A Great Big Lark

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)

Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping is wrong. But when you’re the youngest kid in the family and everyone is much older than you, it’s the only way to learn anything. At least, that is my story and I’m sticking to it. Although, there’s not really much you can learn while sitting halfway up the steps in the front hall and the people still gathered at the dinner table behind the louvre’d doors are talking….you can catch some words, but not all, unless voices are raised, and when voices are raised you have to be ready to make a quick and silent getaway so you don’t get discovered!

Gossip is bad. Gossip is the act of transmitting and receiving stories that might be true. It’s the ‘might’ that makes them exciting. There is usually at least a grain of truth at the center of a piece of gossip. Like eavesdropping, it only gives you part of the real story. Your imagination, along with your knowledge and powers of educated guessing can rush in to fill the gaps. The story you pass along has an added ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, or ‘what if?’, added by you.

While eavesdropping is a method of information-gathering, gossip is a form of sharing information, or more accurately, stories.

Studying genealogy satisfies both of these illicit urges. But it’s perfectly okay, right? Is it eavesdropping if you are reading court documents or letters? Is it gossip if the subjects have been dead for 50, 100, 300 years?? Is it ‘somebody else’s business….not yours’ when it’s the business of your ancestors?

We can ask people for information, but if we ask, we might not get the truth. Just as the youngest kid in the family gets a carefully filtered account of family business and events, we will get the version of the story that someone thinks they remember correctly, that might be edited to remove unpleasantness or scandal, that might be full of errors like incorrect names….maybe, the version of the story they heard as a child, while eavesdropping.

The Notebook

So, it's All Souls' Day, and the ancestors have been crowding around, wanting to have their stories told. I went looking for one small piece of information in the 1920 Census, and got sidetracked and distracted (isn't that always what happens?) and turned up all kinds of cool things today...but the most interesting thing I found is, finally, a pair of our immigrant Scots-Irish ancestors. I was looking at something in someone else's tree, out of curiosity, and looked at a record, and there they were.

Here is a shout-out to my 6th great-grandfather, Thomas Rutherford, born in 1707 in Derryloran Parish, Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. His father and uncles had left Scotland while in the service of King William III for Ireland, and were present and engaged at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Two were officers, and the third was a Presbyterian minister. They decided to stay on the island, and there they raised their families: one in County Down, the minister in County Monaghan, and Thomas' father, in County Tyrone. In 1728, Thomas was in love with 16-year-old Jean Murdach, of nearby Gorty-Lowry Parish. His feelings were returned, BUT! When he asked her father if he could marry her, not only did her father say "no," but he moved his whole family to Pennsylvania. I should note that nowhere does it say that he moved them to America to get his daughter away from Thomas, although that would add an extra dramatic spice to the story.

On October 26**, 1728---- either before or after the Murdachs left for America--- Thomas went into Cookstown and bought a memorandum book. On the flyleaf he wrote his name, and the date, and "written at the house of Aggness Murdoch,"---Jean's mother. On the cover, he wrote only "Enquire for Dennygall." Whether from Jean or another source, he was in possession of an important piece of information: Jean's family planned to settle in Donegal, or "Dennygall," on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Either that year or the next, Thomas left for America, the first of his family to do so.

In 1729, he finally got to Dennygall and showed up on the Murdach doorstep to claim his bride. He was again disappointed. Jean's father, John, sent him away, but told him that if he returned with a certain amount of money to prove that he could provide for her, he would allow them to marry. He departed for Philadelphia, and some time later reappeared-- on a horse this time, instead of on foot--- and with documents that satisfied his future father-in-law. No, Jean's father didn't send him away a second and a third time, although that would make this a more stereotypical fairytale adventure. Thomas later wrote in his memorandum book, "Me and my wife was married the 7th day of September, A. D. 1730, by the Rev. James Anderson, in Donney Gall, America."

In the years to come, Thomas added the births and sometimes the deaths of their 12 children, the later marriages of the surviving children, and other details of their lives. The girls for the most part married at least once, some losing husbands who had left on explorations into unsettled territory, or who became casualties in the Revolutionary War; these families moved south and west, to the Appalachian foothills of South and North Carolina. The boys, for the most part, stayed close to home in Donegal and Paxtang, or Cumberland and Adams counties, in Pennsylvania.

A kind person who is also a descendant of these people transcribed the records written in Thomas' memorandum book, which still exists. She then posted all of this, along with some bits from William Henry Egles' 'Pennsylvania Genealogies: Scots-Irish and German' on the Find-A-Grave website entry for Jean Murdah/Mordah/Murdach.

Thanks to Thomas and his stubborn determination to chase Jean (part of the way) across the globe, thousands of us now appear solid and clear in our own family portraits (Back to the Future-style), solidly written into our family trees, existing in flesh and blood, here-and-now form at our kitchen tables and walking on the sidewalks of our towns.

To steal the status post of a friend this evening:
"Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. 'Be still,' they say. 'Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.'"

**- my birthday, no big deal...

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Two Sides to the Coin of Creepy

.......

There's the warm side, of friends and firelight, holidays and companionship...romantic language and story-forms. Tradition. Tales told over and over but never written down...the same stories told in different ways in different places, the children of travelers, adept at blending in and looking at everything familiar through a different lens in each new location....and all the stories that have been written down. Literature and folklore, transmission of cultures...Festive and social, awash in spiced harvest foods, candy, and alcohol. Creepiness as entertainment: a costume that can be put on and taken off with little or no risk in the comfort of society. Quaint idioms to universalize and tie a clever bow around the primal reality symbolized and played out by the natural world at this time of year.

