‘The Right-Hand Shore,’ by Christopher Tilghman

(NYTBR) ... Mason’s Retreat has been making its appearance in various forms in Tilghman’s fiction for the last 20-odd years. In his first book, the story collection “In a Father’s Place,” we see it as the “Big House,” feared by the son of a white farmworker in the 1960s, and later as the ancestral home — a place of “mildewed stillness that smelled of English linen and straw mats” — to which an aspiring novelist brings his villainous new girlfriend for a summer weekend. From story to story, novel to novel, Tilghman’s readers have become familiar with this Chesapeake plantation, with its summer kitchen and its smokehouse, its box bushes and its oyster-shell paths and stands of loblolly pines, its big views of tidal waters. We have grown accustomed to the scowling 17th-century portrait of “Cousin Oswald” that hangs on the wall of the yellow stucco manor house and have heard the same family names of the neighboring gentry, farm laborers and watermen who have inhabited this peninsula for generations. Continued

The South, the War and ‘Christian Slavery’

(Disunion) In the minds of many Southerners, the capture of New Orleans on April 25, 1862, by Union forces was more than simply a troubling military loss. It also raised the disturbing possibility that divine punishment was being inflicted on a spiritually wayward and sinful Confederacy.
The loss of the South’s most important port and largest city had followed on the heels of the loss of Tennessee’s Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February and the ignominious retreat from Shiloh in early April. These setbacks, after the virtually uninterrupted Southern successes of 1861, caused many across the Confederacy to wonder, in the words of the South Carolina diarist Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward, if “these reversals and terrible humiliations … come from Him to humble our hearts and remind us of our total helplessness without His aid.” Continued

Photo: E. P. Alexander

Books for Congress

(LoC) Today, the Library of Congress celebrates its birthday. On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved the appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of "such books as may be necessary for the use of congress."The books, the first purchased for the Library of Congress, were ordered from London and arrived in 1801. The collection of 740 volumes and three maps was stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library's first home. Continued

Poe Taunts Filmmakers Evermore

(NYTimes) IT’S probably safe to assume that Edgar Allan Poe does not rest quietly in the Baltimore grave that claimed him, at 40, in 1849. In the works that made him famous — poems like “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” — death is never quite the end: something lives on, not happily. Continued

Year of good news highlights Baltimore's rich beer history

(Baltimore Sun) While sentimentalists have applauded the return of National Bohemian from the beer graveyard, they now patiently await for the triumphal return of fabled National Premium — the upscale sister beer to Natty Boh that was also brewed by the National Brewing Co. — rumored to be making its debut this month.

Late last year, Maureen O'Prey, who teaches history at the Community College of Baltimore County, published her book, "Brewing in Baltimore ."

And now, it was been joined by a second entertaining and informative sudsy history of the Baltimore brewing scene, "Baltimore Beer: A Satisfying History of Charm City Brewing," which resulted from a collaboration of two former Baltimore Sun staffers, columnist Rob Kasper and photographer Jim Burger, and was published several weeks ago. Continued

Washington Road trails in Westminster a hidden treasure

(Baltimore Sun) There is a peaceful atmosphere walking along the Washington Road Community Trail, despite the continual rumble of traffic.

A section of the wide, mowed trail rambles along behind the Carroll County Career and Technology Center, as well as Westminster High School before plunging into a wooded area that blocks buildings from view and also shields walkers from the ever-busy Route 97 to the east and Route 32 to the west.

To keep from getting lost, some 92 bluebird houses serve as markers along the trail, with arrows pointing the trail's direction painted on their sides. Continued

Abolition in the District of Columbia

(LoC) On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, an important step in the long road toward full emancipation and enfranchisement for African Americans. ... Before 1850, slave pens, slave jails, and auction blocks were a common site in the District of Columbia, a hub of the domestic slave trade. Continued

Titanic sinks

(LoC) On this day, at about 11:40 PM, April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank to the bottom of the sea at about 2:20 a.m. the next morning, taking the lives of more than 1,500 people. Continued

Liriodendron is a Harford County treasure

(Jacques Kelly) When the street sign said Boulton, I knew I was near the right address. Soon another familiar street name popped up — Atwood — and I was squarely in Bel Air's Howard Park, a subdivision created out of the orchards surrounding a noteworthy Baltimorean's summer home.
Its formal name is Liriodendron, and it is a Harford County treasure. It was built by one of the Johns Hopkins Hospital's fabled "Big Four," Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly. Kelly spent most of the year at 1406 Eutaw Place in Baltimore, where he also had a private clinic in an adjoining building. But in the summer, he, his Danzig-born wife, Olga Elizabeth Laetitia Bredow, and nine children made off for cooler Bel Air. Continued

Elk Landing Opens 62-Acres of Park Land to Public

(WoCCP) For those who enjoy the natural beauty of publicly owned lands and the cultural resources found on some of the properties in Cecil County, there’s some great new out of the Historic Elk Landing Foundation (HELF) this morning. HELF announced that the 62 acres of land purchased by the Town of Elkton through grants from the Maryland Public Open Space program is now open to the public for strolling and picnicking from sun up to sundown year round.
The nearly fifteen year old nonprofit overseeing the restoration of the historic structures, caring for the grounds, and providing interpretive programming says it is “proud and pleased” to make this announcement as it provides stewardship for “a lot of land “ that “is some of the most picturesque ground in the Elkton area.” Continued

The Great Locomotive Chase

(NYTimes) For Confederates, the quickest connection across the Appalachian Mountains, which roughly split the eastern and western theaters of the war, was a railroad line from Richmond, Va., to Chattanooga, Tenn. From Chattanooga other lines fanned west and south toward the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, the Mountain City’s strategic significance was far greater than its population of just 2,500 people might lead one to believe.
Union forces would not gain undisputed control of the town until November 1863. But one general authorized a daring plan that could have led to Federal occupation more than a year and a half earlier: a scheme that, today, is popularly remembered as the Great Locomotive Chase. Continued

Join River Sweep and cleanup along the Lower Susquehanna Heritage Trail

(Aegis) Lower Susquehanna Heritage Greenway 12th annual River Sweep, a volunteer shoreline and roadside clean-up in honor of Earth Day, will take place in Havre de Grace, Perryville, Port Deposit and on Garrett Island on Saturday April 21.
Registration begins at 8:30 a.m., with the cleanup from 9 a.m. to noon, rain or shine. Continued

Lincoln’s Abolitionist Wedge

(NYTimes) ... Three days later, Lincoln wrote to Henry J. Raymond, the editor of The New York Times, pointing out that “one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head.” Indeed, “eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky and Missouri at the same price.” The Times subsequently editorialized that the words of Lincoln’s message “will echo round the globe. They will recover us the respect once felt for us in the Old World. In dealing with this vexed subject we think he has hit the happy mean upon which all parties in the North and all loyalists in the South can unite.” Continued

"It hit an iceberg and it sank"

(NYTimes) What doomed the Titanic is well known, at least in outline. On a moonless night in the North Atlantic, the liner hit an iceberg and disaster ensued, with 1,500 lives lost.
Hundreds of books, studies and official inquires have addressed the deeper question of how a ship that was so costly and so well built — a ship declared to be unsinkable — could have ended so terribly. The theories vary widely, placing the blame on everything from inept sailors to flawed rivets.
Now, a century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the catastrophe. Continued