Story of the Month

With the story of the RMS Titanic back in the public eye, many are continuing to reflect on this historic event over 110 years later. The global impact of the sinking of the Titanic is captured in the travel journal kept by one Frederick Countian and now preserved in the archives of Heritage Frederick. 

Mary White Worthington was born on February 22, 1880, in Ijamsville to Nicholas and Alice Worthington. She lived in Adamstown for many years and spent the last years of her life in downtown Frederick before her death in 1972. In April 1912, Mary embarked on a nine-month tour of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, crossing the Atlantic at the same time as the Titanic disaster. Her journal recorded in real time her own perspective and emotions as well as those of others who were traveling abroad (and by ship!) in the days after the tragic sinking of the famous ocean liner.

On board a train traveling to Naples, Mary met two Catholic priests from Pennsylvania. She played cards and conversed with the two men who shared their experience of being passengers aboard the RMS Carpathia the night of the sinking of the Titanic. One month after the disaster, Mary wrote “had luncheon on the train and met two Pennsylvania men, Mr. Burke and Mr. McCarthy. They had crossed on Carpathia, which rescued the Titanic survivors. We were interested to hear all the details.”

Rev. Henry P. Burke and Rev. Daniel McCarthy were aboard the Carpathia on a visit to Rome and the Holy Land. The Scranton Times reported that both men comforted traumatized survivors, even giving up their shared first-class state room to Titanic passengers. Burke and McCarthy slept on the floor of the Carpathia’s saloon while the ship returned to New York with the survivors. 

Mary’s travel journal goes on to describe her visits to Italy – where she saw works of art from the Renaissance – ancient cities in Egypt, Greece, and Israel, pre-revolution Russia, the Olympic Games in Stockholm, and the metropolitan cities of London and Paris. Her trip concluded with a visit with her brothers, Nicholas, Arthur, and Charles, who lived in South Africa where they owned an ice factory. Mary’s travel diary preserves the unique perspective of one Frederick County resident as she experienced one of the most famous historical events of the twentieth century. 

July 10, 2023 by Kayleigh Trischman, Heritage Frederick Intern

Flag Day is an annual observance marking the anniversary of the adoption of the first resolution creating a standard design for the flag of the United States of America, which the Continental Congress adopted on June 14, 1777. Communities across the United States held public observances of Flag Day as early as the Civil War. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge each made proclamations celebrating Flag Day in 1916 and 1927, respectively. Pennsylvania became the first state to make Flag Day an official holiday in 1937, and the United States Congress passed legislation in 1949 to make Flag Day an annual national observance. 

This photograph shows members of the Frederick Elks Lodge on the stage with invited guests and musicians. Major General Milton Reckord delivered the keynote address; Reckord was a Maryland native who commanded the National Guard and authored the 1933 legislation that made the guard a component of the United States Army. The lodge displayed nine flags at the front of the stage, representing the official flags that have flown over North America beginning with English colonization in the early-seventeenth century. 

The traditional Flag Day ceremony continues to be observed each June by Frederick Elks. Frederick City replaced the original Baker Park bandshell seen in this photograph with the present structure in 1990. 

June 1, 2023 by Jody Brumage, Heritage Frederick Archivist

A beautiful, dark, stained, cherry bedstead from the mid-19^th century recently went on view in Heritage Frederick’s second floor “Frederick County Coverlets” exhibit, and while the coverlets garner all the attention in the exhibition, this early Frederick County rope bed deserves a closer look.

The bed belonged to William Jasper Groshon and his wife, Amy, and it came out of their stone house, still standing today, on Eaton Road in Creagerstown. The Groshon family (originally Grosjean) were immigrants from France who arrived in America in 1751. William’s great grandfather John, born in Edenton, North Carolina, settled his branch of the family in Creagerstown in the first decade of the 19^th century.

John Creager laid out the town between 1760 and 1770, and Isaac Kolb built the first house in Creagerstown in 1775. The town experienced many years of steady growth and was home to a tannery and brewery in its early years. By 1858, Creagerstown had a doctor’s office, two stores, a hotel, and a school as well as a church and parsonage.

William Jasper Groshon was born in Creagerstown in 1843. He fought in the Civil War, serving as a private in Company D of the 6^th Maryland Infantry. Following the war he married Amy Weddle and worked as a stone mason. Family lore suggests that all nine of the couple’s children were born in this bed and that, tragically, their mother died from the measles in the bed in 1888 at the age of 39. Her obituary indicated that five of the nine children, ranging in age from 20 years to 17 months old, also were suffering with the measles at the time of their mother’s death. 

The stone house on Eaton Road served as a meeting place for the Groshon family to gather throughout the years. A widowed daughter-in-law who lived in Philadelphia with her seven children would bring her clan back to Creagerstown to spend summers at the home visiting with their grandfather and cousins, sleeping outside, and enjoying large family dinners in the yard. Margaret, an unmarried daughter of William who kept house for him, is reported to have joked that she had to sleep on a nail when the Philadelphia cousins came to town. She was a small lady, so this may have been true.

Rope beds were invented in the 16^th century and fell out of fashion quickly after the invention of the coil spring mattress in 1865. This example is a ¾ size, which would have been standard for the time, and was made in or near Creagerstown around the mid-nineteenth century.  A rope bed features pegs along the head and foot boards as well as the side rails.  Rope is wound around the pegs, stretching from head to foot and then side to side. The ropes would be tightened regularly with a wooden tool called a bed key, after which a stuffed mattress would be placed on top. The bedtime directive to “sleep tight” comes from this practice. Regardless of how tight the ropes were pulled, rope beds sagged causing anything on the bed to roll toward the center. As a result, they’re most comfortable for just one person to sleep in.

