Maryland and the road to independence: Charles Carroll of Carrollton

(Baltimore Sun) Charles Carroll of Carrollton wasn’t in Philadelphia when the Second Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, nor was he there on July 4 when Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was ratified. He wouldn’t get there and add his name to the document’s signers for some weeks, but when it came to the idea that the 13 colonies must free themselves from England, he got there long before many of his fellow Marylanders. Continued

A woman’s name on the Declaration of Independence

(Washington Post) This Fourth of July, look closely at one of those printed copies of the Declaration of Independence.
See it? The woman’s name at the bottom?
It’s right there. Mary Katherine Goddard. Continued

Battle of Crooked Billet

(Wikipedia) The Battle of Crooked Billet was a battle in the Philadelphia campaign of the American Revolutionary War fought on May 1, 1778 near the Crooked Billet Tavern (present-day Hatboro, Pennsylvania).
In the skirmish action, British forces under the command of Major John Graves Simcoe launched a surprise attack against Brigadier General John Lacey and three regiments of Pennsylvania militia, who were literally caught sleeping. The British inflicted significant damage, and Lacey and his forces were forced to retreat into neighboring Bucks County. Continued

Author Rita Mae Brown talks about preserving history

 

(YDR) York, PA - Author Rita Mae Brown believes the past is prologue. If you don't know where you came from, you don't know where you're going.
That's why Brown, who grew up in the Hanover area, believes a Revolutionary War prison camp in Springettsbury Township should be preserved.
"It's such an important part of our history," she said during a phone interview this week. Continued

Drawings by a long-dead soldier to assist Camp Security fundraising efforts

York, PA (YDR) Friends of Camp Security are hoping that a man who's been dead for 183 years will help them raise money to purchase the site of the Revolutionary War prison camp.
Sgt. Roger Lamb, an Irishman who served with a regiment of Welsh riflemen during the Revolutionary War, was captured at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 and eventually -- two escapes later -- wound up incarcerated with other British prisoners at Camp Security.
Lamb wrote about his incarceration in his memoirs. His notes -- or perhaps manuscript -- include drawings of the camp and depictions of his eventual escape. Continued

Quartering Act of 1765

(Wikipedia) ... This first Quartering Act (citation 5 Geo. III c. 33) was given Royal Assent on March 24, 1765, and provided that Great Britain would house its soldiers in American barracks and public houses, as by the Mutiny Act of 1765, but if its soldiers outnumbered the housing available, would quarter them "in inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualing houses, and the houses of sellers of wine and houses of persons selling of rum, brandy, strong water, cider or metheglin", and if numbers required in "uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings"... "upon neglect or refusal of such governor and council in any province", required any inhabitants (or in their absence, public officials) to provide them with food and alcohol, and providing for "fire, candles, vinegar, salt, bedding, and utensils" for the soldiers "without paying any thing for the same". Continued 

Charles Carroll

(Wikipedia) - Charles Carroll (March 22, 1723 – March 23, 1783) was an American lawyer and statesman from Annapolis, Maryland. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1776 and 1777. ... In 1760 he completed construction of his summer home and estate at Georgia Plantation, west of Baltimore. He named the home [Mount Clare] after his grandmother. In June of 1763 Charles married, to Margaret Tilghman (1742-1817), daughter of Matthew Tilghman of Talbot County. Although the couple had no children who reached maturity, they remained together until his death. She became the mistress of Mount Clare, and earned a reputation for her greenhouse and pinery, where she grew oranges, lemons, and pineapple. Continued

Image: Mount Clare Museum House, Baltimore, Maryland

Thomas McKean

 

(Wikipedia) Thomas McKean (March 19, 1734 – June 24, 1817) was an American lawyer and politician from New Castle, in New Castle County, Delaware and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the American Revolution he was a delegate to the Continental Congress where he signed the United States Declaration of Independence and served as a President of Congress. He was at various times a member of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, who served as President of Delaware, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, and Governor of Pennsylvania. Continued
 

A Road Trip to Gettysburg and Homes of Founding Fathers

(NYTimes) You can almost see them, spectral figures moving through thick forest, ragged, rugged men who endured astonishing hardship just to get here, creeping with their muskets in the sticky haze of a July morning in central Pennsylvania’s Appalachian Mountains. They wouldn’t even know the name of this place, Gettysburg. Yet their blood would become the ink that sets down the town’s name for history.
It is a cast of tens of thousands, generals and infantry, civilians, horses, even dogs.
This was the vision that lodged in my mind as I drove through Gettysburg, the first stop on a winter tour of historic sites in four states. Continued

Gnadenhütten Massacre

The Gnadenhutten massacre, also known as the Moravian massacre, was the killing on March 8, 1782, of ninety-six Christian Lenape (Delaware) by colonial American militia from Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War. The incident took place at the Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhütten, Ohio, near present-day Gnadenhutten. The site of the village was preserved. A reconstructed cabin and cooper's house were built there, and a monument to the dead was erected. The village site has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In an unrelated event in 1755, during the French and Indian War (part of the Seven Years War), Native Americans allied with the French massacred 11 missionaries and converted Munsee Lenape at another Moravian mission village which however bore the same name; this event took place at Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, in the English colony. The term Gnadenhutten massacre is usually only used to refer to the 1782 event in Ohio. Continued 

Photo by Bwsmith84, some rights reserved.

