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…
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…
Right city, wrong state
It’s bad enough to get a call that your son’s in jail and needs you to bail him out, but what happens when you show up at the county jail with bail money and the corrections officer has never heard of your son? You may want to look at a map. James Ridings was a 21 year old from Keyser, W.Va. was driving through Franklin County, Pa., on the evening of April 7, 1961. He was a mile north of Waynesboro, Pa., when he pulled onto the Waynesboro-Quincy road from a side street without paying attention to oncoming traffic. His car hit a northbound car being driven by Kenny Cook, Jr. from Quincy, Pa. The crash sent Cook’s car off the road and into a tree. The impact pushed one of the front wheels on the car back three feet. Read more…
Newspaper editor critical of county official killed after scathing article (part 2)
They say, “The pen is mightier than the sword” and for Lloyd Clary that indeed proved true. The young newspaper editor of the Cumberland Daily Times had survived the bullets and swords of the Civil War only to be felled because of something he wrote on October 27, 1873. “Never in our experience have we been called upon to publish the details of an occurrence more truly painful and shocking than that of the killing of Lloyd Lowndes Clary, the brave editor of the Cumberland Daily Times by John H. Resley…” the Hagerstown Mail reported after the murder. It was in the offices of the newspaper on Oct. 27 that John Resley shot Clary twice, once in the neck and once in the body. The neck shot would kill Clary later that evening. Though Resley left the scene of his crime, he Read more…
York County’s first supermodel
Nearly a century before the term “supermodel” was coined, Amanda Straw was living the life of one. Of course, by then, most people knew her by her professional name, Madeline Stokes. Straw was born in 1875 on a farm in Fishing Creek Valley in northern York County. Unlike the tall, long-legged models of today, Straw stood only 5 feet 4 inches tall. She had hazel eyes, light brown hair, and a figure that epitomized feminine beauty in the 19th century. After receiving an education in one-room schools in the county, she left for Philadelphia to attend the Pierce Business College. However, she left the school to try her hand on the stage and as an artist’s model. “One special performance included working on a New York roof-top garden, Jardin De Paris. She was clad head-to-toe in nothing but enamel (Straw 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…
Welcome to Bird Land
In November of 1973, flocks of blackbirds, grackles, cowbirds, and starlings discovered the 60-acre white pine forest owned by Edgar Emrich of Graceham. Emrich had not trouble sharing his trees with the birds. There were thousands of trees that he had originally planned to sell as Christmas trees when he had planted them in 1957. He hadn’t, and the tree farm had turned into a forest. “I remember we’d go outside and make a game of trying to dodge the droppings,” Mrs. Austin Young told the New York Times. “Of course, there were only thousands of them then.” As the months passed, more and more birds decided to call Graceham home, and by March 1974, an estimated 10 million birds had migrated there and Graceham was becoming known as Bird Land. “Their problem apparently stems from a quirk in the migratory patterns Read more…
Pennsylvania’s Ghost Towns
Susan Tassin was hiking with her husband one day along a Pennsylvania trail when they came across stacked cut stones in a large rectangle. Tassin recognized what she was seeing as the foundation of a house. The home was long gone, and the stones were all that remained to mark that someone had once called that out-of-the-way place home. “I was excited,” Tassin said. “We saw some other hikers and told them what we had found.” The other hikers didn’t understand the Tassins’ excitement. The hikers pointed out a historical marker that told readers the site had once been more than a place for a single home. An entire home had been located there. It was all gone, though. All that was left was a ghost town. When most people think of ghost towns, they picture dusty streets flanked by Read more…
Small-town high school students prepare for the journey of a lifetime in the middle of the Great Depression (Part 4)
The boys of Arendtsville Vocational High School had already seen so much during the summer of 1937. They had traveled across the United States, down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and upon an ocean to reach Alaska. It was almost too much to take in fully, and yet, their journey wasn’t complete. From Vancouver, British Columbia, they climbed aboard a half-ton truck that they had specially outfitted to carry the 25 boys and their teacher, Edwin Rice. “Most of the roads in British Columbia are dirt and not very good at that,” Rice wrote in a letter to The Gettysburg Times. “We were saturated with dust when we got to Asveyoos.” They drove into Washington State where they watched the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. “Today it is one of the largest dams in the world, but Read more…
Small-town high school students prepare for the journey of a lifetime in the middle of the Great Depression (Part 3)
Few of the boys of Arendtsville Vocational High School had traveled beyond the borders of Adams County, but in a short time during the summer of 1937, they had visited two countries, traveled through 19 states and territories, swam in two oceans, and were getting ready to sail on an ocean. They boys had traveled a southern route across the country with their teacher, Edwin Rice, but now they were in Vancouver, British Columbia. There, they boarded the steamship, Prince Rupert. Since the group was traveling on a shoestring budget, they had booked passage on the freight deck. It was cramped quarters. The boys slept in bunk beds and the rooms had no windows, “but we could see out when the doors opened,” Wayne Criswell said in “The Journey of a Lifetime Summer 1937” an unpublished article Criswell told to Read more…
^