LOOKING BACK 1939: Emmitsburg gets three burgesses in four months
Emmitsburg, MD, once went through three burgesses in four months in 1939. It began when Burgess Michael J. Thompson died unexpectedly on May 31. He had gone out walking through Emmitsburg, including stopping at the Hotel Slagle, before heading home. He had only been home a few minutes when the heart struck and he died about 12:20 p.m. “Mr. Thompson had been in ill health for the last two years and the attack this morning was third he has suffered within the last year,” The Frederick Post reported. He was only 61 years old. He had been born in Waterbury, Conn., in 1877. He loved playing sports, but in 1893, while playing football for Suffield Academy against Taft School, he broke his right leg. He healed, but then broke it again the following spring while sliding into second base during Read more…
Read all about it! Northern Frederick County’s newspaper history (Part 3)
Although Thurmont and Emmitsburg have remained distinctive communities, US 15 has connected them closely so that it is not uncommon to travel between two multiple times in a day. This closeness of the communities has been reflected in the north county’s modern newspapers. William “Bo” Cadle and his wife, Jean, started the monthly Emmitsburg Regional Dispatch in 1993. “Volunteers helped us do all sorts of things. An unexpected and greatly appreciated alliance between people in the community (readers and merchants and the worker-bees) over the following months helped the paper to gain firmer footing,” Bo Cadle wrote in a 2002 editorial. A couple years later after he started his own paper, Bo encouraged Lori Zentz to get into the newspaper business. Chronicle Press had started the Catoctin Banner in 1994, but by 1995, Art Elder was looking to sell the Read more…
Read all about it! Northern Frederick County’s newspaper history (Part 2)
Entering the 20th century, both Emmitsburg and Thurmont had solidly established newspapers keeping them informed about what was going on in town and the country. The Emmitsburg Chronicle would become Emmitsburg’s longest-running newspaper. Started in 1879 by Samuel Motter, the newspaper was published weekly, except from a hiatus during World War I and War II, through February 9, 1977. Motter died on March 21, 1889 and his widow took over the paper. Following a couple of interim owners, Sterling Galt purchased the newspaper in 1906. When Fred Debold killed Edward Smith in the mountains near Emmitsburg on August 8, 1906, Galt published an extra issue of the Chronicle. It was the first extra ever published and gave the community the story of the murder hours after it happened. The newspaper’s name changed to The Weekly Chronicle in 1909. The paper Read more…
Read all about it! Northern Frederick County’s newspaper history (Part 1)
Although Thurmont and Emmitsburg are only 7.5 miles apart, in the early 18th century, it was probably a 2-hour trip from one town to the other. While a person could make a round trip in a day, it wasn’t something people wanted to do daily if they didn’t have to. It was a distance that made the communities neighborly, but they operated separately. This could be seen in the publishing of different newspapers, a separate one for each community. Emmitsburg was the first of the two communities to get a newspaper. “The first paper, the ‘Emmitsburg Banner’ was published in 1840 by a Mr. McClain. The Banner was published only a few times before it ceased operation,” according to a 1951 article in the Emmitsburg Chronicle. The second newspaper in Emmitsburg was the Emmitsburg Star, published in 1845. It was Read more…
Emmitsburg editor tries his hand in politics
Sterling Galt purchased the Emmitsburg Chronicle in 1906. He was the fourth owner of the 27-year-old newspaper. Back in those days, small newspapers had few employees. The owner was the publisher and the primary reporter. The debut editorial stated the goal of the newspaper as this: “Our first aim shall be to present the CHRONICLE as a medium through which the outer world may learn our aims, our hopes and high resolves. We shall not try to amuse our readers with rhetorical flourishes, nor with sonorous sentences, neither shall we indulge in meaningless jests, nor silly observations, but endeavor, in an unpretending way to give our readers the current news of the times, with such items of local interest that may present themselves: we shall try to practice the recent suggestion of an esteemed clerical friend, who we estimate as Read more…
Early public education in Emmitsburg, Md.
Emmitsburg has always had plenty of schools. Of the 158 one-room schools in Frederick County in 1890 more than 20 were near Emmitsburg. This doesn’t even include the private and parochial schools in the town at the time. In a 1908 article in the Emmitsburg Chronicle, an old-timer recalled his experiences with some of Emmitsburg’s early schools. One school was on the former site of Helman’s store where Mrs. Reed, a widow, taught classes. “I was packed off to school when I was about five years old, with a small yellow book called an English Primer. The seat, a rough bench was much too high for my short legs and my feet hung some distance above the floor. The school was a sort of a go-as-you please affair, and I did not receive much attention from the mistress, who, by the Read more…
For All the Baseball Fans Out There…
“Babe” Ruth was a baseball legend. You can find out why in When the Babe Came to Town. My new ebook shows how the Babe connected with the fans through his many exhibition and barnstorming games.When the Babe Came to Town is a collection of some of these stories highlighting games that Babe Ruth played in Emmitsburg, Maryland; York, Pennsylvania; Oakland, California and Cumberland, Maryland. It was big news when Babe Ruth came to town. Many residents of these smaller towns unused to seeing Major League baseball games in the days before television. They had only read about Babe Ruth’s talent in the newspapers or heard about it on the radio. The Babe came to town and showed them what they were missing as he hit home runs out of the park. There are a lot of these stories out Read more…
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