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The 350th

The Pictorial Map of St. Mary’s County Maryland identifies twenty-three Places of Interest and, although it is dated 1634, more likely it was published 350 years later with some of the celebration money.

Photographs of a dozen of the Places of Interest fill three-quarters of one side of the large, eight-fold map, the business side covered by white peninsulas drooping diagonally from the upper left and dangling into a sea of light blue.

Blue veins cover the peninsulas. Two slashing red highways parallel the converging shores of the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay and meet as the greater, northeastern peninsula crumbles into the blue bordering water. A single red line makes the hook of Point Lookout which tips due south where the Potomac enters the Bay.

Tucked to the west, above this most southern hook, the St. Mary’s tributary into the Potomac cuts a smaller peninsula. At its is the crumbling land of Piney Point where the red-line highway ends in a claw-shaped bulb that is St. George Island.

 Black paved road lines sprout irregularly off the two red highways, skeletal in number compared to the blue stream veins. The roads thread their way among the streams seeking the shortest path to the bay and river shores where they cluster and ring the coves. More ink was spent on the legend of the map than the roads.

 “There was nothing there,” I report my find of the Pictorial Map to Marisa’s family. “When I first got here there was nothing here.”  The sisters nod, knowing better than I. They had arrived even before the Solomons’ bridge was built which cut hours off the travel time to the eastern portion of Maryland.

“The front cover is a full-torso photo of the Freedom of Conscience statue,” I tell their blank stares. “At the Y in the highway at St. Mary’s City, birthplace of Maryland. You know.”

“What stature?” asks one sister.

“You know, the man standing there.”

“Do I?” she asks.

“Yes, yes, yes. Next time you drive by you’ll realize you’ve been seeing it for so long you forgot it was there.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she says.

“I know that stature,” says another sister. “I never knew what it was called.”

“I thought it said Tolerance,” says Marisa’s mom.

“Nope. It reads Freedom of Conscience. And that’s not all,” I tell them. “The man is erect.”

They gape and then laugh and laugh and laugh.

“Welcome to St. Mary’s County,” reads the map below the photo of this larger-than-life granite man straining upward from his granite base. “Mother County of Maryland,” the inscription continues,  “1634.”

The granite man is bluish gray with shoulders so well-defined they are almost spherical. The shoulder balls are attached to the neck with equally well-defined straps of tendons. His breasts are overly formed as well. Each separate rib bulges upward following his gaze.

He verily tears himself from the stone while a granite banner drapes his nearest hip and tightly cloaks his privates. His knees are locked, his feet and lower legs immersed in the crag of the statue’s base where is chiseled: 

Freedom

Of conscience

“I didn’t even know it had a name, not until I saw this map, you can read it from the photo. But,” I brag to them, “I have always known he was there. That’s where Bobby Wentworth took me on our first date. From the first I knew he was erect.” And they laugh some more.

“But you can tell even in the photo,” I say. “And I think that might even have been the point. You know what you can also read, chiseled below Freedom of Conscience?  ‘Erected by The counties of maryland’.”

    Bobby Wentworth did take me to St. Mary’s City on our first date. It was closed then. Not because it was late in the evening , which it was, but because in October 1983 there wasn’t anything there to actually be open. Besides the bars, of which there were plenty, there wasn’t much of anywhere to take a date in St. Mary’s County. With the state’s upcoming 350^th celebration, St. Mary’s City was about as happening as it got.

    It would rain the actual day of the 350^th, March 25, 1984. It rained that the proverbial horse upon a flat rock. I struggled to keep dry WPTX’s Radio Shack tape recorder and gun-metal brown microphone. I shivered among a dozen or so reporters stranded on St. Clements’s Island, jockeying for a spot under the only structure, a temporary lean-to serving as a one-day post office to issue and mark commemorative 350th  stamps.

