The Witch of Pungo

(HMDB) The witchcraft case of Grace Sherwood is one of the best known in Virginia. She was accused of bewitching a neighbor’s crop in 1698. Allegations grew over time until the Princess Anne County government and her accusers decided she would be tested by ducking, since water was considered pure and would not permit a witch to sink into its depths. Sherwood’s accusers on 10 July 1706 tied her hands to her feet and dropped her into the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven River near what is now know as Witch Duck Point. Sherwood floated, a sign of guilt. She was imprisoned, but was eventually released. Sherwood lived the rest of her life quietly and died by 1740.

Photo: The Historical Marker Database

"Jarrettsville" book signing

(HCPL) “Based on a true story from the author’s family history, Jarrettsville begins in 1869, just after Martha Jane Cairnes has shot and killed her fiancé…”
‘The story is set in Northern Maryland, six miles below the Mason-Dixon line, where brothers literally fought on opposing sides, and former slave-owners live next door to abolitionists and freed men.’
Meet Cornelia Nixon, author of Jarrettsville at the Jarrettsville Branch on Monday, November 2 at 6:00 pm for an exciting discussion and book signing.
For more information and to register for the program, call the Jarrettsville Branch at 410-692-7887. Link

Dave McNally

(Wikipedia) David Arthur "Dave" McNally (October 31, 1942–December 1, 2002) was a Major League Baseball left-handed starting pitcher from 1962 until 1975. He was signed by the Baltimore Orioles and played with them every year but his last one with the Montreal Expos.
McNally has the unique distinction as the only pitcher in Major League history to have hit a grand slam and thereby win his own game in the World Series (1970). Continued

Photo: trufan.com

Graving

(Slate) ... The graving hobby encompasses a range of activities: There are tombstone tourists who plan vacations around the resting places of 1950s Hollywood stars and military gravers who track down the government-issue markers of fallen 101st Airborne soldiers. Genealogical gravers fill blank spots in their family tree with information gleaned from far-flung headstones. Preservationist gravers use bleach to clean mottle from 200-year-old markers. Many gravers just like to hang out in cemeteries and look at the stones. Continued

Photo: Falmanac

The surprising beauty of portraits on gravestones

(Camilo Jose Vergara) When I visit urban cemeteries, I always document the photographs and relief portraits on gravestones. Portraits of the deceased add more of a personal touch to headstones than traditional funerary symbols such as crosses, resurrection angels, or stars of David. Images of the deceased on gravestones show the passage of time and exposure to the elements. Photographs fade, carvings are worn by the harsh weather, and some portraits are even vandalized. Continued

Photos: Falmanac

Lutherville Volunteer Fire Company marks 100th anniversary

(Towson Times) It's always something.
In 1910, the Lutherville Volunteer Fire Company was worried about raising the $25 (plus freight) it would cost to purchase a Model 130, 400-pound steel alloy fire alarm bell.
Officials of the company even hoped there might be enough money left over to paint the hose wagon. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

Integrating Major League Baseball retroactively with Strat-o-Matic cards

(Slate) ... Until this month, though, it was impossible to answer the question What if baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis hadn't been such a stubborn bigot? The great Negro League ballplayers-Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe-were missing from Strat-O-Matic's card sets, just as they'd been missing from the major league rosters of Landis' day. The black America of the early 20th century was invisible to white America, so there was no equivalent of the Elias Sports Bureau to keep Negro League statistics. The Negro Leagues also held a short 70- or 80-game season, supplemented by barnstorming against minor leaguers and semi-pro teams, so it was difficult to figure out where and when the teams had played-and how good their competition was. Continued

Photo: Logo of the Baltimore Elite Giants

Dugouts

(NYTBR) ... When a steer’s leg came crashing through its sod ceiling, Wilder wrote that Ma and Laura “laughed because it was funny to live in a house where a steer could step through the roof. It was like being rabbits.”
The Caseys’ dugout was less jolly: “scorpions, lizards, snakes, gophers, centi­pedes and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceilings.” In rainstorms, Walls writes, “the dugout turned to mud. Sometimes clumps of that mud dropped from the ceiling and you had to put it back in place.” Once, during an Easter dinner, a rattlesnake dropped onto the table, and Lily’s father took a break from carving the ham to chop off its head.
Wilder’s stories have acquired such mythic power (in “The Glass Castle,” Walls lists them among her favorite childhood books) that it can be easy to forget how many American families shared similar histories, each with their own touchstones of calamity, endurance and hard-won reward. Continued

