Washimore Wander: Part 3

Outside, a strong wind came up. Coming from a sheltered climate, "strong wind" doesn't mean a lot to me, normally. This was a strong wind. It blew the pillows off the patio chairs outside. Then it blew the patio chairs over, and dragged a couple of them a ways across the patio.

This was the signal of a changing pressure zone, a signal that there was rain coming. In a couple of minutes there were flashes of lightning, rumbles of thunder, and a sudden downpour of rain. We brought in the patio chair pillows and then watched the storm boil around the house.

The storm continued, and we settled in for more conversation. Bob and Kelly talked about Glasgow, Scotland. They had visited one coffee shop there which turned out to be full of American history. Apparently this coffee shop was where Glasgow merchants met to make their deals. For a while, a lot of these deals involved American tobacco. Which was making the Glasgow merchants filthy rich. Rich beyond all expectations, beyond their hopes. They were at a loss to find enough investments to hold all of this money. They ended up investing in this new idea: factories. As a result of American tobacco, Glasgow became one of the pinnacles of the industrial revolution.

It was time to go home, time to go to bed. I watched a little MTV, got caught up with Beavis and Butthead. And then to sleep.

MONDAY

Hagerstown... Shepherdstown...

We had breakfast at the hotel. The restaurant is called "Nicholas'". Apparently it's named after the owner of the restaurant and hotel, an immigrant from Greece who arrived penniless in the area. The restaurant is one of Hagerstown's best, a favorite of the locals.

It was okay.

Today was Bob and Kelly's day to give us a tour of Hagerstown, MD. They started by bringing us to the local museum. We couldn't go in. It turns out Hagerstown is adding a new wing onto their museum. It looked like they were almost done, actually. Meanwhile, they weren't letting in visitors. Still, Bob told us a bit about the history of the place.

The Museum was established by a married couple named the Singers. They were minor artists of the 1800s. They knew several other U.S.A. artists of the time. These other artists gave various pieces of art to the Singers. Mrs. Singer was a Hagerstown native, and had loved her house with its view of the lake.

An aside about lakes: Maryland has no natural lakes or ponds. It has no natural still water. Any time you see a lake or pond in Maryland, you're seeing something man-made. This factoid is from Bob. I don't know where he got it.

So there's this museum next to this lake. And the Singers donated all of this art by all of these famous artists to this museum. The museum had to expand to fit all of this art. Whew. I guess the museum must have got even more art in the meantime, since it needed that new wing.

The museum and lake were just two things in this big park. There was a mansion there, rocky lawns for little kids to stumble about on, and many BBQ grills. Canadian geese live in the lake all year long. Holden Caulfield would have been much more at ease if he had spent his time in Hagerstown.

The mansion was (unsurprisingly) owned by some rich guy. It sounds like this guy was kind of scary--and scared. He had a grist mill and some other building providing services to farmers (I forget what, exactly). He had set up this sort of watch-room on top of his house so that he could keep an eye on these other buildings of his--I guess to make sure that nobody was messing with them. He had a vinyard next to his mansion, set out in a wheel design, with grapes planted in lines forming the spokes of the wheel. He had set up a watchtower in the center of the vinyard. Thus, when in the tower, he could see anywhere in the vinyard. He set up a walkway concealed by trees from his house to the vinyard watchtower so that he could move between the buildings without being observed.

Heiskell the Hessian

The park itself was the site where Robert E. Lee had camped while marching somewhere else. Lee ransomed the town--after marching in, he threatened to burn the place unless given a lot of money. So the Union gave a lot of money. Lee left the town without burning it, but some soldiers did shoot up the town mascot, a weathervane in the shape of a soldier's silhouette, named Heiskell the Hessian.

Southern troops would occasionally threaten to burn a town if not paid, not get paid, but not burn the town. They had done this three times in a row, and came to another town. When the Southerners demanded a ransom, the Yankee city fathers laughed and scoffed. That town burned. The moral of the story being: Don't be morons.

Hagerstown re-enacts the ransoming of the town each year. People dress up in Civil-War era costumes and--I dunno. Act out the ransoming of the town, I guess. I wonder if they shoot up a weathervane each time. All those bullets flying around in the center of town? Hmm. The town's ransom was $50,000. I don't think you could ransom a medium-sized haircutting salon for $50,000 today. What sort of Environmental Impact Reports does one have to file for acts of war, anyhow? If you set a town on fire, you have to figure that a lot of toxins are going to get released into the air. If you tell people that you're going to burn their town, they won't help you to try to keep it a clean burn. They won't be thinking about keeping old tires out of the blaze, they'll just concentrate on their valuables. Or their neighbor's valuables. And what about all of those DPU shells left around after the gulf war? Who ended up paying for that anyhow?

I was just reading some of Roy Blount Jr.'s recollections of the Carter administration. Carter was calling conservation the Moral Equivalent of War. Pointing out that we could exert our will over OPEC by not buying so much of their oil. As a big customer, we might have caused them to halt their annoying shortages if we could just tell 'em to go screw. But that's a tough concept for Americans to grasp. We're used to going in and kicking ass, and boycotts always seemed sort of Socialist, a lot of people working together to become a force to be reckoned with.