But the other side of the coin is not so much cold, as devoid of warmth. There is no companionable feeling here. No stories to distract and thrill. Stories can be put aside, but what is here can never be put aside, because it is part of the whole fabric of which we are made. Nothing is familiar, there is no blending in. No literature or art to make beautiful that which is inevitable and terrifying.
It is not human, not in our image or the image of any other creature we know. It does not care or feel. It is cold. It is bleak, most of all. It is what is left when there is nothing else. Despair and emptiness. Gray daylight ordinariness. The most disorienting dream you have ever dreamed.
Sometimes you will catch a glimpse. This is a warning. Nothing lies beyond but more and more of the same. This is what you have been looking for, and it's like nothing you could have imagined. It is truth.

Doctor's Report from 1880 Census....St. George Dist,. Accomack County, VA - transcription.

'The only contagious diseases that have prevailed in my district during the past year are the mumps and whooping cough; the latter of which has proved fatal in a few instances. My district is situated in an exceedingly level section of country, extremely well adapted for railroads, which may here be constructed at less expense than perhaps in any other part of the United States. It has long sustained the reputation abroad, of being very unhealthy, so much so that strangers regard it as a sort of death spot. But its exceeding healthiness for the last six years has contributed greatly to retrieve its character in that respect. Indeed, I believe it to be as healthy as any part of Virginia which is not mountainous. It is true, that the mortality on this shore in bygone days was very great, but that, I think, was owing more to the luxurious and epicurean style of living which then prevailed than to the climate. For now, when terrapin and oyster suppers and bacchanalian carousals have become less frequent, a very decided improvement in the health of the Peninsula has taken effect which is likely to increase as the Sons of Temperance are making very strenuous and successful efforts to do away with the use of intoxicating liquors, that well known source of disease and premature death. The district is free from rocks, and contains but little timber adapted to ship building………..however there is enough that is useful for building small schooners; and also the erection of dwelling houses. The most common tree is common pine, which grows very rapidly, the leaves of which are much…….making beds for hogs and cattle. This when decomposed and compounded……substance makes a very excellent manure, and is very generally used. There is a compound, de…..nated among us “……..”, which has also been found to be highly useful as for fertilizing the soil; owing to the salt with which it is very strongly impregnated, our lands requiring manure of character. This grass is ….. in great abundance to our bay and ocean…it is also much used in our ice houses for ….. ice, which it has the main …..of preserving. ………. Are unknown on the Eastern Shore. ….., known…….(next page missing.)'

(this is a snapshot of the place my grandfather's family came from, thirty years before he was born. they had lived in this place for about 250 years, at the time. I think this was written during the time that there was a campaign to persuade the railroad to come to the eastern shores of Md. and Va.)

Sleep Story

At my grandparents' house, I usually slept in the guest room on the first floor. Down a tiny hallway off of the 'entrance' hall (which wasn't really an entrance hall since only strangers used the 'front' door), the guest room had three windows, two of which faced the spacious side-yard, which was bordered by the Chincoteague Bay and PawPaw creek on the east and south sides, and was empty except for a weathered picnic table and a large cedar tree. The third window looked out on what I thought of as the 'front' yard, since it was the side of the house that we saw first when we arrived, since it faced the road. Later I learned that the real front of the house was the side that faced the water, and was fronted by the wide, screened porch. The 'front' yard contained the willow tree that I liked to climb and sit in. The willow branches made swish, swish noises when it was windy, which was always. Inhabited by rhythmically-singing cicadas in the summer months, it was easy to climb. I loved to collect the crispy brown shells that the cicadas left behind. My grandmother would give me a paper lunch bag to keep them in, and I would take them home to my house in Elkridge, for my mother to throw away months later, no doubt, when these summer days were more distant and my thoughts were absorbed in the worries and business of school days. Behind the willow tree ran the white-painted, two-planked fence which separated the yard from the end of the tar and gravel lane that dead-ended at the creek, and the low, narrow, ramshackle pier that reached out into the shallow, muddy water. Across the lane stood the neighbors' house across a damp grassy lawn, and an expanse of salt marsh, and finally, from this same window you could see the bridge that crossed the creek. Bayside Road ran, and still runs, along the Chincoteague Bay coast from Public Landing, swooping inland at Boxiron Creek and Brockatonorton Bay. In the 1970s, the bridge still wasn't paved, and each car or pickup truck rumbled over the wooden bridge, the sound echoing off of the surface of muddy PawPaw Creek and drifting back toward the house.

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.

376

HD Cottage and Elibank

Elkridge Heritage Society

Jail-keeping and Wolves' Heads **

November 7, 2007

While taking a break from working very hard on this quarter's statistics at work today, I found a really cool and amazing thing on a genealogy site....transcriptions of Westmoreland County, Virginia court records concerning John Minor (a 10th great-grandfather from Garway, Herefordshire...the immigrant!) and his wife, Ellinor. This document has his date of birth as 1625, which could be more accurate than my date of 1600. But look! He was in court practically ALL the time, which I guess is not shocking since this also reveals that he was the undersherriff of Sheriff Youell for many years. It looks like he was responsible for prisoners, and for building a jail, providing accommodations for transported indentureds, etc etc which his wife seems to have continued after his death. This is totally fascinating, and I recognize some of the other names in these records as names appearing in my tree, too (Bull, Allerton, Sturman, and even a Thomas Vaughn who maybe he knew from back home?)

John Minor's Court Records

***October 23, 2015. This REALLY needs to be about the wolfs heads!

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)