New book on Ma & Pa Railroad is a definitive work on 'America's favorite short line'

(Aegis) Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a train meandered over 77 miles of track between Baltimore and York, Pa., crossing Harford County from the Cardiff quarry district in the north to Fallston and Baldwin in the west as part of that journey.
Various railways joined the 1867 Maryland Central to eventually become the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad, affectionately known locally as the "Ma & Pa"…and sometimes, the "Maybe and Perhaps" or the "Misery and Patience."
In Maryland, where west of Harford County its tracks ran through Glenarm, Towson, Roland Park and Hampden, the Ma & Pa line hauled passengers until 1954 and freight until 1958. Continued

Photo: MA&PA train along Pleasantville Road, just below the Harford County line (Warren Olt).

'Dickensian Baltimore' recalls era of commerce, and poverty

(Towson Times) Long before Towson resident John McGrain became the historian for Baltimore County, he began taking photographs of Baltimore City.
He took his first photo 65 years ago, said McGrain, who was the unofficial county historian for years before he became the official historian in 1998. He retired from that post in 2006.
It has been said of McGrain that he not only knows where the bodies are buried in the county, he knows what they were wearing. Continued

Lincoln’s Do-Nothing Generals

(NYTimes) ... The military’s thinking circa 1861 was perhaps best delineated by Confederate Gen. Richard Ewell, who, reflecting on his West Point education, purportedly noted that it “taught officers of the ‘old army’ everything they needed to know about commanding a company of fifty dragoons on the western plains against the Cheyenne Indians, but nothing else.” Continued

The Reappearing Railroad Blues

(mdrails.blogspot.com) For decades the railroad industry was seen as a decaying backwater that would more or less vanish after the last American steel mill shut its doors. I can just remember those sad days when Penn Central collapsed and Conrail looked like a government boondoggle. I remember a TV news reporter making a stretch of railroad track bounce up and down merely by pressing on it with his tasseled loafer, and young Arlo Guthrie riding the train, singing City of New Orleans in a desperate bid to save an important industry. This, I think, appealed to a lot of railfans, who seem to be a very nostalgic lot. Every glimpse of a train could be the last, every snapshot archival, every bankrupt line a "fallen flag," as if it were Appomattox Courthouse - the lost cause.
But then something happened. The railroads came back. Continued

Funds lacking to preserve Long Island Farm property in Baltimore County

(Towson Times) The dream of preserving the historic Long Island Farm in the Cromwell Valley area may be slipping away. If it does, "it will be a gigantic loss for historical preservation," said Trish Bentz, executive director of the Baltimore County Historical Trust.
Jim Kelly said he thinks about the farm "with great sadness." Kelly heads the executive committee for Historic Long Island Farm Inc., a group of citizens that incorporated in 2007 with a mission to protect the rural integrity of the 6.8-acre farm at 2200 Cromwell Bridge Road, which is bordered on three sides by Cromwell Valley Park.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and included in the county's Landmarks Preservation List, the 292-year-old farm has been owned by the Risteau and Jenifer families since 1848. Continued

Photo: http://historiclongislandfarm.org

York-area model railroad displays embrace childlike wonder of the holidays

(York Dispatch) If only she could take back that fateful Christmas wish voiced to her husband more than 40 years ago. But Joanne Brown was 28 years old then. She was newly married and romanticized the holiday marked each year with a tree adorned with twinkling lights, ornaments and stuffed stockings.
The only thing missing, she says she believed then, was a toy train to encircle the gifts at the base of the tree inside their Springettsbury Township home.
"It's the worst mistake I ever made," Brown said. "I should've never bought that first train."
But it's too late for that; her husband, Michael Brown, has become an avid model train collector with 500 to 600 cars and about 75 engines. Continued

Photo: MDRails

Native American Heritage Day

(Wikipedia) President George W. Bush signed into law legislation introduced by Congressman Joe Baca (D-Rialto), to designate the Friday after Thanksgiving as Native American Heritage Day. ... Some individual states have also taken legislative action to recognize this day. For example, Maryland established this day in 2008 under the name American Indian Heritage Day. Continued