Should we have fought Iraq by just stepping back and then refusing to buy any oil from their newly grabbed oil fields? How much oil was that, anyhow? How much is it worth? There's been all of these articles and TV shows about a South American tribe with a name that is sort of like Hourani, but not quite--oil companies are trashing their lands in an effort to extract what sounds like a piddling amount of oil.

Maybe conservation is too difficult. I just read something about how buses and trains consume only half as much fuel per passenger as cars. That worries me, because this statistic was supplied by a liberal, someone who would be likely to skew statistics in favor of buses and trains. And one really tempting way to skew those statistics would be to assume full buses and trains. Which I don't see that many of.

It seems like the main things you get from public transportation is that you don't need so much land devoted to cars. So how do you save fuel? Try and live densely so that public transportation can have a better chance to run full buses and trains? That's not easy. Americans seem to have an urge to sprawl. Look at Hagerstown. More than 200 years old, and the tallest buildings are on the order of six stories tall. I think there's four tall buildings in town. The houses are spread wide apart. When we got to town, we had a road map that was a couple of years old. Bob and Kelly pointed out that there was now a more direct route from our hotel to their house, thanks to a new road. Looking at this new road on a new map, one can see that Hagerstown is growing out, not up. The Hagerstown Greyhound Bus Station used to be downtown--stereotypically, at the scummiest looking area of downtown. Now it's at a local McDonald's.

We left the park and went driving through Hagerstown. The houses of the bigwigs were all up on this ridge. Their servants and slaves would live in small houses and shacks downhill from the big houses. Most of the shacks and small houses are gone now. The big houses are in many styles and mixtures of styles, depending on the quirks of the original owners. The whole street is now some kind of Official Historical something. The houses are slowly being restored.

There's this church in town that has beautiful stained glass windows. Kelly had been in there once, for some social gathering, but hadn't had an excuse to linger. And the church was normally kept locked up. So she had taken our visit as an excuse to call up the people who ran the church and ask if she could show us visitors the church. Thus, she had an excuse to go in and gawk with us. The stained glass windows were from the Tiffany studio. Not all the windows were by Tiffany--the ones that weren't didn't seem to have the same texture. Anyhow, the Tiffany windows were cool, but I don't really remember why. I took a xeroxed pamphlet from the church which describes its history:

Saint John's Evangelical Lutheran Church 1770-1995 (225th Anniversary)
141 South Potomac Street, Hagerstown, Maryland 21740
790-2510
The Rev. Eleanor S. Doub, Pastor
Mr. Steven Carman, Director of Music

In 1765, three years after the founding of Elizabeth Town (Hagerstown), land was purchased from Jonathan Hager at a cost of five shillings by the Lutheran congregation who wanted to build a church and school for public worship.

The cornerstone for the log church was laid in 1769, and the following year the Dutch Lutheran Church (Saint John's), was formally organized.

Members met in the log church until 1795, when the present brick structure was erected.

Originally the church was not long on 'pew comfort.' There was no stove. "In winter," they said, "let the pastor put a little extra fire in his sermon."

The services were conducted solely in German until 1842, when the council resolved that German preaching would be performed in the afternoon of the sabbath and the morning services would be conducted in English.

In 1871, the German speaking group withdrew from Saint John's and formed Saint Matthew's Lutheran Church at the corner of Locust and Antietam Streets in Hagerstown. However, Saint Matthew's disbanded in 1917, and many of the members rejoined Saint John's.

[Why the word "rejoined" instead of "joined"? It had been 40+ years.]

There have been several renovations to the church building over the years. In 1867 there were considerable differences over major renovation plans and the ability of the congregation to raise the needed funds. In 1868 nearly 100 members withdrew from the congregation.

In 1869 the dissenters, including most of the Church Council [!], the entire choir, and the organist-choir director, organized Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hagerstown.

The following year, 1870, Saint John's started a renovation program. The church auditorium was placed on the second floor. A Sunday School room was thus provided on the first floor. Two spacious stairways were built to the upper floor, the chancel placed in the south end of the church, the floor covered with red carpet and a new organ placed in the north end.

On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, at almost the very hour that the astronauts made man's first landing on the moon, a lightning bolt ignited a fire that did great damage and threatened to completely destroy the church.

Plans for restoring the historical structure began immediately and restoration was completed and a service of re-dedication was held in 1970.

The church is noted for its tall steeple; its stained glass windows, several of which are Tiffany; its 125 year old double bells, its Moller organ, and 225 years as a house of worship.

Moller was a brand of organ. They had a factory in Hagerstown, perhaps their only factory. The company had fallen on hard times, and was bought out by its employees. Even with that motivation, the company continued to slide, and went out of business.

There was another local business called "Godlove's Liquors", named after the owner, a Mr. Godlove. We didn't get a chance to go there, but we heard that if you want to get liquor in a bottle that looks like Elvis, then Godlove's would offer you more choices than you might expect.

Bob told us that even though there's all this historical stuff in this city, there's pretty much no tourist trade. Like no-one in town has their act together enough to set up a tourist attraction. There was some guy who wanted to donate a bunch of Civil War medical equipment. But no-one in Hagerstown came forward to claim the collection. So the guy ended up giving his collection to the nearby city of Frederick (sp?) instead. Though there are many old buildings in Hagerstown, almost none are open to the public.

| comment? | | home |