Tell it not in GATH

 “GATH”: A Washington College grammar school student becomes a celebrated journalist and author of works celebrating the history and lore of the Eastern Shore. 

 

In 1827, Washington College’s original (and only) college building was destroyed by fire.  Shortly after the new college building, today’s Middle Hall, was built, the college admitted a limited number of grammar school students, who were educated in that same building.  Among these young students was a boy who would go on to become a prolific, celebrated, and internationally-known journalist who also authored poems, short stories and novels about Maryland and especially, his native Eastern Shore.

George Alfred Townsend was born in 1841 in Georgetown, Delaware, into a family with deep roots in the lower Eastern Shore.  His father Stephen Townsend, a Methodist circuit preacher, was descended from some of Virginia’s earliest settlers; his mother, Mary Milbourne, was from the area of Mattaponi Hundred in Worcester County, which bordered Virginia and the Pocomoke River (Ancestry.com). As a circuit preacher, Reverend Townsend ministered to churches all over the Eastern Shore and Delaware before settling his family more permanently in Philadelphia in 1854.  The family lived in Snow Hill, Cambridge, Princess Anne, and Chestertown from 1849-1851. When the family lived in Chestertown, young George attended the Washington College grammar school from the ages of 8-10. He finished his education further afield, earning a Master of Arts degree from Philadelphia’s Central High School in 1860, at the age of 19.

He quickly secured a position with the Philadelphia Enquirer, the first of many publications for which he would write throughout his career. Two years later, at the age of 21, he was hired by the New York Herald as a war correspondent, traveling with the Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan.  He was with the Army during the Peninsula Campaign but caught malaria before the Second Battle of Bull Run; he took some time off to recover, traveling in Europe and giving a successful series of lectures in England detailing his experiences from the front lines of the American Civil War.

Gath, Mark Twain, and David Gray

In 1865 he resumed his duties as a war correspondent, spending his time based at Union headquarters in City Point, Virginia and at Petersburg.  He also returned just in time to cover the Lincoln assassination and its aftermath for the New York World during April and May of 1865.  This work culminated in a book published later that year entitled “The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth.”  The flight and capture of Booth are also imaginatively remembered in his poem, “The Imp in Nanjemoy,” published on November 6, 1873 in The Daily Graphic under “Laertes,” one of Townsend’s many noms de plume.  After travels in Europe with his new wife, Elizabeth “Bessie” Rhodes and the birth of their first child, Genevieve, in Paris, Townsend returned to Washington D.C. to resume his writing career. During this period, he was a successful and prolific columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Graphic and was considered one of the most quotable.  He published letters several times a week, including lively portraits of political figures among his many opinion pieces.  He chiefly wrote under the pen name “Gath,” a biblical reference including his own initials.

It was under the “Gath” sobriquet that he authored his later works, which focused largely on the state of Maryland and his native Delmarva Peninsula.  In 1880, his “Tales of the Chesapeake” was published, including 9 poems and 17 short stories and retellings of regional legends and lore.  This was followed in 1884 by perhaps his best-known work, “The Entailed Hat,” a fictionalized story of infamous 19th century human trafficker Patty Cannon. 

Later in the same year, Townsend traveled to Western Maryland to conduct research for a novel based on events surrounding the Civil War.  He fell in love with the area and bought 100 acres of land just outside Burkittsville, in Crampton’s Gap, the site of an important battle leading up to the nearby Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War.  Here, he built an estate consisting of several structures: a house, a lodge, a den and a library building, along with a mausoleum inscribed with “Good Night------Gath” --carved in a facsimile of his own handwriting.  “Katy of Catoctin or the Chain Breakers: A National Romance” was first published in 1886.  This novel covered the years of the Civil War, from the John Brown raid on nearby Harpers Ferry in 1859 to the Lincoln assassination in 1865.  In 1896, he erected the National War Correspondents Memorial Arch on the site; this memorial, along with a tree at Arlington, is the only national memorial dedicated to correspondents killed in combat.  It depicts the names of 157 journalists and artists who saw and described the events of the American Civil War.  It incorporates quotations pertaining to communication, and striking sculptures of the Greek god Hermes and two horses' heads above tablets reading “Speed” and “Heed.” Gapland, as the site was called, is now Gathland State Park, and is well worth a visit.

