Part 5

Wandering through the leafy streets, with ever a glimpse of bright water, or a white sail shining between the trees, one notes the Old World flavor of their names; Cornhill, Hanover, Prince George (of Denmark), King George (the First), Duke of Gloucester--in honor, this, of the pathetic little royal child whose early death broke the heart of William of Orange, and left Queen Anne a childless woman. And the houses that border the streets, sometimes set close to the pavement, sometimes half hidden by trees, are worthy of them, and of the air of unspeakable contentment and aloofness from the cares of this world which is characteristic of the place. Here is one built by the Proprietary Governor, Ogle, spacious and elegant, in whose garden are yet some bits of the box-bordering of a forgotten labyrinth, and here is one whose carved doorway arrests every eye. The Paca homestead has wings that are little houses of themselves, joined to the house proper by long, low corridors; and opposite to it, in the delightful little Iglehart house, there is a panelled room where ghosts might walk. The façade of the Brice mansion, built of English brick, as is many another in the town, with long corridors and transverse wings, is said to be two hundred feet long; while within, the drawing-room situated in the old fashion at the back of the house that it might overlook the garden, is yet the delight and despair of architects, so noble are its proportions, and so fine the carved work of its cornice and chimney-piece. The fame of the latter is, indeed, international. On the State House Circle the Randall or Bordley house, built in 1740, stands in a proud seclusion of magnolias and ivy-hung trees, and behind a tiny paddock where a pretty Jersey cow sometimes grazes. Not far away the Lloyd or Chase house lifts its walls in a haughty consciousness of being the finest specimen of its class in America. It not only boasts of mahogany doors with wrought-silver latches, carved shutters and cornices, noble drawing-rooms and chambers, a vast hall with a curious, double-flight of stairs, but has also a carved breakfast-room which is ideal.

[Illustration: THE BRICE HOUSE.]

On Hanover Street is the stone mansion of Anthony Stewart, the merchant whose brig, the _Peggy Stewart_, came into harbor one October day in 1764, laden with the repudiated tea. So incensed were the stout-hearted Annapolitans that, to escape their ire, poor Anthony, with his own hands, set fire to the ill-starred brig, his wife, the Peggy for whom the boat was named, watching from her chamber window the sacrificial flames mounting from the water’s edge. We keep a Peggy Stewart Day, now, in Maryland, and some of us like to remember that Peggy, too, was once the mistress of a breakfast-room which was ideal.

[Illustration: THE PEGGY STEWART HOUSE.]

At the foot of Duke-of-Gloucester Street, in 1760, John Ridout built for himself and his children three houses that are like a castle; and just across, hidden by the beautiful St. Mary’s Church, lies Carrollton, the home of Charles Carroll.[4] It is occupied now by the Redemptorist priests, and the profane shoe of a woman can gain for its owner no nearer view than that to be had from the bridge that spans the waterway below. It looks a very charming place, built in the Dutch rather than the Georgian taste: gray, small windows, high-roofed, and set in a garden which is what all Annapolis gardens are, and what all gardens everywhere ought to be, an ordered wilderness of hollies, box, magnolias, roses, lilacs, more roses and yet more lilacs, jessamine, wallflowers, iris, lilies, violets, daffodils,--all the old-fashioned flowers which ever were and ever will be the dearest and sweetest flowers in the world.

[Illustration: THE BURNING OF THE “PEGGY STEWART.”

FROM THE PAINTING BY FRANK B. MAYER.]