Photos: 1. Oklahoma dugout c1909 (Library of Congress). 2. The Faro Caudill [family] eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 (Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

Daniel Nathans

(Wikipedia) Daniel Nathans (October 30, 1928 – November 16, 1999) was an American microbiologist.
He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. During the Great Depression his father lost his small business and was unemployed for a long period of time. Nathans went to public schools and then to the University of Delaware, where he studied chemistry, philosophy, and literature. He received his M.D. degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1954. Nathans served as President of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1995 to 1996. Continued

Wayward NJ manatee bound for FL

Ilya is on his way back home via a Coast Guard C-130 plane. "All this thing did was eat," Schoelkopf said. "But that's a good thing." Link

Kierkegaard on the Couch

(NYTimes) ... In an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced. Continued

Sir Walter Raleigh

(Wikipedia) Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall (c. 1552 – 29 October 1618) was a English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer.
... Raleigh's plan in 1584 for colonization in the "Colony and Dominion of Virginia" (which included the present-day states of North Carolina and Virginia) in North America ended in failure at Roanoke Island, but paved the way for subsequent colonies. Continued

Temperance and Prohibition

(LoC) On October 28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act providing for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified nine months earlier. Known as the Prohibition Amendment, it prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the United States. Continued

Who kept U.S. Grant sober?

(HistoryNet) In Galena, Illinois, in early 1861, one would have been hard pressed to find two men less alike than Ulysses S. Grant and John A. Rawlins. The 39-year-old Grant was a failed former Army officer of limited horizons and dubious sobriety who passed his days as a clerk, shuffling around his father’s general store. Rawlins, nine years Grant’s junior, was an abstemious, ambitious attorney and the town’s leading Democrat. Although Rawlins represented Grant’s father in the store’s legal business, he and Ulysses were only passing acquaintances.
All that changed with the outbreak of the Civil War. Continued

Photo: John A. Rawlins (Library of Congress).

James M. Cain

(The Rap Sheet) ... Certainly best remembered as the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941), Cain was born in Maryland, aspired early to become a singer like his mother, worked in journalism with both H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann, and moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts but wound up penning cinematic novels, instead. Continued

Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt

(NYTimes) The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt. Continued

Photo: "Battle of Agincourt" (Wikipedia).

"A Young Lady Shoots her Seducer in Maryland"

Here's some background on the Cairnes-McComas affair, portrayed in Cornelia Nixon's new novel "Jarrettsville." (No spoilers included.) (New York Times, April 13, 1869) On Saturday evening at Jarrettsville, Harford County. Md., Miss CAIRNES shot and killed NICHOLAS McCOMAS. About twenty persons were seated on the porch of the village hotel, when Miss CAIRNES suddenly appeared and drew a pistol and fired three shots at McCOMAS. The alleged cause of the murder was seduction. (NYTimes May 9, 1869) THE MARYLAND HOMICIDE; Trial of Miss Cairnes for the Murder of Her Alleged Betrayer. Sympathy for the Prisoner--She is Furnished Rooms at a Hotel--Her Appearance and Demeanor. The trial of Miss MARTHA J. CAIRNES for the murder of NICHOLAS McCOMAS, her alleged seducer, on the 10th of April last, at Jarrettsville, commenced here yesterday. From the large number of talesmen summoned and the regular jurors, (after the rejection of a good many on account of having formed all opinion. Continued

Photo: Grave of Nicholas McComas reads : "In the memory of our murdered friend; who was murdered April 10, 1869 in the 36th year of his age." Courtesy of Donna Jones at Find A Grave.