Gath’s mausoleum is not occupied; he became a recluse after the death of his wife in 1903, and his financial situation declined as his distinctive style of writing fell out of favor in the early 20th century.  He eventually moved to live with his daughter and son-in-law in Philadelphia, where he died in 1914, and was buried near his wife and his parents from the Eastern Shore.

Townsend’s later works draw heavily on his life experiences and his family’s heritage, and many characters and locations are based on real people and places of Delmarva. Works like “Katy of Catoctin” and “The Imp in Nanjemoy” draw from his front-row experiences during and immediately following the Civil War.  Many of his shorter works feature country ministers, drawing from Gath’s childhood observations.  Meshach Milbourne, the enigmatic protagonist of “The Entailed Hat,” shares a surname with Townsend’s mother, and the character Sampson Hat in the same novel is based on Sampson Harmon, a free Black man and local folk hero associated with the Nassawango Iron Furnace in Worcester County.  Other characters are based on public figures in the lower counties of the Delmarva Peninsula.  His distinctive writing style is very old-fashioned to the modern ear,but his lush and vivid descriptions of the natural world and the sparse and haunted landscapes of the southern Eastern Shore are poignantly accurate to those of us who have spent time in that area. 

Anon the river spreads to coves, 

And in the tides grow giant groves

The water shines like ebony,

And odors resinous ascend

From many an old balsamic tree,

Whose roots the terrapin befriend;

The great ball cypress, fringed with beard, 

Presides above the water oak

As doth its shingles, well revered, 

O’er many a happy home endeared

To thousands far from Pocomoke. 

-from “Mother Nook,” introduction to “Tales of the Chesapeake” 

“The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth,” can be read in its entirety on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/lifecrimecapture4567town/mode/2up. 

 

Mr. Walsh

When I was very young, my interest in family history encompassed people I knew who were still alive; I wondered what they were like as children, teenagers, young married people. My sisters, cousins, and I would sit on the green tweed sofa in my grandfather’s den, looking through the albums of oddly tinted black-and-white and sepia-colored photos by the yellow glow of the floor lamp. It was an evening ritual any time we gathered at the house on the lower Eastern Shore. There weren’t any pictures of William Walsh, my grandfather’s maternal grandfather, only a vague impression of his place in the family tree and the knowledge that he was our most recent immigrant from across the ocean. This made him, to me, the most mysterious and fascinating of our known ancestors. The shades and atmospheres conjured up by my childish imagination gathered around a few details, only half-remembered by those who shared them with me, which I hoarded like shards of blue beach glass. I heard as a child that William, born in 1840, left England as a teenager, and that he had served in the British Navy. That he had “jumped ship” in Virginia. I imagined a skinny kid with light brown hair, looking vaguely like me, literally leaping from the deck of a wooden ship into the salty waves far below. He wasn’t dressed in a naval uniform, but more in the manner of a pirate’s apprentice, in tattered homespun, without shoes, of course. He looked like he belonged among my grandmother’s “rogue’s gallery,” her collection of Royal Doulton toby jugs depicting salty sea characters such as “The Falconer”, “Captain Hook”, and “The Poacher.” I imagined that he had bravely fled an oppressive existence in a crowded and dirty city somewhere, that maybe he was an orphan or even a criminal who had happened to fall from the deck of a ship like a ripe banana onto the remote beach where he would meet my great-greatgrandmother as she sat mending fishing nets, or waded with her skirts hiked up, raking for clams in the shallows.

 Decades later, when I was in my mid-thirties, I became seriously interested in delving into the real history of my family. The story I pieced together from the documents of the time told a much different story of William’s arrival in the United States. In 1858, when he was eighteen and a new resident of New York City, he declared his intention to become a U.S. Citizen. Before doing so, however, he needed to establish himself well enough to find a person to attest to his good character. In the meantime, he spent at least part of his time earning a living with the British Merchant Marines. He did indeed “jump ship” in 1864, but in New York, at the height of the Civil War, after the deadly 1863 draft riots but shortly before the Copperheads’ attempt to burn the city to the ground in November of ’64.