It is hard to come back even to the first days of the century just closing. The defence made by the guns of Fort Severn, which kept Admiral Cockburn at bay, seem but recent history in the light of other years, nor can the stirring scenes of the Civil and Spanish wars claim even a glance. Filled with the spirit of the golden days of the Athens of America, we sit in the deep window-seat of a panelled room, looking out across intervening lush and flowery growths, at the dome of the State House and at the aërial procession of the old denizens. What a procession it is! Indians, explorers, Lords Proprietary, Governors Royal, Republicans, Puritans, Cavaliers, priests, shipowners, sailors, slaves! Ships sail out with rich freights of tobacco and other Colonial produce, and ships sail in, bearing yet richer stores of silks and spices, wines and perfumes, silver and porcelain and sumptuous household furnishings. We see the growth in aristocracy, in wealth, in hospitality, in luxury, the plenty of those lavish boards, the splendor and courtliness of dress and manners of the gentry. Sedan chairs, carried by the liveried servants, attended by link boys and by bowing, perruqued gentlemen in gold-lace waistcoats and buckled shoes, bear the patched and powdered ladies to balls and routs. We hear the gossip of the playhouse--the first in America--or of the races. The _bon mots_ of the Tuesday Club are told again; the wit flashes at the dinner given in honor of the King’s birthday; the defeat of the Pretender, the birth of the Dauphin, the repeal of the Stamp Act, the coming of Washington. Anything would

“Serve as excuse for the glass”

in those

“Very merry, Dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking times.”

We hear, above the grave tones of the men who are talking of the affairs of state, the clear voices of the women--fair, slender, sweet, in pearls and brocade, singing to the accompaniment of spinet or harpsichord music, as unlike ours as were their faces or their thoughts, and we all but forget that the Past is dead and can come no more, and that these are but echoes and shadows and the ashes of roses.

Behind a long brick wall, gated and sentried, lies the United States Naval Academy, and another world.

“But that,” as Hans Andersen says, “is another story”; a story familiar at a thousand American firesides where the life of a son dedicated to the navy is lived over by fond hearts; a story told on every wave of every sea where our American ships ride on their mission.

[Illustration: THE NAVAL INSTITUTE.

(WHERE THE BATTLE-FLAGS ARE KEPT.)]

On the 13th of June, 1845, James K. Polk, being President of the United States, and George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy--a letter was written by Mr. Bancroft to a Board of Examiners of Midshipmen, sitting in Philadelphia, proposing the foundation of a naval school, and suggesting Fort Severn as a suitable site. Urged by Commodore Thomas Ap-Catesby Jones and Captain Isaac Mayo, the Committee approved the suggestion, and, although the usual congressional and sectional opposition had to be overcome, the School was opened on October 10th of the same year. During the war there was a temporary flight to Newport, and there have been, from time to time, various schemes for removing it permanently from Annapolis. It has long since become a permanent fixture, and additions have been made to the Fort Severn property (purchased in 1808), making an ample and beautiful home for the cadets and their corps of instructors.

Time ceases to be subject to clocks when one enters the green, shady Academy grounds, beside which the waters flash and gleam, and bells divide the hours of the busy lives of the lithe young sailors who are forever marching under the trees to this duty or to that; and whose four years of residence are crowded with ten thousand things which a landsman need not know, but which go to make a finished seaman. Among the officers, gravely saluting them as they go to classes, one sees many a famous face, for many of the simple, quiet gentlemen have done great deeds in their day.

There are some memorials of older days--the monument which recalls our victory at Tripoli, some cannon captured in some

“Sea-fight far away,”

and some figure-heads of ancient ships. Most precious of all is the worn flag, guarded jealously in the Naval Institute, which bore the wonderful message

“Don’t give up the Ship.”

By the docks lie various craft needed for the instruction of the midshipmen; and with them the old _Santee_, dismantled, a ghost of herself, lies at her last moorings. She has seen strange sights in her day, the old _Santee_, none perhaps stranger than the trim young steel giants of our modern navy which steam up the Bay at times.

[Illustration: THE OLD GOVERNOR’S MANSION, NOW THE NAVAL ACADEMY LIBRARY.]