    Marian Myles, the former Beacon reporter who had remained with the Enterprise after it ate the older paper was also on the second boat over. The media boat had ferried two loads of us onto the island, site of the first landing in 1634, and in advance of the landing of the first officials of 1984.  Worsening weather conditions had halted the transport with the vessel docked at the mainland where the officials remained inside the two-story bungalow serving as the St. Clements Island and Potomac River Museum. Number four on the Pictorial Map. We waited for the Governor, whose helicopter was to arrive shortly. Or not. Or so. Reports were sketchy.

    When called for there is full equality among journalists, so gender did nothing to move Marian or me within the limited shelter of the lean-to which had filled with those on the first boat over, which was assuredly not the boat carrying the local reporters. A just-a-bit-younger than middle-aged man must have been one of the last off the first boat and despite non-stop fidgeting and muttering remained at least partially outside the lean-to’s protection.

    He was so encumbered with cameras and lenses, a tripod, meters and bags that he took up the space that might have kept Marian and me dry, or at least drier. But he clearly felt his equipment more vulnerable. “I have to keep this dry,” he would mutter. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have thought of this, expose us to these conditions. I have never been so treated. Jesus Christ,” he squealed as rain poured off the slanted roof and down his collar. When it happened a second time Marion and I had to look away from each other to keep straight faces.

    “Isn’t there even anywhere in here to dry off?”   He again surveyed the deeper regions of the temporary shelter, already crowded with wet and dispirited reporters and postal workers. “I’ve never had to work in these kind of conditions. I can’t believe it. There aren’t even any phones.  How can they keep us on this island?  Abandoned. They should at least tell us if the Governor is coming or if the helicopter can’t fly. Or bring the goddamn boat back and take us back to land.

    “The mud, they can’t expect us to trek up there if the helicopter does land. It’s nothing but mud. I’ve never seen such a mess. No planning. I cannot believe this.”

    The weather got worse, sheets of rain penetrated deeper and deeper into the shed. His grousing from amid the stranglehold of his cameras and bags, at first annoying became so ludicrous Marian and I struggled to keep somber. Few others found it amusing, making it even funnier to Marian and me, both dressed in foul weather gear and plenty of wool. It always rains on Maryland Day and it is always cold.  Knowing this helps local journalists endure the condescension flowing down from the occasional visits of the better paid state or national press corps.

    It was a big media event March 25, 1984. Electronic media types, writers and reporters from the dailies were down to record the Governor’s helicopter landing upon the site of Governor Calvert’s first landing in the Mother County of Maryland. They came down in their professional in-the-field clothing. The weather tradition outdid itself.

    As it became clearer that no helicopter would be landing this morning and that no official of any kind was going to take the voyage to the island, the term media frenzy became real.

     “You don’t think they’d leave us here?” muttered someone from inside the shelter.

    “Of course they wouldn’t,” boomed the man with all the cameras. “But who knows what these rubes consider rough weather,” he said, still pawing through the huddling reporters to maneuver farther into the shelter

    “Did he say these boobs?”  Marian asked me.

    I giggled. “Who is he? Where is he from?”

    “National Geographic,” she said.

    I thoroughly sobered. “No.”  I said.

    “Yes,” said Marian. And maybe she was making it up for a novice’s benefit.  “The bigger they are the louder they whine.” We were still laughing when he clambered, first aboard, the first boat that finally came back to rescue us. We locals waited for the second shuttle. Not only better dressed – and now within the shelter – but more aware of the greater issue of vessels beyond capacity.

    Bobby Wentworth assigned himself the task of educating me to the history of the celebration ahead. Instruction began the night I stared thunderstruck at Freedom of Conscience and learned the statue had been erected in the school’s early years as a female seminary and that the Latin on the state seal read, “Manly men with womanly ways.”

    “What in the hell does that mean?”

     Bobby gave his low chuckle into his thick black beard that he annually powdered to transform him into Santa Claus. “No one really knows what it means,” he said with an exaggerated leer and another rumbling chuckle.

    “Manly deeds and womanly words,” Leonardtown historian Ernie Bell corrected 20 years later, the year of the 370^th, when Bobby Wentworth no longer needs to powder his beard.