 

1778: Baron von Steuben arrives at Valley Forge to help train the Continental Army

 

(Wikipedia) ... On September 26, 1777, the Baron, his Italian greyhound, Azor (which he took with him everywhere), his young aide de camp Louis de Pontiere, his military secretary Pierre Etienne Duponceau, and two other companions, reached Portsmouth, New Hampshire and by December 1, was extravagantly entertained in Boston. Congress was in York, Pennsylvania, after being ousted from Philadelphia by the British advance. By February 5, 1778, Steuben had offered to volunteer without pay (for the time), and by the 23rd, Steuben reported for duty to Washington at Valley Forge. Steuben spoke little English and he often yelled to his translator, "Here! Come swear for me!" Colonel Alexander Hamilton and General Nathanael Greene were of great help in assisting Steuben in drafting a training program for the Army, which found approval with Washington. Continued

Print: Frederick Girsch. "General Washington standing with Johann De Kalb, Baron von Steuben, Kazimierz Pulaski, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Lafayette, John Muhlenberg, and other officers during the Revolutionary War." (Library of Congress)

 

George Washington

 

(LoC) George Washington, the first president of the United States, was born on February 22, 1732. Americans celebrate his birthday along with Abraham Lincoln's on "Washington's Birthday" — the Monday before Washington's and after Lincoln's birthday. How do we really know when George Washington was born? Tobias Lear, Washington's secretary and close friend, gave the world a clue.
Lear lived with George and Martha Washington at Mt. Vernon, and he helped the Revolutionary War general organize his papers. On February 14, 1790, Lear wrote that the President's "birth day" was on the 11th of February Old Style, referring to the Julian Calendar. Washington was born 20 years prior to the 1752 introduction of the Gregorian Calendar (intended to more accurately reflect a solar year). When the Julian Calendar was "corrected" to the Gregorian Calendar, February 11th became February 22nd. Continued

Painting: Parson Weems' Fable by Grant Wood

Pirates, in Fallston?

(J. Alexis Shriver, Bel Air Times) Who wants to join me in the fascinating (even though it be futile) building up of a playing card house, about an old tradition concerning a pirate?
Every indication points to the contrary, and yet there must be some reason to explain the constant search for hidden treasure which has continued for a hundred years.
Let us take our playing cards and build our fragile house of romance at "Bon Air", the gem of a French mansion built in 1794 by Claudius Francis Frederick de La Porte near the Gunpowder Falls in Harford County, almost adjoining the old Quaker Meeting House at Fallston. Continued

Photo: Historic American Buildings Survey E. H. Pickering, Photographer October 1936 BUILT 1794 BY CAPTAIN DE LA PORTE OF ROCHAMBEAU ARMY - Bon Air, Laurel Brook Road, Fallston, Harford County, MD

Friends of Camp Security need $400,000 by May

 

(YDR) Friends of Camp Security need to raise about $400,000 by May to help pay for a 47-acre property where historians believe a Revolutionary War prison camp once stood. The Conservation Fund bought the parcel off of Locust Grove Road in Springettsbury Township earlier this year from local developer Timothy Pasch, who had put the land up for sale. It ended a more than decade-long fight over whether the land would be preserved or become a housing development.
The total cost of the project came in around $1.05 million. Continued

Remembering Repudiation Day

 

(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.

 

James McHenry

(Wikipedia) James McHenry (November 16, 1753 – May 3, 1816) was an early American statesman. McHenry was a signer of the United States Constitution from Maryland and the namesake of Fort McHenry. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Maryland, and the third United States Secretary of War (1796–1800), under presidents George Washington and John Adams. Continued 

 

 

The Articles of Confederation

(LoC) On November 15, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation. Submitted to the states for ratification two days later, the Articles of Confederation were accompanied by a letter from Congress urging that the document
…be candidly reviewed under a sense of the difficulty of combining in one general system the various sentiments and interests of a continent divided into so many sovereign and independent communities, under a conviction of the absolute necessity of uniting all our councils and all our strength, to maintain and defend our common liberties… Continued

Charles Carroll of Carrollton

(Wikipedia) Charles Carroll of Carrollton (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832) was a wealthy Maryland planter and an early advocate of independence from Great Britain. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later as United States Senator for Maryland. He was the only Catholic and the longest-lived (and last surviving) signatory of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95. Continued

Image: Cornerstone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad laid by Carroll on July 4, 1828, now displayed at the B&O Railroad Museum.

 

Caesar Rodney

(Wikipedia) Caesar Rodney (October 7, 1728 - June 26, 1784), was an American lawyer and politician from St. Jones Neck, in Dover Hundred, Kent County, Delaware, east of Dover. He was an officer of the Delaware militia during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Continental Congressman from Delaware, and President of Delaware during most of the American Revolution. Continued

Battle of the Chesapeake

(Wikipedia) The Battle of the Chesapeake, also known as the Battle of the Virginia Capes or simply the Battle of the Capes, was a crucial naval battle in the American Revolutionary War which took place near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on September 5, 1781, between a British fleet led by Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Graves and a French fleet led by Rear-Admiral the Comte de Grasse. Continued