BASED ON LETTERS AND LEGENDS OF AN EASTERN SHORE FARM 1837-1935 BASED ON LETTERS AND LEGENDS OF AN EASTERN SHORE FARM 1837-1935 ^Bi/^Jfa/H/y Wood An .• 1-°° i>*1 /> © Copyright 2002 Mary Wood Chestertown, Maryland Dedicated with love to the great grandchildren of Alice Emory Wilmer, with special thanks to one of them, Mary McCoy, who designed this book and to my husband, Howard Wood, for memories and patience. > Penned in an elegant hand, the following was found among the letters: May tlte pleasures of our pleasure loving ancestors be yours, may you inlierit all of tlteir virtues and none of tlteir faults. ' Affectionately yours, Amy E. Blanchard -v..4 *. * EVERSLEY Eversley Farm, Centreville, Maryland April 1935 My name is Alice Emory Wilmer, an eighty-year-old woman sitting at an old table in an old house. The house and the farm on which it stands are part of lands which have belonged to Emorys since the first of our name left England for the New World. Arthur Emory arrived on these shores from Somersetshire, England in 1660 with a wife, Mary, and two children. A land grant from Lord Baltimore, recorded in 1668, awarded him two thousand acres of land across the Chesapeake Bay on Maryland's Eastern Shore between the Chester and Corsica rivers. The portion which fell to me some two hundred years later I named Eversley. It is a farm of 250 acres on White's Cove off the Chester River in Queen Anne's County. At my age you are constantly remembering. The coal oil lamp on the table by the wall, which we use now only when the electricity fails, is the one our oldest son, young Harry, took with him when he first went away to St. John's College. Hanging on the wall above it is a photograph of his brother, Pere, in his Marine Corps uniform. He was one of three officers left alive in his company after Belleau Wood. Weighing down the papers here on the table is a piece of fossilized wood Van, our middle boy, sent me from Montana. How I treasured it. That stone and a penciled scrawl were all we had of him for many long months after he ran away from home. In a silver frame by my left elbow is my darling Phebe surrounded by her children, and way at the back of the closet behind me, a l shapeless canvas hat—the one my dear husband, Harry, wore when we went out on the river. There are stories of past times behind everything I see, stories that the children and grandchildren are too busy to listen to. Of what use is the past which lies about me everywhere in this house, cluttering the bookshelves and walls? Why, there's a story behind almost every kitchen utensil piled in the cupboards, dresses put away in the spare room closets, baby clothes wrapped in tissue paper at the back of a bureau drawer, a tarnished silver trophy for a sailing race no one remembers winning. Once these outgrown clothes and cast-off relics were important, had meaning. Don't they still? * * * * On the floor beside my chair is a shiny lard can in which have been placed, to preserve them from mice, silverfish and damp, important family papers, scraps of early deeds. Metes and bounds, courses and distances, fragments of notes in spidery penmanship on fragile paper, rapidly turning brown. Proof that Emorys owned the lands within these nearly illegible boundaries inscribed in fading ink. ... a tract of land lying on the East side of a river running out of the Eastern Bay called Chester River, and on the Northside of a creek on the said River called Corsica Creek, Beginning at a marked Locust tree upon a Point called Coursey's Point, running for Breadth Northwest and by West six hundred seventy and five perches to a marked Oak by the creekside bounding on the west by a line drawn North from the said Oak for length three hundred and twenty perches on the North by a line drawn South East and by East six hundred seventy and five perches until it Intersect a parallel on the South and .... Robert Clayton Surveyor Does one really own land, I wonder? I have lived on "mine" since my father's death in 1880, and I do not know the answer. Beautiful words, on long sheets of legal paper, beautifully copied down by clerks hired for their clear handwriting: To have and to hold such tracts, parts of tracts, pieces and parcels of land above described—with every of the appurtenances, rights of ways, privileges and water courses unto the said Alice G. Emory her heirs and assigns forever. 