“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 2)
During his last years of teaching at Philip’s Delight one-room school in Frederick County, Md., William McGill’s day began at 7 a.m. when he would get in the station wagon and drive up Catoctin Mountain on roads “so winding and narrow that he blows his horn constantly to warn the lumber wagons which frequently come the other way,” wrote William Stump for the Sun Magazine. The change in elevation was 1,500 feet over six miles of road. He would stop at the farms and cabins and pick up the older school children and then take them back down the mountain to Thurmont High School. Many of them were his former students so he would catch up with their lives and their studies during the trip. Once he dropped them off, he would turn around and head back up the mountain. Read more…
“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 1)
William McGill would have laughed at the idea that students need to be educated in $60-million-plus schools to get a good education. He would have known. For nearly a quarter century, he taught school in the last one-room school in Frederick County. “Some people are of the opinion that youngsters can’t get an education in a one-room school. That isn’t keeping with the facts,” McGill told the Sun Magazine in 1952. “Since 1910, I’ve been teaching in schools like this, and I wish I had a dollar for every one of my pupils who went to the university. Why, last year Betty Ann Willard, a girl I taught, was the honor graduate at Thurmont High.” Philip’s Delight Philip’s Delight School was located off an old lumber trail surrounded by thick woods high up on Catoctin Mountain. Before the school closed Read more…
Where did the Dwayyo away go?
Was it a man or beast, and just where did the name Dwayyo come from? At the end of November 1965, John Becker heard a noise in his backyard. When he went to investigate and found a six-foot-tall creature covered in black fur with a bushy tail. The two fought and the beast ran off. Becker called the Maryland State Police to report the creature, calling it a Dwayyo. Besides what the beast was, the origin of the name was never explained. Becker told the police that he lived on Fern Rock Road, a narrow dirt road near the entrance of Gambrill State Park. The police tried to investigate the call, but they couldn’t find a John Becker in Frederick County or a Fern Rock Road. Most people assumed the call was a prank or that the man had had too much Read more…
Training the unemployed from the Catoctin Mountaintop
Catoctin Mountain can boast a lot of interesting history from Camp David to the Blue Blazes Still raid. From an OSS training camp during World War II to Camp Misty for children. “Also on the Government side is the ‘mother’ camp of President Johnson’s Poverty Program,” the Frederick Post reported in 1965. President Johnson had been the Texas director of the National Youth Administration. It was a New Deal program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt similar in objective to the Job Corps. Johnson convinced Congress it could work again, according to Barbara Kirkconnell in Catoctin Mountain Park, An Administrative History. The camp, called Camp Round Meadow, opened in January 1965 and served as the place to train people who would be sent out across the country to depressed areas to open and operate other similar camps. At the camp, 75 Read more…
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