Historically, the gem of the Academy is the Library building, which was built by Edmund Jennings, and served as a home for our governors from 1760 until 1868. It has had Washington for its guest, and many another great man of his time. And so, no doubt, had the fine old home of the Dulanys, near by, which was built as early as 1751. An iconoclastic superintendent ordered its destruction in 1883,--a loss irreparable to the lovers of the old town.

And all are its lovers, who have once felt its abiding charm.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Of all the deeds whereby Charles Carroll served his country, none, perhaps, was more noteworthy than the writing of the four letters to the _Maryland Gazette_, in 1773, signed “First Citizen.” In them he pitted his young strength against the marvellous learning of Daniel Dulany, the greatest lawyer of all the colonies, whose letters to the same paper were signed “Antilon.” His brave defence of the rights of the people brought Mr. Carroll the unprecedented honor of an adjournment of the Legislature that that body might visit his house _en masse_, to express its thanks and appreciation.

[Illustration]

FREDERICK TOWN

“THE GARDEN SPOT OF MARYLAND”

BY SARA ANDREW SHAFER

Long after the lower counties and the eastern shore of Maryland had been turned from a wilderness into a rich and prosperous country, and after Annapolis had grown to be one of the most brilliant and important cities of the New World, there lay in the western part of the domain granted to the Calverts and their heirs forever a vast and beautiful region, which was not only _Terra Mariæ_, but _terra incognita_ as well. Noble mountains, the remains of far older and nobler Alps, guarded the valleys worn by innumerable streams, and rich with the detritus of uncounted ages of erosion. Vegetation flourished under the kindly skies, and green things of every kind, from loftiest oaks to humblest mosses, grew in rank luxuriance over the heritage of the wild creatures of earth and air, and the scarcely less wild Indians. The Susquehannoghs, who chiefly lorded it here, were of the fearless and noble Iroquois stock, and, whatever they lacked, had certainly “a genius for nomenclature.” Their

“Love of lovely woods”

has left in one fair valley such names as Catoctin for its long western mountain range; Linganore for its eastward hills, and Potomac, Monocacy and Tuscarora for its rivers and streams. Vanished, like the red leaves of an autumn forest, in these soft syllables we hear, even yet, the voices of the “First Families” of Frederick.

One of the far-reaching consequences of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, was the unrest and fear which spread all over Europe, and scattered to the four winds tens of thousands of the best men, not only of France and the Low Countries, but of Germany, Switzerland and Bohemia. It is to one of these waves of emigration that we must look for the hardy pioneers who came southward from the settlements in Lower Pennsylvania. With the land-hunger and the land-judgment characteristic of the Teuton, they “took up,” as the phrase goes, the lands lying along the river they--and the Carrolls, long after them--called Monnokasi, or Monockessy. Certain traits they brought with them as a matter of course, these Palatines,--as they were indiscriminatingly called,--industry, economy, honesty, and an absolute devotion to the principles of civil and religious liberty. Some were Labadists, some Mennonites, some Lutherans, but for the greater part they were of the Calvinistic churches, and held the Helvetic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism next in honor to the open Bible. Hardly less picturesque than the Indians were these pioneers: the women in homespun kirtle and linen bodice; the men in the deerskin costume of the frontiersman, tomahawk, rifle and fringed leggings included. It was not long before they had built roads, cleared fields, sowed crops, built houses and barns, and had planted those countless lovely orchards that make the valley one drift of rose and snow when May-time comes.

In 1745 another settlement was begun along one of the newest roadways, the first house being built by Thomas Schley. There is a glimmer of doubt as to whence came the name of the village and the county formed a year or so later. There was, it is true, a very dissolute Frederick Calvert who died--the last Lord Baltimore--in 1771; but there was also a Frederick, Prince of Wales, father to King George III.; and it was no doubt in his honor that the name was given by Charles Calvert, then bowing and smiling at the English court.

