A Coal Town Christmas
Adapted from Saving Shallmar: Christmas Spirit in a Coal Town Betty Mae Maule was one of 60 students who attended the two-classroom Shallmar School in November 1949. When teaching principal J. Paul Andrick asked Betty Mae to write a problem at the board one day, the 10-year-old girl stood up at her desk and promptly fainted. Betty Mae and her siblings hadn’t eaten anything all day. Their last meal had been the night before when the eight people in the family shared a couple apples. This is how bad things had gotten in the little coal town on the North Branch Potomac River. What had once been the jewel of Western Maryland coal towns was dying. Operating only 36 days in 1948, the Wolf Den Coal Corporation, which owned Shallmar, came into 1949 struggling in vain to stay open. The Read more…
Garrett County’s (MD) first phone call made
When Alexander Graham Bell said, “Mr. Watson, Come here, I want to see you” into an early version of the telephone, it wouldn’t be heard in Garrett County, Maryland, until 1900. William A. Smith of Hoyes built the first telephone line in the county between the general stores in Sang Run and Hoyes. This allowed callers to speak with one another, but only in those two locations. “This is considered remarkable when one realizes Bell secured his Patent in 1876, the A. T. & T. company was formed in 1884 and 16 years later when the Bell had hardly gotten out of New Haven, Connecticut, we find a telephone line constructed and operating so far away from the field of the then telephone activity,” W. Russell Pancake, engineer assistant with the C & P Telephone Company told the Oakland Rotary Read more…
LOOKING BACK 1958: Let it snow! Oh, no!
The call came in that Thomas J. Johnson needed an ambulance. He was seriously ill and needed to get to the hospital. Normally, it wouldn’t be a problem, but in early 1958, getting anywhere in Garrett County was, to say the least, difficult. The ambulance attempted to reach him, but it couldn’t get through to Johnson’s Herrington Manor home. Help came in the form of bulldozers and snow plows that struggled to carve a path through drifting snow as high as 15 feet. It took six hours for the plows to reach the 67-year-old Johnson and rush him to Garrett Memorial. During another incident that winter, Trooper First Class Robert Henline walked three miles through deep snow that vehicles couldn’t get through to deliver medicine to a desperate family near Gorman. Other incidents occurred, some serious and some just major Read more…
LOOKING BACK 1959: Train crashes into Garrett County school bus killing seven children
Having no children of his own, 49-year-old Leroy Campbell enjoyed the laughter and squeals of the children he drove to and from school each day, but it was their screams of terror that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Campbell had a perfect driving record and he had driven a school bus for the Garrett County Board of Education for eight years by 1959. He picked up children in the Loch Lynn and Mountain Lake Park areas and delivered them to Southern High School and Dennett Road Elementary every day school was in session. On the morning of September 10, 1959, Campbell had picked up 27 students and was heading towards the schools where he would drop them off. As he was crossing the railroad tracks at Route 560 in Loch Lynn, the bus stalled. He was Read more…
LOOKING BACK 1917: The champion coal miner of the world
When Lawrence B. Finzel trudged home from the coal mines each day, he knew he had done a good day’s work. In fact, he knew he’d done a good two or three days’ work. In 1917, Finzel was called the champion coal miner of the world “who just before the recent wage increase became effective earned $347.92 in one month mining coal,” according to The Republican. He accomplished this by mining an average of 12 tons of coal daily at a time when a good day’s work at the region’s mine was five tons of coal. “He leaves his home with his fellow miners and returns with them and does as much work as two or three ordinary miners with apparent ease,” the Cumberland Evening Times. Though he accomplished this great feat in Hooversville, Pa., Finzel was born in Garrett Read more…
The sneeze that killed
Elmer Martin, who lived near Crellin, returned to work on October 15, 1918, after being sick for a few days. The 28-year-old felt fine and needed to get back to earning a living at the Turner-Douglas Mine as a driver. He seemed fine his first day back, but when he didn’t report to work the next day, someone realized that he had never made it home. A search began and lasted all night until Martin’s body was discovered alongside the tracks of the Preston Railroad. He had apparently just fallen down and died. He wasn’t the only one, either. Across Garrett County, more than 100 people died from Spanish Flu in fall of 1918. The flu wasn’t just a problem in the county, either. Spanish Flu reached nearly every place on the globe and by the time it subsided at Read more…
Embarrassed wife has Oakland’s first doctor executed
It’s been said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Such fury cost Oakland its first doctor. When Dr. John Conn stepped off the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad train in 1851, he was a pioneer. Oakland hadn’t yet been incorporated as a town and the region was still frontier for Maryland. The town only had a few hundred citizens and they needed a doctor. The next-closest doctor was Dr. John H. Patterson in Grantsville. To get there and back to Oakland would have taken a full day. Conn set up his office at Second and Oak streets where it quickly flourished. “In the days before the convenience of a well-stocked pharmacy, it was said that the ‘young doctor’ either had on hand the correct medication, or could prescribe a suitable home remedy for any attack of ague or Read more…
The morning Oakland burned (part 2)
Note: This is the second of two articles about the Great Oakland Fire of 1898. As a fire rampaged through Oakland, Md., during the morning of July 12, 1898, the townspeople had formed a bucket brigade to fight the fire. The fire department had a chemical engine that was also being used to try to put out the fire. It was overwhelming, and Oakland Mayor R. S. Jamison telegraphed Mayor George A. Kean of Cumberland for help. Kean promised to send a fire company, but that help would be hours away. Jamison’s message may have been one of the last to get out of Oakland before the fire burned down three telegraph poles, taking the wire with it. A correspondent with the Warren (Pa.) Democrat had been transmitting a story to the newspaper when he had lost communications. The message read, Read more…
The morning Oakland burned (part 1)
Note: This is the first of two articles about the Great Oakland Fire of 1898. Robert Shirer woke up from a deep sleep the morning of July 12, 1898, when the sound of a whistle and church bell wouldn’t stop. When he opened his eyes, wondering what the reason for the noise was, he saw that his bed was on fire and some of his room. He jumped from his bed and ran out of the burning building with only his nightclothes on. It was a narrow escape that left him with slight burns. Outside, it appeared as if all of Oakland was on fire. I.L. Haught, a clerk at the Oakland Pharmacy, had been the first person to see the fire that morning. Like Shirer, he had been asleep, but he came awake much earlier than usual because of Read more…
LOOKING BACK 1917: Bank robbers get away with a haul from small town bank
Around lunch time on a nice May day, three men walked into Charles Spragne’s restaurant in Kitzmiller. Their faces were blackened with cork and they wore miner’s caps. They were unfamiliar to Charles and his wife, but they were used to seeing new miners in town from time to time. Spragne’s wife spoke to one of the men, “thinking he was a local miner but did not notice that either of them were masked,” the Republican reported. The men finished their lunches, paid their bills, and then walked across the street to the First National Bank of Kitzmiller around 11:45 a.m. As they entered, the men drew large revolvers. One of the men stepped around Cashier Barclay V. Inskeep’s desk and pointed his pistol in Inskeep’s face. Sue R. Laughlin, Inskeep’s assistant, screamed. A second man pointed his pistol at Read more…
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