, is not only functional and decorative, but is lead free and oven, microwave, and dishwasher safe.
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