A Brief History of Black Friday

(Mental Floss) ... It’s hard to say when the day after Thanksgiving turned into a retail behemoth, but it probably dates back to the late 19th century. At that time, store-sponsored Thanksgiving parades were common, and once Santa Claus showed up at the end of the parade, the holiday shopping season had officially started. Continued

Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner

(Wired) - Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents' Thanksgiving dinner table.
Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn't look or taste much at all like our modern variants do. Continued

Richmond’s Medical Miracle

(NYTimes) During the opening months of the Civil War, the streets of Richmond, Va., filled with bloodied bodies. The thousands of Confederate wounded were treated in a range of makeshift hospitals hastily established in hotels, factories and private homes. But by autumn, as hopes the conflict would be brief faded, it became clear a war of this magnitude required a modernized medical response.
That fall Samuel P. Moore, the Confederate surgeon general, secured both the facilities and the personnel to provide such a response at Chimborazo, a 40-acre plateau just east of the Confederate capital’s stately Church Hill neighborhood (the site got its name from Mount Chimborazo, an inactive volcano in Ecuador, famous at the time after being “discovered” by the German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt). Occupying 150 buildings, it was one of the largest hospitals in the world, typically serving around 4,000 sick and wounded soldiers at a time. Continued

Photo: Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, a nurse/administrator at Chimborazo, who later wrote "A Southern Woman's Story: Life in Confederate Richmond," which is still in print.

Remembering Repudiation Day in Frederick

(Gazette.Net) There are some ill-informed denizens of Frederick County who labor under the misapprehension that the tea party movement is a new phenomenon in Frederick, and that the famous tea party protest against British taxation was basically a Boston adventure.
But a group of Frederick judges met in a long-since demolished wood house on Record Street, behind the current City Hall, a full decade before the Boston Tea Party launched its own protest in what came to be called Repudiation Day. Continued

Cartoon lovingly pilfered from the late John Stees, longtime cartoonist from the Baltimore Sun of my youth.

More Thanksgivings

(LoC) - On December 4, 1619, thirty-eight Englishmen left their ship, ventured into the Virginia wilderness, and observed a prayer of Thanksgiving for safe passage to the New World.
Soon, the party, including a sawyer, a cooper, a shoemaker, a gun maker, and a cook, set about constructing a storehouse and an assembly hall for the plantation known as the Berkeley Hundred. Thereafter, December 4 was a day of Thanksgiving at Berkeley, "yearly and perpetually kept holy" as the plantation charter directed.
Located on the James River thirty miles west of Jamestown, the 8,000-acre plantation drew ninety settlers before it was decimated by a massacre in 1622. Continued

A few years later (1634), in Maryland, a first thaksgiving was celebrated, but we call that Maryland Day.

America's REAL First Thanksgiving

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (USA Today) - What does REAL mean? Well, she's not talking turkey and cranberry sauce. She's talking a Spanish explorer who landed here on Sept. 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians. They dined on bean soup. Continued

A Sauerkraut Thanksgiving

(Bon Appétit) ... I didn't know what to say that day to explain our tradition, but I've since done some research, and I now know where it comes from: Baltimore. Serving sauerkraut at Thanksgiving is an old tradition there, rooted in the homes of the city's German immigrants. In 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, about a quarter of Baltimore's population was German. Sauerkraut was a given on their celebratory table, and so it became a common part of Thanksgiving meals across the city. Over time, it didn't even matter if you came from German stock: Sauerkraut became a Baltimore thing. My grandfather's family was as Irish as they come—Mack was their surname, a shortened version of Macgillycuddy—but he grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, eating sauerkraut on the fourth Thursday of every November. Continued

{Falmanac slow-cooks his Thanksgiving sauerkraut with spareribs and caraway seeds.}

Photo: Making sauerkraut c1915 (Library of Congress).

Turkey in the yard

(Newsweek) ... In 1881 a volume called Los Angeles Cookery urged readers to "get your turkey six weeks before you need it; put him in a small yard; give him walnuts—one the first day, and increase every day one until he has nine; then go back to one and up to nine until you kill him, stuffing him twice with corn meal each day, in which you put a little chopped onion and celery if you have it." Continued

Photo: Turkey in the yard of a Harford County home, circa 1935 (Library of Congress).

