Showing posts with label incomplete posts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label incomplete posts. Show all posts

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.

John Chandler - Part One


 I find it interesting that this year, the year my father died, is also the year that two major immigrant brick walls have come down in my family history research.  One of those walls has revealed John Chandler, the youngest person at the time of his arrival to ever land at Jamestown.  The timing was dramatic; if he had been on an earlier fleet, he may have had to endure The Starving Time, which ended with the arrival of Lord DeLaWarr's fleet in 1610, on which John was a passenger.  The evidence linking this particular John Chandler to my family was established earlier this year, following genetic testing and research...more details of that later.  Some months ago I began putting together John Chandler's story, and typed up the sketch below to give context to his arrival:




                     The situation at Jamestown, Virginia on June 10, 1610, the day that                            John Chandler  (age 9) arrived on board the Hercules, the third ship in Thomas West, Lord DeLaWarr’s fleet

At the end of the previous summer (October 4), an injured John Smith returned to England.  Conditions in Jamestown quickly deteriorated. Relations with the natives quickly went from a fragile truce to an open campaign by Chief Powhatan to starve out the colonists.  Since previously, colonists had relied on trade with the natives for the bulk of their food supply, this spelled huge trouble with the coming winter.  The colonists had neglected their fishnets, which rotted in the water.  Hunting was extremely dangerous, since natives attempted to kill anyone who left the fort.

The expected fleet from England had suffered damage from a hurricane that summer, with the flagship becoming stranded in Bermuda, with a bulk of the supplies and food. One ship returned to England, and the seven other ships landed at Jamestown, delivering 200-300 men, women, and children and few supplies.  Although a fleet returned to England to warn of the settlers’ predicament, no further supply ships arrived that year, or the following spring.

The Starving Time followed, and that winter, 88% of the approximately 500 colonists died.  All of the fort’s animals were eaten, many houses and parts of the palisade were burned for firewood, and some even resorted to cannibalism to survive. 

The Bermuda contingent, including the recently widowed John Rolfe, arrived in May of 1610 to find 60 sick and starving colonists confined to the safety of the blockhouse, with the rest of the fort deteriorated around them.  It was decided to abandon the colony and on June 7, 1610, everyone boarded the ships and began to sail down the James River. 

At approximately 10 miles downriver from Jamestown, they were met by a fleet of supply ships led by Thomas West, Lord DeLaWarr, that had left England on April 1.  The newly appointed Governor West headed the group back to Jamestown.  On the third ship in this fleet, the Hercules, the youngest passenger was John Chandler.  He was also the youngest person to date to have been sent/brought to Jamestown.


*Governor Percy had sent Capt. Francis West on a trading mission to the Potomac.  After trading for corn, West and his men on the Swallow began to return to Jamestown, and at Ratcliffe’s fort at the mouth of the James learned that the colony was in dire need and had resorted to cannibalism.  Instead of proceeding with due speed, they headed to sea and consumed the corn themselves on a return trip to England.

Although he was very young, John Chandler wasn't traveling with relatives.  It is not known if he had any connection to anyone else on the fleet, or why he was aboard.  Just a few weeks later, another boy would arrive:  Thomas Willoughby, age 10, whose uncle was an investor in the Virginia Company.  It is a safe bet that the two boys, as the only children in the colony, became friends.  In any case, by 1624, John Chandler was living as an employee at Thomas Willoughby's military encampment at Elizabeth City.  John Chandler's fortunes were just about to change.  (to be continued)

MR. WALSH

(June, 2015) ~  Mr. Wm. Walsh, of New York, has bought a house and lot at Mappsville, of Mr. Nehemiah W. Nock, for $1,000. He proposes to en...