Giving History a Hand…and Arm
History can be funny, fascinating, inspiring and sometimes just plain yucky. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD, received a forearm as an anonymous donation this year. It is a human foremarm that still has the right hand and skin attached. It is said to have been found by a farmer in Sharpsburg, MD, about two weeks after the 1862 Battle of Antietam. It had been displayed for decades at a private museum. It was shown in a glass-topped, pine case with a card that read, “Human arm found on the Antietam Battlefield,” according to the Associated Press report. When the museum’s owner died in 2001, the museum’s contents were sold at auction. Museum officials are hoping to verify that it is a relic of the battle, though they have little hope of figuring out which soldier’s arm Read more…
Coming in June!
I thought I would let everyone have a peek at the cover art for my next book, which should be out just in time for the Heritage Days Festival in Cumberland in June. I think Stephanie E. J. Long did a great job with it. I definitely looks like it is part of the series. This volume is 150 pages and 47 stories from Western Maryland along with 33 black-and-white photos. It contains stories of lost treasure, train wrecks and successful residents. You’ll also find out where Albert Einstein liked to get away in the summer and the story of Allegany County’s lost automobile manufacturing industry. Looking Back II: More True Stories of Mountain Maryland will retail for $14.95.
A Midnight Walk Through a Jewelry Store
Here’s a fun story I found from Cumberland, MD, in 1875. However, as I wrote it, I found myself wondering if it was the truth. I’m not saying that the newspaper got the story wrong, but when I read the story as reported, I thought that maybe the “sleepwalker” wasn’t telling the whole truth. He successfully entered a jewelry store, or at least the store’s upper levels, after hours. Could he have been trying to rob the store, either consciously of subconsciously while sleepwalking? And for it to take an hour to go down a flight of stairs, out the door, orient himself on a street he would have recognized and walk next door? That sounds a little far fetched, too. Might he have been looking around for a few “souvenirs” before he left and finding none, needed an excuse Read more…
Looking Back: Sledding on City Streets
By 1923, cars were no longer a novelty on Cumberland’s roads. They had surpassed horse-drawn wagons and carriages as the main form of transportations. With more cars on the streets, the chances of accidents rose. Cars could zip along at speeds of 40 miles an hour or more. However, just like today if a driver tried to stop too quickly on snow-covered streets, the car could slide out of control. That was causing problems because children sledding shared a similar problem. Once their sled was in motion, it was hard to stop. Unfortunately many of them didn’t stop until they hit a moving car. This led parents to action. At a city council meeting in February 1923, “The suggestion that a special street for sled riding by children be roped off and protected by city authorities in order to prevent Read more…
Piecing together the past
Researchers are excavating a slave village on the site of the Monocacy Battlefield in Frederick County, Maryland. The village wasn’t there at the time of the battle. It dates back to the turn end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century. The plantation called L’Hermitage was a 748-acre plantation owned by a French-Catholic family that fled St. Dominique during a slave revolt. The family owned 90 slaves that lived in a collection of cabins on the plantation. The site was first discovered in 2003, but excavation couldn’t begin until this summer when a Department of Interior grant allowed six students to be hired to help with the work. Surface-penetrating radar was used to get a look at the area to find where the remnants of the village were buried 4 to 16 feet below the surface. 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…
Mystery of Valley Street bridge explosion revealed
The three teenagers tossed a baseball back and forth as they walked home from Allegany High School where they had been participating in an athletic program sponsored by the Cumberland Police Department. It was a Saturday morning in February 1945. Robert Milburn,14; Eugene Iames, 14; and Eugene’s brother, Allen, 12, started to spread out as they walked across the Valley Street bridge. Robert and Eugene were near the center while Allen rushed ahead of them to the end of the bridge. Two blasts sounded within seconds of each other. “The second blast was louder than the first and when I looked out the window, the whole middle section of the bridge seemed to bulge eight or ten feet into the air,” William Keegan, owner of the Shober Restaurant, told the Cumberland Sunday Times. The force of the explosion shattered many Read more…
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