The bed was handed down in the family and was donated to Heritage Frederick in 2003 by George D. Basford, the great grandson of William and Amy Groshon.

May 1, 2023 by Amy Hunt, Heritage Frederick Curator

Everyone is familiar with the dream of winning a major cash prize by playing the lottery. However, in the early history of the United States, lotteries were a popular form of raising money to build governmental, educational, and other public structures and to fund public services. Perhaps most surprising when viewed from our contemporary conception of lotteries, they were commonly used to help pay for the construction of houses of worship for religious institutions.

Frederick’s Republican Gazette newspaper of June 20, 1804, carried notices of two public lotteries that were raising funds to support the construction of churches in the county. One of these projects was “to build a church in Woodsbury [Woodsboro] for the Lutheran and Presbyterian congregations in the neighborhood.” The church described in this lottery notice is known today as Saint John’s United Church of Christ and still stands on North Second Street in Woodsboro. Two years before this lottery announcement appeared in the local paper, the citizens of Woodsboro laid the cornerstone for this church which was intended to be shared by the Lutheran and Reformed [noted as Presbyterian in the advertisement] congregations. The lottery was authorized to raise $12,000, of which $1,800 would go to the new church, which was not completed until fifteen years later in 1819. 

The second lottery announcement concerned raising money to “complete the Church of St. John in Frederick-Town.” The building referred to in this announcement was the old Saint John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, which stood on the northwest corner of East Second Street and Chapel Alley, opposite the present Saint John’s Church. Father John DuBois, the future Bishop of New York and the founder of Mount Saint Mary’s University, was the priest in charge of the Frederick parish when construction was started on this church in 1800. Among the commissioners assigned to oversee this lottery was Frederick attorney and later Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Roger Brooke Taney. The lottery for the Catholic Church was intended to raise $24,000, of which $3,600 would be given to the parish for completing the construction.

Why were lotteries a popular form of public fundraising? Many religious, educational, and other public institutions in the early United States lacked their own financial resources to complete major initiatives like constructing new buildings. The lottery offered a self-funding means of raising money by voluntary participation. Having recently fought a revolution, in part, against excessive taxation, this concept was significantly more palatable than a compulsory tax. The receiving institution generally earned 15% of the total funds raised, the rest being paid out in prizes to the ticket purchasers, who had about a 50% chance of winning something from the lottery. There were many other projects supported by public lotteries in Frederick County in the early-nineteenth century. These included the bell tower of the Lutheran Church at Emmitsburg, completed in 1814, and the purchasing of firefighting equipment for the Independent Hose Company in Frederick.

Sources:

Dasgupta, Anisha. “Public Finance and the Fortunes of the Early American Lottery.” Yale Law School, (2021). Accessed April 6, 2023.

McWilliams, Jane. “’Fortune Attends the Brave:’ A Brief History of Lotteries in Maryland.” Maryland States Archives, (1989). Accessed April 6, 2023.

April 1, 2023 by Jody Brumage, Heritage Frederick Archivist

Henrietta Bacchtel received this award in 1838 in recognition of her achievement in fourth class writing. She was a student at St. Joseph’s Academy in Emmitsburg, one of the earliest institutions dedicated to the education of women in Frederick County. Henrietta and her colleagues studied at St. Joseph’s during a time when the school’s curriculum was evolving in accordance with changing attitudes towards women’s education in the United States. 

When St. Joseph’s Academy opened its doors in 1809, the school’s first thirty students were educated in basic writing, reading, and arithmetic in addition to courses in etiquette and other domestic duties a woman was expected to perform once she married and started a family. By the mid-19th century, the school’s curriculum shifted to a greater academic focus with the introduction of courses in the sciences, philosophy, and languages. In time, schools like St. Joseph’s Academy developed a comprehensive academic course of study for their students and many of the women used this education to become teachers after the establishment of public education systems in the late-19th century. In 1902, St, Joseph’s Academy received a charter to become a degree-granting college which it remained until its closure in 1973. 

St. Joseph’s Academy was founded by Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, who came to Frederick County in 1809 with the goal of caring for poor children and educating young women. Born into a wealthy New York family in 1774, Elizabeth’s early adulthood followed the traditional path of many women in her class and time. She married William Magee Seton at age 19 and had five children. Her husband enjoyed success in his business pursuits and the family lived in an upper-class neighborhood in New York City. However, by the age of 30, Elizabeth’s husband had died from tuberculosis and the family’s fortune had been decimated by trade interruptions from ongoing European conflicts. In this difficult point of her life, Elizabeth converted to Catholicism and dedicated herself to caring for children in need.   

At the invitation of Sulpician priests from Baltimore, Elizabeth moved to Maryland in 1809 and settled at Emmitsburg where she organized a religious order named the Sisters of Charity of St. Josephs (renamed Daughters of Charity in 1811). At the same time, the order established St. Joseph’s Academy to educate young women. Elizabeth Ann Seton was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1975, becoming the first person born in the United States to become a Catholic saint.

March 1, 2023 by Jody Brumage, Heritage Frederick Archivist