Jarrettsville

(NYTBR) In her third novel, “Jarrettsville,” Cornelia Nixon has the advantage of telling a true story, one that took place in her own family. Just after the Civil War, a distant ancestor, Martha Jane Cairnes, made national headlines after she shot and killed her sometime lover, Nick McComas. With the steady hand and steely nerve of a practiced marksman, Martha gunned Nick down on the porch of the barroom at the local hotel. The ensuing trial blended all the elements that, then as now, thrilled and fascinated the prurient American imagination: illicit sex, betrayal, murder — and the specter of race, since local rumor held that Martha had also had a liaison with a black man.
While Nick was a Union Army veteran, Martha and her family had been Confederate sympathizers. Their town, Jarrettsville, lay in northern Maryland, just a few miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, occupying its own strange no man’s land between North and South. Continued

Anne Tyler

(Wikipedia) - Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. novelist.
Tyler is the eldest of four children. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. Her early childhood was spent in a succession of Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina, including in Raleigh, North Carolina. She didn't attend a school until she was 11 and this unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view 'the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise'. ... Tyler resides in Baltimore, Maryland, where most of her novels are set, often crossing decades in a family's life. Continued

Biking Coal Country’s Tracks and Tunnels

(NYTimes) ... As I discovered on a three-day trip this year, the passage, which travels 132 miles from McKeesport, Pa., to Cumberland, Md., is part industrial history lesson, part nature excursion and part fun house, with thrilling and spooky moments: barely lighted corridors through mountainsides, whitecaps on rivers a hundred feet below and the lonely sound of a freight-train whistle.
Word is getting out that the trail is a world-class biking destination. Continued

Photo: MDRails

80 Years Ago Today: The Great Crash of 1929

(Wikipedia) The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash or the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.
Four phrases—Black Thursday, Black Friday, then Black Monday, and Black Tuesday—are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. All four are appropriate, for the crash was not a one-day affair. The initial crash occurred on Thursday, October 24, 1929, but the catastrophic downturn of Monday, October 28 and Tuesday, October 29 precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world. This stock market collapse continued for a month. Continued

Photo: Wall Street bubbles; - Always the same / J. Ottmann Lith. Co. ; Kep, 1901. Caricature of John Pierpont Morgan as a bull blowing bubbles "inflated values", for which group of people are reaching. (Library of Congress)

Photos: When Playgrounds Didn't Suck

See also: Waxing nostalgic for old, dangerous playground equipment

Library of Congress/Flickr

R.I.P: Soupy Sales

(NYTimes) Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned the smashing of a pie to the face into a madcap art form, died Thursday night. He was 83. Continued

Infographic of Mars missions

(boingboing) Editorial illustrator and data visualizer Bryan Christie created this fantastic graphic of Mars missions. Higher res at imgur.

The Lend-Lease Act

(LoC) The Senate passed the $5.98 billion supplemental Lend-Lease bill on October 23, 1941, bringing the United States one step closer to direct involvement in World War II. The Lend-Lease Act, approved by Congress in March 1941, gave President Roosevelt virtually unlimited authority to direct material aid such as ammunition, tanks, airplanes, trucks, and food to the war effort in Europe without violating the nation's official position of neutrality. Continued

Snyder's to acquire Utz

(YDR) Pending approval by the Federal Trade Commission, Snyder's of Hanover will acquire Utz Quality Foods in Hanover.
Snyder's plans to continue operations in all four of the local Utz plants, plus the Snyder's of Hanover's plant, said Carl E. Lee, Jr., president and chief executive officer of Snyder's, in a statement. Continued

Johnstown Flood Was as Big as Mississippi River

(Wired) The devastating flow released when a dam burst upstream of Johnstown, Pa., in May 1889 transformed a small, normally tranquil river into a raging torrent that briefly rivaled the mighty Mississippi, a new study reveals.
Johnstown, which lies about 100 kilometers east of Pittsburgh, was a thriving coal- and iron-producing town in the years following the Civil War, says Carrie Davis Todd, a hydrologist at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Then, on the rainy afternoon of May 31, 1889, disaster struck: Continued

Photos: Wikipedia, Library of Congress

Panic of 1907

(Wikipedia) The Panic of 1907, also known as the 1907 Bankers' Panic, was a financial crisis that occurred in the United States when the New York Stock Exchange fell close to 50% from its peak the previous year. Panic occurred, as this was during a time of economic recession, and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies. The 1907 panic eventually spread throughout the nation when many state and local banks and businesses entered into bankruptcy. Primary causes of the run include a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks and a loss of confidence among depositors. Continued

Superman-atee: Did Ilya the Manatee Swim to Virgina?

According to today's Richmond Times Dispatch, a manatee has been spotted in the James River. Could it be Ilya? According to what I've read online, manatees typically travel just 18-20 miles a day - Ilya's last confirmed location was in New Jersey on Friday. But maybe manatees can swim faster when under duress? Stay tuned.

