LOOKING BACK: A lucky unlucky man
Howard Swain considered himself an unlucky man, so much so, that even when he was lucky, he saw it as unlucky. For starters, he was 40-year-old divorced man. It wasn’t a situation he would have wanted, but there you have it. He was unlucky, although the marriage probably wasn’t a happy one, so ending it could have been seen as lucky. Swain was a carpenter by trade, but business was slow so he was forced to live with his sister and brother-in-law in their spare bedroom at their home at 10 N. Pearl Street in York, PA. Again, Swain saw this as unlucky, although he was lucky to have a place to live while he got back on his feet. Then there was the auto accident in August 1925. Swain was driving a car in which his sister and another Read more…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
Gettysburg goes audio
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 27, 1950, Robert Smith, an announcer engineer, pushed a button and the miracle of Marconi came to Gettysburg and the surrounding region. Music was transmitted through the air from a location north of Gettysburg into people’s homes miles away. Though radio had been around since the early years of the 20th Century, WGET Radio became Gettysburg’s first commercial radio station. The first thing Gettysburgians heard on their radio station was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Then Owen Voight, another announcer engineer for the station, stepped up to the microphone in the main studio and said, “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is Radio Station WGET signing on its initial broadcasting day WGET transmits on a frequency of 1450 kilocycles, with a power of 280 watts as authorized by the Federal Communications Commission,” the Gettysburg Times Read more…
Callithumpian band causes worry in York
The metallic reverberating sound of gongs repeatedly sounded throughout downtown York, Pa., in August 1925. It was a sound people recognized as the alert on a fire truck. Somewhere in York, a fire was burning. “During the disturbance patrons of theaters, hurriedly snatched their wraps and fled from the amusement places to ‘go to the fire.’ Others telephoned or went to their homes,” The York Dispatch reported. People attending a municipal band concert at Farquhar Park heard the gongs over the music and streamed out of the park, seeking the fire or their homes to make sure it wasn’t burning. The problem was that there was no fire. “A callithumpian band mounted on a truck which also carried, despite their objections the bride and bridegroom, coursed about downtown streets for about an hour last evening,” The York Dispatch reported. According Read more…
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