    “I remember Priscilla’s 50^th birthday, Bobby’s mother,” Ernie chuckles and nods his head remembering the years when Go-Cups made St. Mary’s County home to the proverbial Moveable Feast. “It was Christmas time and Bobby was in full Santa regalia. At the end of the day, night really, I had been driving everyone home. I had only had a few beers. It was down to Bobby and me in the kitchen at my house. I just didn’t want to drive anymore and Bobby was happy enough to sleep on the couch.”

    Ernie chuckles again. “My kids were little then. And when Ann got up the next morning they were lined up along the couch and a line going out the front door.

    “Bobby was sound asleep, black boots parked under the couch, kids lined up to see Santa Claus.

It wasn’t surprising that Santa would stop here. Everyone stopped here. Southern Maryland was renowned for its revelry. St. Mary’s offers distance enough from the cities to provide a respite and even hideaway, a playground with in a day’s drive of Washington D.C. Stills operate today. And in 1984 the state was footing the bill for the whole County to do it up right.

The  350^th  Celebration was to be launched March 25, 1984 and continue through the summer and into the holidays. All sorts of promotional and artistic grants poured in, museum exhibits got built, money was introduced, tourism was touted.

Folks drove hulking old American cars and trucks on sparsely populated county roads that carried parties of revelers every weekend. Often enough they crashed in cornfields but it was rare the season without at least one horrific drunken driving calamity. Already St. Mary’s statistics made a solid showing among the nation’s deadly averages.

Duke’s Bar operated from one of the historic buildings in Leonardtown. It perhaps even inaugurated the drive-through window. Duke’s window was out the back alley from behind the bar. This allowed the bartender to handle on-site sales and off.

Years later, a good decade after I’d begun writing for the newspaper, a California transplant – the state, not the St. Mary’s County Zip code between Lexington Park and Hollywood – looked up amazed. “You mean you could buy a bottle of liquor or a six pack through the window?” she asked.

 “Yes, but also a drink,”  I told her.

“Like the canned drinks?”

“No, like a scotch and water in a Go-Cup.”

“A Go-Cup?”

“Yes, a plastic cup. It was legal to drink in your car as you drove.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“It was illegal to drive drunk, but not illegal to drive drinking.”

“How civilized,” she said.

The year of the 350^th , when Go Bars still peppered the back roads, acres and acres of active farms, English and Amish, cloaked the rolling hills with traditional American calendar scenes.  At the scattered crossroads there would be a softball field in one quadrant. On the same or an adjacent quadrant would be the local bar that sponsored the home team, sold basic groceries and conducted on- and off- liquor sales all day and all night.

It was through these roads Bobby Wentworth’s tutelage took me during the afternoons of the fall I arrived, 1983. There were even more churches than ball fields. Mostly Catholic churches, but Episcopal and AME churches as well. Further down the church roads were the manor houses and plantations that perched upon the highest bluffs of the rivers.

“Plantations?”

“Yup,”  Bobby said.

“Slaves?”

“Yup.”

“This was the South?”

“Sort of,” he said. And drove down to Point Lookout State Park to see “Federal Monument to Confederate Soldiers.” It is number eleven on the Pictorial Map of St. Mary’s County. It is an obelisk, quite a bit smaller than the Washington Monument up the road but the same general style. Plates at its base name the  “some 4,000 confederate prisoners who died at Point Lookout during the Civil War.” The photo caption goes on to read, this is the only Federal monument to Confederate Soldiers.”

My Illinois education again and again proved inadequate in a state among the original thirteen colonies and had furthermore failed to prepare me for the Maryland state song which refers to Abraham Lincoln as a “despot.”

“Take my name,” Bobby tried to educate me without insulting my utter ignorance. “It’s all through the phone book.”

“What?  I don’t get it.”

“My name. There are hundreds of them.”

“What? That nice English name Wentworth?”

“No,” said Bobby Wentworth. “Robert Lee.”