III. The Lawn

Just a hilltop or two away at Elk Ridge, Colonel Marshall had neighbors in Lawyers’ Hill, an enclave above the Patapsco River where several lawyers, judges, and doctors had their summer homes.

{During and after the war, they gathered socially on the wide lawn of Judge George Washington Dobbin, who hosted a Friday Club at his home, which was aptly named The Lawn. His daughter, Rebecca, noted in her journal that the sound of artillery from Manassas could be heard from this favorite vantage point during the first battle of Bull Run.}

On the wall of the porch near the front door, you can still find a string of wooden beads that Judge Dobbin used to keep track of the laps he walked on the wraparound porch.  There was something odd/special about the knocking, ringing, or locking mechanism on the front door, but I can't remember what it is right now!...  The glowing entrance hall where the smell of oil paints and linseed oil hit you upon entering.  On the right, the dark gallery/studio, and on the left the drawing room....then kitchen and butler's pantry.  Just inside the drawing room door, on the right, a desk with a phone.  Mrs. May Cobb, a family friend from church and my art teacher, had funny stories of things that happened back when phone lines were party lines and you could listen in on other peoples' conversations (or vice versa.)

Art lessons were either on the 'back porch' or in the drawing room.  My sisters had taken these classes too, when they were my age.....I had to bring a quarter with me to each Saturday afternoon lesson, to help defray the cost of supplies.  Sometimes during these sessions, she told me ghost stories about the house.  A vase of flowers on the mantel would float out into the room and dump itself out....and this was the poltergeist, she explained....a 'noisy ghost' that likes to move things, throw things, cause disturbances.  Once, a recently planted flower box was uprooted when her back was turned.  She speculated that this was Judge Dobbin, who had an observatory above the second floor, where the flower boxes were located.  

After Mr. Joe Cobb's death, Mrs. Cobb awoke in the night to hear his circular saw running in the workshop.  I thought it might be lonely and scary for an elderly widow to live alone in a big place like this, back in the woods, with spirits.  Fortunately, she rented out part of the second floor to tenants.  The tenants, a family, loved the house so much that when Mrs. Cobb went to live with family in Pennsylvania near the end of her life, they bought it and lived in it for about a decade.

~~

When I was older, she found some of my old paintings from class and had them matted for me.  I still have a fabric wall hanging that I made at her house, and I remember doing ink drawings over watercolor wash, and learning the principles of Japanese flower arranging...odd numbers always, earth, sky and water.  She let slip to friends that I had a fascination with buttons, and one of them brought me a small collection at church one morning.

My elementary school friend Alan Talbot lived in the gatehouse (one of the original tenant cottages) with his mother, and I remember attending one of his birthday parties there.

An oil painting in/near the front hall of a man with a floppy hat
"Merriman"

It was here that I first heard the word 'Europe' as a small child, and conceived of a place far away, that was different from where I lived.

The two tenant cottages had to be moved when Rt. 895, the Harbor Tunnel Throughway, went through in the early 1970s.

In the mid-2000s, the family who loved the house so much sold it, and shortly thereafter it was chosen to be the Howard County decorator's showhouse for 2007.  The home underwent restoration and refurbishment, and vendors and designers showcased their work all through the property in the fall of 2007.  The photos below were taken when my mother, sister, and I visited the showhouse on my mother's birthday in September of that year.

Sadly, about a year later, the then-owner of the property died by his own hand in the historic barn.  I don't believe the property has changed ownership since that time.

                                           Judge George Washington Dobbin, builder of The Lawn.



                                                                      Fairy swings

                                         Above, a view of the barn, to the west of the main house.

                   The main house with the original 'cottage' wing in the foreground, the two story 

                   double-parlor wing further back, with the observatory poking out above the second floor.

                                                         View from an outbuilding



                                              Here you can see the two extra extensions added
                                                 to the rear of the main wings of the house.
                             

                                                                         The beads!!


                                      Part of the porch on the cottage/library/studio wing.

II. Colonel Marshall's House

On a high hill through the woods and far beyond the back of the house in Marshallee lay the isolated foundations of the home of Colonel Charles Marshall, Robert E. Lee’s traveling secretary throughout the Civil War. Or at least they did, until relatively recently.