In 1766, the frontier troubles known as the French and Indian War had assumed such proportions that General Braddock came over to see what could be done about it. A young surveyor from Virginia, tall and brave, with splendid physique and a judgment which impressed all who came in contact with him, was invited to act as _aide-de-camp_ for the British commander. The meeting between Braddock and George Washington took place in Frederick, in April of the ill-fated year 1755, as all men may read, not only in the pages of more serious historians, but also in a chronicle steeped with the very spirit of the eighteenth century, wherein William Makepeace Thackeray has recounted the adventures of _The Virginians_. Another visitor at the same time was Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster-General of the Colonies, who came to arrange for the delivery of despatches to and from the expedition, and who then first saw the younger soldier. A court-house was building, by the way, but, by fair means or foul, Braddock, whose angry bluster and loud oaths we can yet almost hear, aided by the wily Franklin, impressed so many hundreds of horses, wagons, teamsters and servants that the work was delayed for some years after the testy General, in his coach-and-six, drove off over the mountain on May-day morning. He left a memorial on Catoctin,--a walled-in spring of icy water, covered by a great flat rock, under whose shelter tiny ferns and silvery-green mosses love to grow.

There was a road to Baltimore and to Annapolis as early as 1760, and a curiously large commerce with the Saltzburgers who had settled in Georgia. The town flourished apace, and, besides the Palatines, some Scotch-Irish and many English began to arrive. The gentry had not been slow in obtaining patents to the fertile lands. In 1723 the Carrolls received the splendid manor of Carrollton, ten thousand acres in extent. Daniel Dulany had eight thousand acres, and the last Lord Baltimore nearly twice as much, while other gentlemen had estates of immense value. With fortunes such as these figures represent a splendid style of living was possible, the effect of which was seen on every hand. In 1760, the Market House was built, and the Presbyterians had their pastor, while as early as 1764 the Reformed Church boasted of a belfry, which, remodelled in 1807, is yet one of the

“Clustered spires of Frederick”

that rise from what the enamored Washington called the “garden-spot of Maryland.”

In 1765, Father Hunter began the arduous duties of a priest whose flock was scattered over uncounted miles of wilderness; and even before that, perhaps, the whole county, which embraced all that is now known as Western Maryland, was one parish of the Established Church, with All Saints’ for its centre. Her clergymen had an annual revenue of five thousand pounds, and this rich plum was given to one or another of the beneficed clergy who too often disgraced the reign of the early Georges. The most notorious of all the New World incumbents was, perhaps, the Rev. Bennett Allen, who came to All Saints’ in 1768, greatly against the will of the people. On the first Sunday after his arrival the vestrymen left the church in a body. A peace-making worshipper ventured up to the pulpit with a remonstrance, only to be met with a drawn pistol in the clerical hand, and an oathful threat of immediate happy despatch if he interfered with the service. That his wild career included the murder of one Dulany in a duel, and the plotted assassination of another, and that he died an unknown, drunken outcast of London streets, is the shameful and pitiful ending of this o’ertrue tale. That he has been succeeded by a long line of devout and godly men has long ago effaced the stain he left upon the parish annals.

[Illustration: PROSPECT HALL. THE DULANY MANSION.]

Some miles to the northeast of the town a young man, Robert Strawbridge by name, who had imbibed the doctrines of the Wesleys, formed a class after their ideas in 1764, which Bishop Asbury said was “the first in Maryland and America.” The small log chapel which they built antedated any other Methodist meeting-house in America by three years, which gives the county the right to the title of the Mother of American Methodism.

History was fast making in those days. In 1764 the Stamp Act was passed, and a commissioner was appointed to distribute the detested paper in the province of Maryland. Court was sitting in Frederick Town, but there was no paper of the prescribed variety on hand. On the 23d of November, 1765, twelve free men of Frederick decreed and declared that Frederick Court could attend to its own affairs without any aid from his Majesty the King, and that, paper or no paper, its work should proceed. John Darnell, the clerk, demurred, refused to issue unstamped paper, was committed for contempt, submitted, and thus the first repudiation of the Stamp Act was accomplished. The names of the twelve justices who, without hesitation or fear, took this great step, were these: Joseph Smith, David Lyon, Charles Jones, Samuel Beall, Joseph Beall, Peter Bainbridge, Thomas Price, Andrew Hugh, William Blair, William Luckett, Thomas Dickson and Thomas Beatty.

