Cecil County, Maryland

It is 270 miles from Morgantown to Elkton, the county seat of Cecil County. You might think, from driving 240 miles through Maryland, that it was a big state. Much of the way, however, you can see West Virginia from the road, or walk to Pennsylvania from the exits. At Hancock, Maryland is only three miles wide.

I visited Cecil County this week, my sixty-fifth county to visit within three hundred miles of Morgantown since I moved here in July, 2012. These trips were my retirement project while playing spouse to the town's new rabbi, my husband, Joe Hample. Since July, I am out of retirement in my supposedly part-time job as representative for the Seventh Ward on Morgantown's City Council. Only three meetings a month, and committees, and demonstrations and events I'm asked to attend. I like it, but it makes it harder for me to get away. Our meetings are on three Tuesdays, and since October had five Tuesdays this year, I was off two of them.

I try to visit my parents' grave in Owings Mills before the High Holy Days. This year we were in Canada, and I didn't get there. It was only a few miles off the Beltway to go see them, so I did.

I grew up in northern Maryland, about sixty miles west of Elkton, and when I was a child, my family drove through Cecil County on our frequent trips to New York, where my grandparents and most of my parents' families  lived. What I knew as an adult was this: that Elkton, having the first courthouse in Maryland coming from the northeast, was a haven for quickie marriages, there being no blood test or waiting period required to marry before 1938. My grandmother's sister, Aunt Mary, told me that she and her Italian-American boyfriend were married in  Elkton, in what she called "Marry-land." The JFK Expressway, Interstate 95 from Baltimore to Wilmington, Delaware, was ordered built by President Kennedy because there was a scandal. Ambassadors from newly-independent nations in Africa driving US 40 from Washington to New York were not served in restaurants in Aberdeen and Havre de Grace in Harford County, nor in Elkton, in Cecil County. A state-owned restaurant was built in the median of the highway and everyone was served. President Kennedy attended the ribbon-cutting a week before he was murdered, and the highway was named for him. Cecil County also was home to a resurgent Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1960s. In the last presidential election, the current president was favored with sixty-three per cent of the vote.

Cecil County borders Delaware and Pennsylvania both, and Elkton is only about twenty-one miles from Wilmington, fifty-one miles from Philadelphia, and fifty-eight miles from Baltimore. It looks like Maryland as I remember it, a handful of colonial buildings, little suburban houses, and big trees, reminding me of the hay fever and asthma attacks I suffered through as a child. There is corn, lots of it, although this year the stalks were brown and wrinkled from a long, blazingly hot and dry summer. My sister, when I told her where I was going, thought she had visited a lighthouse on a trip from her senior center. Cecil County lies at the point where the Susquehanna River, traveling through New York State and Pennsylvania, and flooded with seawater, becomes Chesapeake Bay.

I booked a motel for two nights off I-95 near  North East, along the bay in the western part of Cecil County. My Usual Chain gave me two free nights based on accumulated points. The clerk seemed unhappy.

I napped a bit, then headed out to find two historic places in North East, one the lighthouse at Turkey Point in South Elk Neck State Park. It was farther than I thought it would be, and I got there just at sunset, 6:13, 16 minutes earlier than in Morgantown, when the park was to close. It was nearly a mile to walk on a trail, but I got there in time to snap a shot in the fading light. Walking back, people were coming out to the point in Quaker garb, in family groups.  I drove back up to town with the "low gas" light on and made it to a gas station where our ten-gallon tank car took ten and a half gallons. I stopped at a chain of pizza places, ate a chicken parmesan sub, and headed back to the hotel. I never found the other place, a covered bridge.

Turkey Point Light, 1833, South Elk Neck State Park

I still had fifty places on the National Register of Historic Places to visit, and plotted different ways to see all of them on Monday, my one full day in Cecil County. I finally gave up and picked every fifth one, giving me ten places to visit throughout the county. The other things I do: visit a mall, a college, a synagogue and a big park, would have to wait. I had already done the park, there is only a Messianic synagogue, which I saw, on US 40 in Elkton in a beige box of a building, and there is no mall. I passed Cecil College, the local two-year school, near where I stayed in Northeast, but didn't stop .

I was up too late and on my alternate day diuretic Monday, which made my day difficult, because I needed more bathrooms than available. Twice, I had to duck out somewhere to pee. I'm one step away from adult diapers.

I did manage  to find my ten places and photograph them. One place is a 17th century waterfront estate down a long country road, and posted with "No Trespassing" signs. This happens often in Tidewater Virginia and Maryland. I didn't get that picture. Also, some of the places on The National Register are archaeological sites that no one wants you to find. I skipped those.

It should no longer be surprising that the it reached into the 70s F. during the day in late October. 2017 will likely be the warmest year of the last 150 or so since records have been kept. West Virginia politicians, and the US government think climate change is a "hoax."

Here are the pics:

West Nottingham Meeting House, 1811, near Colora

Elisha Kirk House, 1813, near Calvert

Rock United Presbyterian Church, originally 1761, remodeled 1872 and 1900, near Elkton

Cecil County Courthouse, Elkton, 1939

Mitchell House, Main Street, Elkton, between 1769 and 1781

painted parking meter and Halloween decoration, Elkton

Painted elk. There are several of these throughout Elkton

Holly Hall, Elkton, 1810-1820, off a main street, surrounded by fast food places and shopping centers, abandoned

Elk Landing, about 1780, near Elkton, in a park

St. Francis Xavier Church, dedicated 1797, near Warwick

site of the wharf in Charlestown Historic District

Main St., Port Deposit

Paw Paw Building, 1821, Port Deposit, built as a chuech

Walkway along the Susquehanna River, Port Deposit, looking south to the I-95 and US 40 bridges

Cecil seems to be a depressed place. Bainbridge Naval Station was once a major employer near Port Deposit. It now lies abandoned behind locked gates. I didn't see much going on in downtown Elkton. There are wealthy people who own shorefront homes and it is possible to commute to Wilmington, Delaware. The last place I visited, Port Deposit, is an old town on the Susquehanna at the base of a cliff. I saw some tourist-oriented places there, but all of them were closed on Monday afternoon, and many of the historic structures are decrepit and/or abandoned. Across the railroad tracks that front the river, there are new condo buildings. A sidewalk along the water is open to the public.

Having eaten too much at breakfast Monday at the motel, I skipped lunch, napped late in the afternoon, and went looking for a place to eat. I ended up at a chain buffet restaurant, located in a truck stop off I-95 north of Elkton at the Delaware line. The clientele may have been mostly travelers. There are now two state-owned restaurants on I-95, serving only several brands of fast food. In addition to the heavy-set people one might expect at a buffet, I saw many African-Americans and Spanish-speakers. I thought that odd, in a largely Caucasian-populated county. Still, anyplace in the South, including Maryland, that is a small restaurant, bragging about "family-owned" or "since (any date before 1965)" , were I African-American, I would be wary of how I might be treated. For me also, I like an anonymous sort of place where you can pick-and-choose what you want to eat.

I drove back leisurely on Tuesday, detouring off the Baltimore Beltway to drive through Pikesville, from Greenspring Avenue to Old Court Road., through Sudbrook Park and down Campfield Road past my elementary school to see the house where I grew up. I still often dream that I live in that house, sometimes waiting, alone, for my parents to come home.

Wendell-Washington House, 1953 (remodeled), Lochearn Census Defined Place, Baltimore County, MD