Benjamin Chew

(Wikipedia) Benjamin Chew (November 19, 1722 – January 20, 1810) was a third-generation American, a Quaker-born legal scholar, a prominent and successful Philadelphia lawyer, head of the Pennsylvania Judiciary System under both Colony and Commonwealth, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Province of Pennsylvania.
Chew was well known for his precision and brevity in making legal arguments as well as his excellent memory, judgment, and knowledge of statutory law. His primary allegiance was to the supremacy of law and constitution.
... Benjamin Chew was the son of Samuel Chew, a physician and first Chief Justice of Delaware, and Mary Galloway Chew (1697–1734). He was born in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, at his father's plantation of Maidstone. Continued

Walking and documenting the B&O Railroad

(Baltimore Sun) John David Hiteshew Sr. and Jr. — both known as David — spent four years walking and exploring hundreds of miles of Maryland railroad trackage to document the industrial infrastructure and physical characteristics of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the nation's first common carrier railroad that began building westward from Baltimore in 1827.
They were armed with walking shoes, notepads and a digital camera used to photograph trackage, alignments, curves, grades, tunnels, culverts, bridges — both stone and steel, yards, signals and wayside structures affiliated with the railroad.
They also recorded stations, towers, shop buildings, and the remains or foundations where structures had once stood. No detail, no matter how mundane or pedestrian, escaped their attention and recording process. Continued

Photo: MDRails

Evacuation Day

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Time!

(LoC) On November 18, 1883, four standard time zones for the continental U.S.A. were introduced at the instigation of the railroads. At noon on this day the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to correspond to the change. Until the invention of the railway, it took such a long time to get from one place to another that local "sun time" could be used. When traveling to the east or to the west, a person would have to change his or her watch by one minute every twelve miles.
When people began traveling by train, sometimes hundreds of miles in a day, the calculation of time became a serious problem. Operators of the new railroad lines realized that a new time plan was needed in order to offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals. Continued

Photo: MDRails

Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer

(Wikipedia) Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer (1723 – 16 November 1790) was a politician and a Founding Father of the United States. Born long before conflicts with Great Britain emerged, he was a leader for many years in Maryland's colonial government. However, when conflict arose with Great Britain, he embraced the Patriot cause, willingly abandoning the ordered society of colonial Maryland for the uncertainty of revolution. Continued

Plan for accessible trail taking shape at Cromwell Valley Park

(Towson Times) The Cromwell Valley Park Council has begun development of the "Nature Trail for All," a scenic and educational trail that will be accessible to people of varying physical and intellectual limitations.
"There are very few places where someone with limited mobility can be around nature," said Alan Lake, chair of the buildings and grounds committee for the park council.
"Right now, the park is a series of hills. There are 16 miles of trails, but little of it is accessible to people with various limitations," he said. Continued

Photo: Photo: Barns at Cromwell Valley Park, Canon EOS 5D (Falmanac)

A short history of the dreaded green bean casserole

(Slate) ... My guess is that we've got the Campbell Soup Company to thank for the limp bean's promotion from occasional guest to bona fide Thanksgiving mainstay. As is fairly well-known, the Campbell test kitchen (under the leadership of Dorcas Reilly) invented the green bean casserole in 1955. This near-instant meal consists of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, fried onions, and—of course—canned green beans. Although Campbell did not initially market the recipe as a holiday special per se, it became one by the 1960s. Now we can't get rid of it. This Thanksgiving, the soup giant estimates that 20 percent to 30 percent of American families will prepare the green bean casserole. Continued

Photo: Rick Kimpel

Albert Ruger: Pioneering panoramic map artist

(LoC) Pioneering panoramic map artist Albert Ruger died on November 12, 1899 in Akron, Ohio. Ruger was born in Prussia and emigrated to the United States where he initially worked as a stonemason. While serving with the Ohio Volunteers during the Civil War he began drawing landscapes.
After the war, Ruger settled in Battle Creek, Michigan. In the late 1860s, Ruger joined forces with J.J. Stoner of Madison, Wisconsin to form Merchants Lithographing Company. Over the next three decades, Ruger produced maps of towns and cities in twenty-two states from New Hampshire to Minnesota and as far south as Alabama.
A form of cartography in which towns and cities are drawn as if viewed from above at an oblique angle, panoramic mapping became popular during the late nineteenth century. Panoramic cartographers abandoned restraints of scale to illustrate street patterns, individual buildings, and major landscape features in perspective. Continued

