^ ^ ON ON N 3 to ^ ^ ^ P" s < if) Maryland Historical Magazine Vol. 90, No. 2, Summer 1995 THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY Founded 1844 Dennis A. Fiori, Director The Maryland Historical Magazine Ernest L. Scott Jr., Editor Robert I. Cottom Jr., Associate Editor Patricia Dockman Anderson, Associate Editor Jessica M. Pigza, Managing Editor Jeff Goldman, Photographer Angela Anthony, Robin Donaldson Coblentz, Christopher T.George, Jane Gushing Lange, and Laura S. Rice, Editorial Associates Robert J. Brugger, Consulting Editor Regional Editors John B. Wiseman, Frostburg State University Jane G. Sween, Montgomery Gounty Historical Society Pegram Johnson III, Accoceek, Maryland John R. Wennersten, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore Acting as an editorial board, the Publications Committee of the Maryland Historical Society oversees and supports the magazine staff. Members of the committee are: Robert J. Brugger, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Go-Ghair John W. Mitchell, Upper Marlboro; Trustee, Go-Ghair Joseph L. Arnold, University of Maryland, Baltimore Gounty Jean H. Baker, Goucher Gollege James H. Bready, Baltimore Lois Green Garr, St. Mary's Gity Gommission Stiles Tuttle Golwill, Baltimore Richard R. Duncan, Georgetown University Dennis A. Fiori, Maryland Historical Society, ex-officio Jack G. Goellner, The Johns Hopkins University Press Gilbert Gude, Bethesda David Hein, Hood Gollege John Higham, The Johns Hopkins University Ronald Hoffman, Institute of Early American History and Culture Samuel Hopkins, Baltimore Charles McC. Mathias, Chevy Chase Roland G. McConnell, Morgan State University Norvill E. Miller III, Baltimore Edward G Papenfuse, Maryland State Archives The views and conclusions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors. The editors are responsible for the decision to make them public. ISSN 0025-4258 © 1995 by the Maryland Historical Society. Published as a benefit of membership in the Maryland Historical Society in March, June, September, and December. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and/or America: History and Life. Second class postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: please send address changes to the Maryland Historical Society, 201 West Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201. Composed by Publishing Concepts, Baltimore, Maryland,and printed in the USA by The Sheridan Press, Hanover, Pennsylvania 17331. Individual subscriptions are not available. Institutional subscriptions are $24.00 per year, prepaid. MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY 201 WEST MONUMENT STREET BALTIMORE, MD 21201 MARYLAN Historical Magazi VOLUME 90,2 (SUMMER 1995) CONTENTS Shootout on the Old C. & O. Canal: The Great Parkway Controversy, 1950-1960 141 BARRY MACKINTOSH Mayhem in Mobtown: Firefighting in Antebellum Baltimore 165 AMY SOPHIA GREENBERG The Wonderful Lady and the Fourth of July: Popular Culture in the Early National Period 181 JEAN B. RUSSO Renaissance Rivalry in Baltimore: One Charles Center vs. One North Charles 195 MICHAEL P. MCCARTHY Greenbury Point: The Interplay of History and Ecology 216 GREGORY FELDMAN and M. STEPHEN AILSTOCK Portfolio 221 Research Note: A Marylander at the Northwest Frontier 229 ROBERT W. SCHOEBERLEIN Book Reviews 237 Warren and Warren, Bringing Back the Bay: The Chesapeake in the Photographs of Marion E. Warren and the Voices of Its People, Patricia Dockman Anderson Burk, Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, & American Baseball to 1920, by James H. Bready Kingsbury, ed.. The Records of the Virginia Company of London: The Court Book: Vol. I, 1619-1622, by Robert Barnes Chandler, The Jefferson Conspiracies: A President's Role in the Assassination of Meriwether Lewis, by Christopher T. George Freyer, Producers Versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America, by Anthony Gene Carey Lounsbury, ed.. An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape, by James T. Wollon Jr. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics, by Frank Towers Colt, Defend the Valley: A Shenandoah Family in the Civil War, by Kevin Conley Ruffher Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, by Merline Pitre Otto, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880, by Lee A. Craig Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884-1970, by Peter B. Levy Books in Brief. - •Lt• •fi«Him«<rtu' • r ' ^ 253 Notices . HAUL OF.. RECORDS. LIBRARY. 256 Historic Trees of Maryland. 