When I was a teenager, my father started doing genealogical research, visiting courthouses and local libraries in the small rural places where my grandparents, and their parents, grew up. There was one document he was never able to find: a record of the marriage of William Walsh and my great-great-grandmother, Maggie Ewell. There were rumors of “another family” in New York. These questions were left hanging in the air. It was said that he had a large personality, and was a drinker; that often when he came home in an inebriated state, his wife would yell for their daughters (“the girls”) to all go out in the back yard to be out of the way. These rumors of a double life took root in my imagination. I imagined Maggie, my greatgreat-grandmother, waiting by her kitchen window in Seaside Virginia, wondering when William would be back from his latest jaunt to New York. I imagined her wondering what he was doing, perhaps seething silently about her secret status as the “other woman” while posing as the respectable wife of a hard-working man who occasionally “went to sea,” but was in reality a mysterious foreigner who lied and had shady dealings with mysterious parties far away. I imagined children springing into being in separate families in separate states, with “wives” quietly hating each other across the miles, never guessing that the New York wife had probably died, along with the infant Willie, leaving William to start over as a widower with two young children in the nation’s largest city. 

I don’t know what rumor of opportunity, or lucky acquaintanceship formed at the docks or in a neighborhood pub led William to leave New York for Accomack County and the tiny town of Modest Town, and I probably never will. One of his neighbors in the North Moore Street tenement where he lived with Mary was a man from Virginia whose wife had been born in England. Maybe the two men struck up a friendship. I am in awe of the millions of invisible chances and choices, breaths of air on invisible spider’s webs, hormonal fluctuations, desperate situations, and quirks of time and timing which result in each one of us being born.

 'Hey! --- Do you have a pic somewhere of our ancestor Walsh the sea captain with the parrot??? '

-email from my cousin 

 It’s funny, but not difficult to understand, how in the space of four generations, a person within the range of “ordinary” during his or her time and place could accumulate the status of a folk hero. Four generations of imaginative children, listening to snippets of adult conversations after dinner or while half-asleep in their grandparents’ laps, combining them with favorite storybooks, the simplified history learned in school, and artifacts looking down from shelves in their grandfathers’ studies, can give the images that form in their minds a life of their own. He may not have been a sea captain, but there was a parrot. What my cousin knew, he heard from his mother. She had inherited his parrot, which he had stuffed after it died. My cousin’s father, her former husband, had thrown it away without telling her. My cousin had been told that William was on a ship that sailed out of Liverpool, that he made a small fortune seafaring, and that he used that fortune to launch his businesses in the U.S. He retired, or possibly ran from, sea life fairly early. My cousin admitted that it could all have been fabrication, although it now seems like an exaggeration based on truth.

 The most compelling story of Mr. Walsh that I’ve seen to date is one that I haven’t yet finished compiling, and it consists of pages of snippets from the ‘News from the Towns’ section of the Peninsula Enterprise newspaper, between the years 1883 and 1915, the year of William’s death. It tells of a busy and enterprising man who operated a store and drinking establishment; raised nine children (two from his previous marriage) with his wife; bought and sold real estate, and generally had his finger in many pots; entertained eccentric visitors from New York and England; invented a hog cholera remedy and a life-saving device for rescuing shipwreck survivors; had many friends and some enemies; traveled frequently with his wife, friends, and children; and once caught a 10-foot shark with a sea turtle in its belly. I do have a photo of him now, taken on one of his trips to England after the death of his wife. It depicts a healthy, well-dressed older man, and carries his signature on the mat---- the same signature that appears on his citizenship papers. 

1753

September Now Sets In --- James Madison Scates Diary, Part 2

Sept. now sets in. On the 4th of this month I traveled up the Rappahannock over to Fredericksburg and over on the cars to the camp at Brooks Station having been on furlough home.  On the 11th day of September we struck our tents at Brooks Station and marched for Marlborough Point the distance of 7 miles and again pitched our tents.  Up to the 15th all is quiet and on this day I traveled over to Fredericksburg on the cars and back to Brooks Station.  All quiet up to October.  

