In the Maryland State of Mind
For each of us, Maryland is a different place: perhaps a state of mind, perhaps a state of being, perhaps a blood line running through your veins.
Like many Marylanders and distant cousins spread throughout the land, your link may take you all the way back to 1634, when Lord Baltimore’s sea-tossed ships The Ark and The Dove bumped into now-St. Clement’s Island and decided the Potomac River was the place for them.
Bay Weekly contributing writer Mick Blackistone is one of those so linked. So are my sons, through their paternal grandmother Mary Mattingly.
Another link: You can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Maryland Day at the same time and for much the same reason: possession of land. Englishman Cecil Calvert, the mind behind our colony, was made baron of the territory of Baltimore, in north central Ireland, in the 1620s, when such grants were in the English king’s power. His colonial ambitions were further tried in Newfoundland, which proved too cold, and finally in Maryland.
In Ireland, Baltimore is a rocky village on the coast of County Cork.
So you can toast Maryland Day with a glass of Irish whiskey. Or beer. But better not make it wine, lest you suffer the fate of a thirsty group of Baltimore colonists. Father Andrew White, who chronicled the voyage, reports the sad consequence of celebrating Christmas 1633 at sea with wine: in order that that day might be better kept, wine was given out; and those who drank of it too freely, were seized the next day with a fever; and of these, not long afterwards, about twelve died …
Modern Marylanders preserve the legacy they’ve inherited in many ways.
For the Ann Arundel Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, including Bay weekly correspondent Diana Dinsick, the touchstone of Maryland history is the Rising Sun Inn, a pre-Revolutionary farmhouse and later tavern tracing its lineage to Virginia Puritans, an outlying branch of the believers who caused so much trouble in England for Charles I, whose history is entwined with Maryland’s.
For Annapolis, the touchstone is preserving the homes and stories of Revolutionary era personages great and small.
For Captain Avery Museum’s dedicated volunteers, the touchstone is inviting new generations to share the opportunities of a waterfront home — first of a sea captain, then a Jewish community summer home.
For the Galesville Historical Society, it’s preserving the traditions of two communities in one, black and white. For the Deale Historical Society, it’s sharing memories of generations leading to ours.
There are many Marylands beyond these, probably many for each of us, and often divergent.
New Jersey transplant Joanna Evens can’t get over our roads, she writes of her new home in Southern Maryland:
“My suspicion is that many numbers of people here are hunters. I can tell by the number of pickup trucks that crawl up my car trunk as I meander along Rt. 4. Meandering is something I brought with me from New Jersey. Why rush to the next stoplight? The pickups don’t like meandering. …
“I realize the contorting roads are part of the terrain and not unlike those used when slow-moving wagons transported tobacco. I don’t like driving them — yet — but I like seeing the old barns that suddenly surprise me as I take a sharp turn. The barns are colorful, some colorless, but grace the empty fields much like a stately lighthouse on an empty beach. They seem to be guarding something, perhaps the past.”
Maryland Day weekend, this weekend, is a good time to visit other Marylands beyond our own, extend our acquaintance with generations past and ponder what we’re handing down to the future.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]