My Dutiful Balloon: Precarious Reconnaissance in The Great War

While wandering through a churchyard the other day we found an odd line on a gravestone: 28 BALLOON CO. That was a new one. We were a stone's throw from the border of Aberdeen Proving Ground and it got me to wondering if APG was home to a balloon company, and even stranger, what if the guy landed here and was buried on the spot? Well, he didn't land there, dead in a graveyard, but the base was home to the 28th Balloon Company, also a balloon school, and a unit of the 18th Airship, whatever that was.
The balloonists were hoisted in the air in baskets, hanging from little blimps, which were tethered to the ground, in order to see what the enemy was up to. The enemy didn't care for it and would shoot at the balloons. The balloonists were well protected with covering fire to discourage attack, but this didn't deter enemy aircraft from targeting them anyway; there was a whole class of aces known as "balloon busters." The balloonists were equipped with parachutes which they seemed to use use rather often. But it must have been an effective way to gather information as there were a lot of balloon outfits on both sides. According to Stars And Stripes, there were 35 American balloon companies in France during World War One. 23 of the companies were active at the front, making 1,642 ascensions.

I imagine the balloonists were a breed apart. Who would take such hazardous duty? One story from Stars and Stripes relates how a French soldier, forced to parachute from his burning craft (Did I mention the balloons were filled with flammable hydrogen?), found himself being strafed by a German plane, the balloonist calmly pulled a pistol from his holster and started blasting away at the pilot.
The paper also noted that the members of the balloon corps were usually near the top of the list when it came to generosity, donating liberal amounts of their pay to various charity drives.
By 1923 it was all over; lighter than air technology was on its way out and the army was through with the balloon corps. Nearly a hundred years later, it is just another forgotten aspect of an unpopular time.

Veterans Day

The Allied powers signed a ceasefire agreement with Germany at Rethondes, France, at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, bringing the war, later known as World War I, to a close. President Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day on November 11, 1919, with the following words: "To us in America, the reflections of armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…" Originally, the celebration included parades and public meetings following a two-minute suspension of business at 11:00 a.m. Continued

Harford, Cecil counties tell their stories from War of 1812

(Baltimore Sun) ... on May 3, 1813, the British fleet sailed up the Chesapeake Bay and set fire to Havre de Grace homes and businesses. The invaders razed the nearby Principio Furnace, which had manufactured some of the first cannons for the U.S. Navy.
The counties and their towns will tell such stories through their museums, battle recreations, site tours and a Star Spangled trail. Continued

Armistice Day

We never observed Veterans Day in my house, growing up. We observed Armistice Day. "It was intended for those who fought in World War One," my mom said, and that was that.

Bucky Harris

(Wikipedia) Stanley Raymond "Bucky" Harris (November 8, 1896 – November 8, 1977) was a Major League Baseball player, manager and executive. In 1975, the Veterans Committee elected Harris, as a manager, to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Harris was born in Port Jervis, New York and raised mostly in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Harris was discovered by baseball promoter Joe Engel, who led the Chattanooga Lookouts at Engel Stadium. In 1919, at the age of 22, he came up to the Washington Senators, where his initial performance was unimpressive. Harris' batting average was a meager .214, and he participated in only eight games in his first season.
Despite this poor showing, club owner Clark Griffith made him Washington's regular second baseman in 1920, and before long, Harris was batting .300, while distinguishing himself as a tough competitor. The young player stood up even to the ferocious Ty Cobb, who threatened Harris when he tagged Cobb in their first encounter. Continued

Dunmore's Proclamation

(Wikipedia) Dunmore's Proclamation is a historical document issued on November 7, 1775, by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, royal governor of the British Colony of Virginia. The Proclamation declared martial law and promised freedom for slaves of American patriots who left their masters and joined the royal forces.
... The only notable battle in which Dunmore's slaves participated was the Battle of Great Bridge, which was a decisive British loss. Although few slaves reached Dunmore (estimates vary, but generally range between 800 and 2000), it is estimated that up to 100,000 attempted to leave their masters and join the British. Those escaped slaves who managed to join the British became known as Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment. Continued