11 These lands were here before the first white oak was felled by the first Emory. We have scratched its surfaces with hoes, mule-drawn plows, and now, tractors. We have changed the look of it from forests to tobacco fields, from peach orchards to wheat and corn fields and now, soybeans. Horse barns have been built and then been converted to dairies and the dairy to storage shed. My grandfather, General Thomas Emory, built a race track in the front meadow of the manor house, Poplar Grove—no trace of it remains. We owners come and go. The land stays. * * * * Before me on the table is a black lacquered box, each side decorated with a painting, in the Japanese style, of a different white bird, wing tips and bill touched with red. Inside the lid two gentleman in kimonos bow to one another from either side of a decorative symbol. The box contains 99 letters tied in faded pink tape—the kind I once used to bunch asparagus together to sell in Centreville. These are my love letters. All those years when my husband, Harry Wilmer, was traveling for The McCormick Harvesting Company, his commissions and salary supplementing the meager living the farm provided, these bits of paper are what kept our marriage alive. I lived for each mail. He was rarely able to come home more than once a month. Looking back I do not see how we survived the separation. At the time, his leaving us to go on the road seemed the only way we could bring up our four children and hold on to the farm. Was it worth his enormous sacrifice? Did we succeed "in our great undertakings"? * * * * Next to the Japanese chest is a purple tin candy box, which once held Whitman's chocolates. In it is the Line a Day 5-year diary our daughter, Phebe, received on her 21st birthday in 1910 and faithfully kept until her engagement in 1914. What a delight she was to us, what a good heart she had, still has, how everyone loved her—especially "her yahd fulla beaus" as Joanna called them. 2924—August 21. Aunt Etta came. Sat around all morning and sang. Went for a sail all of us in afternoon. It was perfect. Bo & I sat under silver poplar in the moonlight. 22. All day picnic up river, no breeze. A& 1 paddled. I sang. We sat under silver poplar again. in 23. Rita went. Dad & Bo went crabbing. We all went for a sail in afternoon. Moonlight paddle with Bo. 24. Picked peaches. Splendid sail in afternoon way downriver. Looked at charts, made lists for camping Yes—I say to myself leafing these pages, remembering. Yes. The final bundle of letters are those I wrote to Phebe on her honeymoon with the one she finally picked from the "yahd," Howard Wood, from a town with the picturesque name of Conshohocken outside of Philadelphia. Joanna christened him her "black-haired boy." What a comfort he has been to the whole family. My history, my life is spread before me here. What demon possessed me to dig all this out from the closet shelf where it has been stored for years? The sensible thing would be to pack it all away and leave it for the children to dispose of after I am gone. But the words call out to me. The Polonius-like letter General Thomas Emory wrote in 1837 to my father, John Register Emory. The letter to my mother, Alice Gray Bourke, presenting her with a chaplet of flowers to wear in her hair, Harry Wilmer's dear letters which tell so much of what farm life was like in those hard years, as well as of his loyalty and devotion. Think of the waste if these are bundled up and thrown into the fire! In the hard days, I used to sit at my desk each night and by the light of my coal oil lamp, scratch away at letters until I could not hold my eyes open. Surely now with electric light and a fountain pen, it might not be an impossibility to tell my story—their story—our story. IV (oAafiter/ ALICE GREY BOURKE EMORY i Two pictures hung on the wall of the bedroom my sister Nan and I shared at Poplar Grove. One was of a pretty woman draped in veils, with a smiling baby on her lap. The other, Nan told me, was of our mother, Alice Grey Bourke. When I was very small, I used to get the pictures mixed up and thought I might have been the baby. "Oh, no," said Nan solemnly. "That is the baby Jesus." Our mother died in 1857 when she was 29 years old, after having borne four children. Edward Bourke Emory (Ned) in 1848, John Register Emory 3rd (Jack) in 1850, Anna Hemsley Emory (Nan) in 1853, and in 1855, me, her last child, her namesake, Alice Grey Emory.