People took their pleasures gladly in those days, and in an old New York _Postboy_ (January 2, 1766), and a yet older Philadelphia _Gazette_ (December 26, 1765), we read of a right jolly mock funeral, in which the Stamp Act was buried with much ceremony, the chief mourner being the unlucky distributor, Zachariah Hood, in effigy, which, during the frolic, was hanged in the Court-House Square, near the stocks and whipping-post. The usual supper and ball of the period ended the day.

The skies grew ever darker, and, in the next old paper to which we turn, we read of pledges made to support the blockaded Bostonians, on whose shoulders the burden of a common injustice was laid. Next came the call to arms, and the start, on their long march to Boston, of two companies, in command of Captain Michael Cresap, whose father had blazed his way to the Ohio. One of his lieutenants was John Ross Key, whose son Francis, yet unborn, was to make his name forever famous.

On the roll of honor the county gives high place to Sergeant Laurence Everhart, who, in the battle of Cowpens, prisoner though he was, bore himself right haughtily in the presence of Colonel Tarleton. Escaping by good fortune, a better fortune enabled him to deal a blow at a British officer whose sword was lifted against Colonel William Augustine Washington, so saving that brave life. Long years afterward we hear of a meeting between the veterans, when “with tears and kisses” the old bond was strengthened.

At home work scarcely less patriotic was doing. Flax, hemp and wool were grown, spun and woven; a gun-lock factory was established, saltpetre was made and in the iron furnaces owned by D’Hughes and by Thomas Johnson and his brothers, cannon and bombs were cast. The Market House became an arsenal. Hessian prisoners, hundreds of them, were confined in a log jail built for them, and in some stone barracks, still partly standing. To reinforce Washington, and to share the perils of Valley Forge, seventeen hundred men left home, and until peace was declared, the people of Frederick bore their share of the danger and the loss with all bravery and cheerfulness. It is like a page from the history of the darkest ages, however, to read this sentence passed upon seven Tories, convicted of treasonable conspiracies:

“_You shall be carried to the gaol in Frederick town, and be hanged therein: you shall be cut down to the earth alive, and your entrails shall be taken out and burned while you are yet alive. Your heads shall be cut off; and your body shall be divided into four parts; and your head and quarters shall be placed where His Excellency the Governor shall appoint. So Lord have mercy on your poor souls._”

This terrible sentence was in four instances executed!

[Illustration: ROSE HILL, THE HOME OF GOVERNOR THOMAS JOHNSON.]

A mile or so north of the town, where the lands are richest, and the view up and down the valley and the blue mountains is finest, lies Rose Hill, where Thomas Johnson lived and died. Born in 1732, of sires who had commanded ships against the Invincible Armada, this man had few peers in the era which his wisdom, his industry, his sterling honesty and his pure patriotism adorned. He had made a name at the brilliant provincial Bar, when in 1765, in answer to an appeal made by the Massachusetts Assembly, a Maryland Assembly was formed, and he took his place among the men who had set for themselves the task of righting the wrongs of the colonies. He became a member of the Committee of Safety and the Committee of Remonstrance, and, in 1774, he aided John Adams, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry in framing the Address to the Crown. On the 15th of June, 1775, Thomas Johnson nominated George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of the Continental armies. This act, which would seem to be glory enough for one life, was but an incident in his busy days, for his name is heard of wherever probity and wise-heartedness were needed. That it does not appear on the Declaration of Independence is owing to the fact that the serious illness of a member of his family made his absence from Philadelphia necessary on that fateful 2d of July.