The Storm That Nearly Lost the War

(NYTimes) During the first week of November 1861 the worst storm in years struck the Atlantic Seaboard. Lacking modern meteorological equipment and techniques to predict its arrival, millions of people were caught unprepared. Floodwaters swamped Newark, Manhattan and Newport, R.I. Violent winds splintered fishing fleets off New England. On Nov. 3, 26 people on board the 990-ton square-rigger Maritana drowned when their ship capsized near Boston Harbor.
As bad as the damage was, though, most Northerners feared the worst news was still to come. Continued

Walter Johnson: "The Big Train"

(Wikipedia) Walter Perry Johnson (November 6, 1887 – December 10, 1946), nicknamed "The Big Train", was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball between 1907 and 1927. One of the most celebrated players in baseball history, Johnson established several pitching records, some of which remained unbroken for more than a half-century.
... As a right-handed pitcher for the Washington Nationals/Senators, Walter Johnson won 417 games, the second most by any pitcher in history (after Cy Young, who won 511). He and Young are the only pitchers to have won 400 games. Continued

Walter Johnson and Calvin Coolidge ( Library of Congress - both photos)

First cross country flight landed in Pasadena 100 years ago Saturday

PASADENA - The only reminder of C.P. "Cal" Perry Rodger's historic cross-country flight in the Vin Fiz 100 years ago today is a simple plaque at Tournament Park.
"HISTORICAL SITE - TOURNAMENT PARK
"Official Terminus of the first transcontinental airplane flight. Calbraith "Cal" Perry Rodgers took off from Sheepshead Bay, New York, September 17, 1911, landing here November 5, 1911." Continued

Nov. 4, 1952: Univac Gets Election Right, But CBS Balks

1952 (Wired): Television makes its first foray into predicting a presidential election based on computer analysis of early returns. The Univac computer makes an incredibly accurate projection that the network doesn't think credible.
The Univac, or Universal Automatic Computer, was the next-gen version of the pioneering Eniac built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. in 1950 and sold the first Univac to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951. Continued

Photo: U.S. Army/Wired

Happy National Sandwich Day!

(Joffre The Giant) Today is the birthday of John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich. Give praise to God and the earl this day by eating one of their sandwiches.

Mr. Seward’s Little Bell

(NYTimes) “My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen in Ohio. I can touch the bell again, and order the arrest of a citizen in New York. Can the Queen of England, in her dominions, do as much?” William Henry Seward’s boast to Lord Lyons, Britain’s envoy to the United States for much of the Civil War — and a diplomat with whom Lincoln’s secretary of state enjoyed an often fractious relationship — is almost certainly an apocryphal invention of administration critics. But it nevertheless illustrates a higher truth: Seward’s early and aggressive involvement with the wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most controversial actions of the Lincoln administration. Continued

Photo: John Merryman

'Hell on Wheels' keeps track of railroad building

(siouxcityjournal.com) "Hell on Wheels" may be set in the 1800s, but it's able to address issues contemporary series can't. "By going back or forward, you can give yourself a much bigger canvas," explains actor Colm Meaney. "People tend to group together, so there's all those issues as well as 'What's progress?'"
Featuring a melting pot of characters, "Hell on Wheels" suggests what might have happened during construction of the Transcontinental Railway. Four characters -- a former Confederate soldier, an emancipated slave, a greedy businessman and a young widow -- provide an entree into the world. Continued

Library of Congress Building Opens

(LoC) On November 1, 1897, the new Library of Congress building opened its doors to the public. Previously, the Library had been housed in the Congressional Reading Room in the U.S. Capitol. In the twentieth century, two additional buildings were added to the Library of Congress complex on Capitol Hill. In 1871, Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford first suggested the construction of a separate building for the Library, which had outgrown its cramped quarters. According to Library historian John Y. Cole, Spofford envisioned "a circular, domed reading room at the Library's center, surrounded by ample space for the Library's various departments." Continued