On the 1st October I was appointed orderly Sergeant.  26th I had a furlough home [marginal note; not sure if he means September or October 26th.] October 4th on this day we receive orders to march for Aquia Village we was soon ready for the march with 24 hours rations cooked and packed in our haver sacks.  We started on our march about 5 o'clock the same evening and marched until 3 o'clock that night when one of our waggons got stuck in the mud on the road and while we was there we received orders to return as the yankeys had left the place when they landed and had gone again on board of their vessels --- We then kindled our fires and spread our blankets on the ground and slept on them until day and about 8 o'clock we again took up the line of march back to our camp resting at Stafford Court House and again at the hospital church we arrived at our camp at Marlborough about 6 o'clock in the afternoon of the 5th after a long and tiresome march counting this distance there and back at 30 miles.  

James Madison Scates

The weather being verymuch warmer than is often seen in October a good many of our men gave out and stopped on the road in our own company every man returned to his quarters in the ranks.  

On the 15th we struck our tents and moved our camp about 3 hundred _____ and on the 10th we began clearing to build winter / on the 14th we began to build our houses 15th the batteries at (Evansport?) opened fire on the vessels passing there which caus'd all vessels to stop a five - miles below the Battery.  It was quite amusing to we soldiers to see some forty or fifty vessels lying too and affraid to pass our battery.

On the 23rd the steamer Geo. Page left her place whare she was fitted up in aquia Creek and ran up the Potomac opposite our battery at Evans Port and was loudly cheered by our soldiers.

On the 24th our regiment was ordered to cook 3 days rations and hold our selves in readiness to march at a moments warning.  But the soldiers was not informed whare we was to march but on the 29th we was ordered to march.  We was soon ready and about 9 o'clock we started from our camp to meet the Enemy which we understood was about to land in Westmoreland County and that being the nearest to our homes that some of our men had been since they left for the service they marched with light hearts, expecting to soon have a chance to see their homes or some of their beloved friends.  We crossed over Potomac Creek and marched out about 4 miles in King George County and in crossing the creek and our little march had taken the day we then stopped for the night in the woods and had to stay thair to await further orders.  We had no shelter but the woods and but little cover and laying on the cold ground for our beds and in this condition we spent 4 days and nights and the last night we had to suffer from a heavy east rain.  Next morning the 1st of November we received orders to go back to our camp which we done in quick time through the same heavy rain.  It was a terrible time the wind being very high we crossed the creek veary slow it took the whole day to cross we was quite glad to get back to our camp wet and hungry as we all was our soldiers seemed to be cheerfull and full of high spirit for the cause of our belovd country.

On Sunday the 17th we moved winter quarters at Marlbrough nothing of any consequence has happened since we recrossed the Potomac Creek.  Except a steamer out in the river threw several shots at Col. Caric's regiments crossing the Potomac creek and up to the 19th day of December all was quiet with us we was then comfortably quartered and on this day we received orders to march to the Northern Neck in Northumberland County VA this being the homes of most of our soldiers we received the order with joy and early on the morning of the 20th we started on our march crossing over Potomac creek and marched to St. Francis Church in King George County in the distance about 14 miles and arrived about 6 o'clock that night.  The next day the 21st we rested and about 3 o'clock on the 22nd we again started on our march and marched to Bethlehem Church about 6 miles further and again rested or to await further orders.  And whilst here we took our Christmas.  And on the 27th we again took up the line of march for the hop yard to take the steam boat we arrived thare about 10:00 the same day marching about 12 miles when the boat came to take us off it was late in the evening and only ran about 12 miles down the Rappahanock and stopped for the night.  And about light we again started on our rout and we arrived at Circuts Point the same evening (28th) the distance of 55 miles from the hopyard and we landed thare and spent the night and at 1 o'clock we again took up our march for Farnham Church in Richmond Co.-- we arrived there about sunset the same evening marching about ___ miles and rested for the night.  At 8 o'clock next morning Sunday the 29th we again started on our march we marched over a level country about 12 miles and arrived at Northumberland Court house amid shouts and cheers of welcome by the citizens and here we lived well for soldiers until about the 4th of February 1862.