Remembering a WWII Veteran
Donald Lewis stood crammed among a group of friends and fellow soldiers trying not to lose his balance. The landing craft they were on was pushing toward its destination on Omaha Beach at Normandy, France. A strong current threatened to pull them away from their destination. Lewis was a long way from his hometown of Thurmont, but he along with millions of other young men had been drafted to serve in the armed forces during World War II. Though he had entered the army as a private, he had risen to the rank of staff sergeant. Lewis stood at the front of the landing craft hanging onto the edge of the wall. Around him, he could hear the explosion of artillery and see the explosions on the water or beach. Things seemed a mass of confusion, but it was all Read more…
“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 2)
During his last years of teaching at Philip’s Delight one-room school in Frederick County, Md., William McGill’s day began at 7 a.m. when he would get in the station wagon and drive up Catoctin Mountain on roads “so winding and narrow that he blows his horn constantly to warn the lumber wagons which frequently come the other way,” wrote William Stump for the Sun Magazine. The change in elevation was 1,500 feet over six miles of road. He would stop at the farms and cabins and pick up the older school children and then take them back down the mountain to Thurmont High School. Many of them were his former students so he would catch up with their lives and their studies during the trip. Once he dropped them off, he would turn around and head back up the mountain. 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…
Thurmont’s Seminary gave students an advanced education
At the beginning of July 1875, the parents and family members of 38 students of the Mechanicstown Male and Female Seminary gathered in Mechanics’ Hall for the first graduation from the school. “The stage was beautifully decorated and ornamented with flowers and evergreens, and everything looked charming as the children and young ladies, all dressed in white, were pyramidically situated upon it,” the Catoctin Clarion reported. The seminary had opened the year before by the Middle Conference of the Lutheran Synod of Maryland. It was located in the Stoner House on East Main Street. The Rev. Victor Miller was principal. The school’s prospectus said that “Its aim is to impart a better education, intellectual and moral, than is afforded by public schools—an education thorough in character and practical as possible.” The school taught three grades, though they don’t correspond to Read more…
Thurmont, MD, loses its railroad station
One of the reasons for Thurmont, MD, existing was lost in 1967. Thurmont was originally called Mechanicstown, but a movement in 1873 started to come up with a more progressive name for the growing town. Among the supporters of a name change was the Western Maryland Railroad. “The railroad was all for the idea since it would relieve the shipping and passenger problems caused by a profusion of the ‘sound alike’ communities. There was Mechanicsburg and Mechanicsville, Pennsylvania and several Mechanicsvilles in Maryland as well as our town,” according to A Thurmont Scrapbook. The Western Maryland Railroad had first reached Mechanicstown on January 9, 1871. The first stationmaster was Harry Shriner. “Upon the event of the coming of the railroad to Mechanicstown, a group of civic-minded citizens arranged a reception and a banquet for the railroad officials and their guests. Read more…
Lilypons and Lily Pons
Given the fact that the Lilypons, Md., Post Office was created to handle the increased mail-order demand from Three Springs Fisheries, a Frederick County, Md., business that sold goldfish and water lilies, you might think Lilypons is a misspelling of Lily Ponds. Yes, it is a misspelling. Not of lily ponds, but of Lily Pons, a 1930s opera singer. Three Springs Fisheries George Thomas started his business in 1917 as a roadside stand in Buckeystown, Md., that sold the vegetables and goldfish he grew on his farm. “He had a keen eye for finding some type of venture where he might be successful,” Charles Thomas said of his grandfather. While customers may have bought his vegetables, they showed more interest in the goldfish bred in his goldfish hatchery, Three Springs Fisheries. Business grew quickly, and the little town post office where his Read more…
Training the unemployed from the Catoctin Mountaintop
Catoctin Mountain can boast a lot of interesting history from Camp David to the Blue Blazes Still raid. From an OSS training camp during World War II to Camp Misty for children. “Also on the Government side is the ‘mother’ camp of President Johnson’s Poverty Program,” the Frederick Post reported in 1965. President Johnson had been the Texas director of the National Youth Administration. It was a New Deal program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt similar in objective to the Job Corps. Johnson convinced Congress it could work again, according to Barbara Kirkconnell in Catoctin Mountain Park, An Administrative History. The camp, called Camp Round Meadow, opened in January 1965 and served as the place to train people who would be sent out across the country to depressed areas to open and operate other similar camps. At the camp, 75 Read more…
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