Photo: Faster than a speeding blimp! Can manatees cover more ground than previously thought? (U.S. Department of the Interior, via Wikipedia).

The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock

(Errol Morris) ... Claims of posing, false captioning, and faking regularly appear in much the same way as they appeared in the 1930s. Clearly, Photoshop is not the cause of these controversies. They predate Photoshop and other modern means of altering photographs by more than a half century. But they allow us to ask an important question. What can we of the Great Recession learn from the photographs of the Great Depression? Continued

Photo: FSA/Library of Congress

Goodbye, Ohio Blenders

In a strange effort to transform itself from an "architectural museum" to a craptacular bore, York, Pennsylvania continued its campaign against the "York Triangle," this time dismantling "Ohio Blenders," a profitable agricultural processor. They had to take it using eminent domain. The city is planning to put in residential and commercial development - because, I guess, that's such a lucrative business to be in right now.
Not that Ohio Blenders is an architectural gem or anything, but it certainly added a little variety to the place. The problem, as I see it, is that the entire historic York Triangle area is in danger of being leveled, over time. See my article at Railroad.net, York Won’t Be Timeless Forever, for more information.

Photos: MDRails

Calvin Griffith

(Wikipedia) Calvin Robertson Griffith (December 1, 1911 - October 20, 1999), born Calvin Robertson in Montreal, Canada, was a Major League Baseball team owner (1955 - 1984). He was famous for his devotion to the game and for his sayings.
He was the nephew of Clark Griffith, who raised Calvin from the age of 11. After Calvin's father died a year later, Clark adopted the boy. The senior Griffith owned the Washington Senators from 1920 until his death in 1955; upon his death, the team passed into the hands of Calvin, who had worked up through a variety of positions with the team, starting as a batboy, and serving a brief stint under Joe Engel and the Chattanooga Lookouts at Engel Stadium. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

36 Hours in Richmond, Va.

(NYTimes) AS the heart of the old Confederacy, Richmond, Va., watched with envy as other cities like Atlanta and Charlotte became the economic and cultural pillars of the New South. But Richmond may finally be having its big moment: a building boom in the last few years has seen century-old tobacco warehouses transformed into lofts and art studios. Chefs are setting up kitchens in formerly gritty neighborhoods, and the city’s buttoned-up downtown suddenly has life after dusk, thanks to new bars, a just-opened hotel and a performing arts complex, Richmond CenterStage. Richmond is strutting with confidence, moving beyond its Civil War legacy and emerging as a new player on the Southern art and culinary scene. Continued

Photo: St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia (Library of Congress).

An Interview With Medical Historian James Mohr

(HistoryNet) ... There is a long American tradition of public responsibility for health. In the 19th century, for instance, states devoted as much as 30 percent of their budgets to public mental health care. And when it became clear that vaccination actually worked against smallpox, state after state created labs to provide vaccines free of charge to citizens. So to say it’s un-American is profoundly wrongheaded. Continued

Photo: WPA

1918 epidemic sent many to final rest on Flu Hill

(Jacques Kelly) ... An eerie pall fell over the city as gas-fired streetlights grew dim because so many utility workers were sick that the flow of fuel slumped. Some 626 streetcar operators were out one day. People were asked to stop making phone calls because many telephone operators (calls were hand connected) were home in sickbeds. "During its six-week reign as the king of all diseases, Spanish influenza struck down 50,000 persons in the city and state and killed 5,160," The Evening Sun reported in November 1918. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

Bobby Troup

Robert William "Bobby" Troup Jr. (October 18, 1918 - February 7, 1999) was an American actor, jazz pianist and songwriter. He is best known for writing the popular standard "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66", and for his role as Dr. Joe Early in the 1970s US TV series Emergency!. Bobby Troup was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Continued

Old-Timer, Still Telling Mountain Tales

(NYTimes) Ralph Stanley is one of the last, and surely the purest, of the traditional country musicians. He’s such a stickler that he has no use for the dobro, let alone electrified instruments, and he’s not overly fond of the term bluegrass. He prefers to call what he performs “that old-time mountain music.” He plays the five-string banjo in the claw-hammer style he learned from his mother — or he used to, until arthritis caught up with him — and he sings in a raw, keening Appalachian tenor. Continued

Photo: Larry Miller, some rights reserved.