259 Maryland Picture Puzzle 260 ANNAPOLIS, MARY| - Editor's Notebook ; • Don't Know Much About Hist-o-ree... "As Montesquieu put it in Spirit of the Laws, 'The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.' Nor, we could add, so dangerous as the zeal of a citizen who is ignorant of the past." This is found in Lessons from History: Essential Under- standings and Historical Perspectives Students Should Acquire, published in 1992 by the National Center for History in the Schools. The Center is the heart of a national network of distinguished history schol- ars, teachers, and educators who have worked for over seven years to define the historical understandings that should be the goals of teaching in our schools. The Center has important things to offer as we confront the horror of Oklahoma City and the apocalyptic, paranoid strain in American politics (Richard Hofstadter's coinage). Pogo had it right back in the 1970s: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Self-styled militiamen and G. Gordon Liddy will not cause the Republic to im- plode, but we should be worried about the simplistic antigovernment bombast that suffuses our airways. Honest debate over the role of government is as old as The Federalist, but today's ether is steamy with half-baked opinions laced with innuendo and demonization. When we forget that we are the government, with collective responsibility for fixing what is wrong, and when every issue is reduced to angry confrontation, we deprive ourselves of fair debate about the quality of the society we want. Consider this: "Lacking a collective memory of important things, people lapse into political amnesia, unable to see what newspapers are saying, to hear what is in (or left out of) a speech, or to talk to each other about public questions. A his- torical education should prepare us for times of trouble, when we are tempted to put aside inefficient democracy and to lash out, to exclude, or to oppress others. Why have past societies fallen or survived, turned ugly or retained their human- ity? Citizens need to know and to be able to tell each other, before it grows too late, what struggles and sacrifices have had to be accepted, what comforts given up, to keep freedom and justice alive. Historical knowledge and historical per- spective ward off panic, cynicism, self-pity, and resignation." That too is from the Center's Lessons from History. The passage reminds us that citizenship means making thousands of moral judgments over a lifetime, decisions that depend on learning much more than William Bennett's McGuffeyesque val- ues. Our children must learn to think critically about American and world his- tory and to test rhetoric with logic and deep understanding. In 1994, the Center published National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience, a book of brilliantly conceived lesson plans for grades 5 through 12. Lynne V. Cheney, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities (provider of some seed money for the Center) in the Bush administration and once a warm supporter of the Center's work, including the earlier Lessons from History, suddenly cast a cold eye. Then she uttered an anti- Center sound bite at the height of the election campaign. There was too much Ku Klux Klan and not enough Thomas Edison in National Standards, she said, ignoring the fact that the independent teams that developed teaching strategies for the book had created far more useful materials than lists of this or that. Don't let it stand (to borrow a Bush locution). Do something to subvert sound-bite culture. National Standards is a spur to imaginative classroom work and an antidote to ignorant zeal and apathy. It costs $18.95 plus $5.00 for shipping and handling. Address National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 10880 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 761, Los Angeles, CA 90024-4108. Buy a copy, read it with growing hope, then give it to a history teacher or a school. It's not too late to help the next generation think more clearly than ours. E.L.S. Cover Mardela Springs This timeless image speaks of long and lazy, quiet afternoons on Maryland's Eastern Shore, wading and fishing under a canopy of shade to escape the heat of a summer day. Located between Vienna and Salisbury in Wicomico County, Mardela Springs once drew tourists from across the state who came to sample the healing waters of the springs. After traveling the Nanticoke River by steamer to Vienna, and then riding by stagecoach to the nineteenth-century health spa, guests stayed at a large, white-framed Victorian hotel where they could walk the footpath through the woods to the octagonal pagoda that served as a springhouse. On the wide porches and spacious lawns of the hotel, the citizens of Mardela Springs joined their guests for political rallies, annual meeting days, and fireworks displays on the Fourth of July. The tradition be- gun more than a century ago continues, as summer spreads over the Old Line State, and Marylanders pack their bags and travel to the Eastern Shore. P.D.A. 140 Maryland Historical Magazine United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (right front) challenged reporters to hike the C&O Canal in March 1954. This highly publicized campaign drew public attention to the rec- reational potential of the canal and helped save it from being converted to a motor parkway.