  

This landmark was a favorite destination of my sisters and me, where we collected evergreens at Christmastime and daffodils in the spring, in the buried remnants of the old formal gardens, nearly a mile from the nearest house but close to the noise of traffic from Interstate 95. The house remained standing, minus windows and other important parts, until I was about 10 years old. I remember visiting, looking through an open doorway, and seeing a path in the dust where someone had dragged away a heavy mantelpiece…..or maybe this memory is just a picture I made in my head, after hearing an adult talk about it. It’s impossible to remember which, now.

The house mysteriously burned one summer night in 1978, while I was sleeping in my room which looked out on the beech tree and the woods beyond, toward the hill where the ‘mansion’ stood….the mansion called Markham, and later Marshallee, after Colonel Marshall and General Lee. From that night on, we had to be especially careful when visiting the wooded hill, lest we should step into some innocent-looking greenery only to find ourselves plummeting injured into a hidden cellar or some other part of the home’s concealed foundation. We just avoided the green, tangled rectangle in the clearing in the bend of the encompassing dirt driveway.

Marshallee was a reminder of the Elkridge of the nineteenth century. It was built before the Civil War, but Colonel Marshall bought it in the years immediately following the War, after returning to his civilian profession as a Baltimore lawyer. Marshallee was his home “in the country,” Baltimore being only seven miles from Elk Ridge, as the crow flies. I imagine that seven miles was a good bit further then than it is now, when we have motorized vehicles, highways and interstates to speed us from place to place.

It is said that Colonel and Mrs. Marshall held lavish parties at the house, and that part of the rear wing was devoted to dressing rooms for the fine ladies who attended. In his later years, the Colonel loved to walk the front porch with his granddaughter, looking out over the southwest lawn, toward  the place where my sisters and I found daffodils still growing every year, in the 1970s and 80s…almost a hundred years later.

In our house in Marshallee, less than a mile away in distance, my mother often looked out at the woods through the window over the kitchen sink in the same direction, southwest. It was perfect for catching the low rays of sun in fall and winter, and she knew that when a cold draft made its way through this window, it meant snow. She was always right. I wonder what Colonel Marshall thought about as he gazed to the southwest from his porch. No doubt, he observed the weather and the changing seasons. No doubt, he also remembered some of the things he had seen and experienced on the battlefields of Virginia, and near the Capital, all those years ago to the southwest.

(840 words)

I. The Beech Tree

While the house I grew up in was being built, my mother would sometimes come and watch, making a cozy spot for me at the feet of a huge beech tree that stood in the backyard, at the edge of the woods in our new neighborhood, Marshallee. We moved into the house in August of 1968, when I was 10 months old. The tree still stands behind the house, but after more than 40 years of residency, my parents sold the house a few years ago. I haven’t been back to see it since, although I’m often in the area visiting friends, or my sister, or my daughter who now lives with her aunt during the school year.

There are many things about beech trees that set them apart from their fellows in the tree world. First would be their smooth, silvery bark, which scars easily and is therefore a beloved target of graffiti aficionados who were obviously never Girl Scouts who were taught that tree bark is the equivalent of our skin. Second would be their interesting, rounded-pyramid-shaped seeds, housed in prickly little nut shells. Squirrels sometimes nested in this tree, but always loved scrambling around in its branches, feasting on these tasty (I imagine) little nuts. The shells would fall gently onto the back porch, and sometimes our heads, in the autumn months. I wonder if the squirrels made bets with each other about whether they could make their scraps hit us when they fell. The third, and most interesting, unique feature about this breed of tree is the way that its trunk seems to grow human faces. Knobs and whorls, which appear on the smooth trunk as it grows, resemble eyes and eyebrows, sometimes even a lumpy nose or a scowling frown. A single tree can glower down upon the forest from 6 or 10 different vantage points on its trunk. Because of these faces, beech trees have always seemed to me more likely to be inhabited by a spirit or soul than the average tree.

This exact tree, both in fact and in fancy, watched me grow from a baby into an adult…watched my sisters grow, and my family evolve. I miss it almost in the way I would miss a relative.

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