Interview with Mary Helen Cadwalader

              ORAL HISTORY TAPE #16
INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
INDEX
01-02	Family home taken by Edgewood Arsenal
03-05	Hunting Lodge on Maxwell's Point
06	Farming around Edgewood Arsenal: Tomatoes, corn,
wheat grown; orchards
07	Description of hunting season
08-09	Gamekeeper named Gowan - claimed he was with
Gilmore's Raiders
10-11	Travel - By boat; horse and buggy; walking; train
12-13	Beginning of Aberdeen for making poison gas in World
World I
14-15	Land bought from Grandfather for Edgewood Arsenal at
$50 an acre
16-17	Family bought The Mound
Romantic story of John Carroll Walsh and Amanda Lee of Jerusalem
18-19	Jerusalem Mill and Farm
20-21	Baptism in Jerusalem Mill Race
22	Biblical names: Salem - Short for Jerusalem;
Bethel - Short for Bethlehem
23	St. John's Church - first church in Hayford County
24	Joppa - port of entry in colonial days
25	St. John's Church eventually moved to Kingsville
26	Edward Day boundary stone
27	Boundary stones of The Mound; Ranger's Range
28-29	How The Mound got its name; date stone in house - 1785 -
by John and Ann Mason, second owners
30-End	Original name was Groom's Chance;
of Tape	Mr. Edwin Bond - collection of arrowheads and tomahawks
 
 
ORAL HISTORY TAPE #16
INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
INTERVIEWER: Sally Rawle SIDE I
INTRODUCTION 
the Cadwalader farm on Old Joppa Road and I'm interviewing Miss Mary Helen Cadwalader.
R: What part of Edgewood Arsenal did your family live on?
C: Well, the house was on a place called Maxwell's Point, which is a point of land which sticks out into the Gunpowder River about halfway down the peninsula. You know, Edgewood Arsenal is a long peninsula with the Gunpowder on one side and the Bush River on the other. And the house is not there any more. It was a rambling ... I have a picture of it somewhere I'll show you . . . a rambling frame house and I never . . . I was there once as a very small child, but I don't have any memory of it, because the Army took it in 1918.
R: How much land did the Army need to make up Edgewood Arsenal?
C: I'm not sure, but I believe it was somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 acres. It had been a large property with fifteen or twenty farms on it, and it ran nine miles, I believe, from the Philadelphia Road, which you call Route 7, down to the tip end.
R: Was the main house destroyed or is it still in use?
C: It was destroyed, but I'm not sure when. I think about fifty years ago, around 1921-22. For a little while, the Army kept the house and the trees around it because they were very unusual trees. My great-great-uncle had planted them, and he brought a lot of trees from all over the world. But I don't know whether any of that is left now or not; I haven't been there for many years.
R: My mother's heard about a hunting lodge on Maxwell's Point. Was that an area in Hayford County?
C: Oh, yes, it's in Hayford County; and it was a hunting lodge. People came down . . . my great-great-uncle who lived there, who bought it originally about 1840, came down in the fall to shoot ducks and geese and came in the spring, I think, just to sail and go swimming. They didn't like it much in the middle of summer because there were too many mosquitoes in those days.
 
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INTERVIEW WITH MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: It was just too hot. It was a sort of a hunting lodge, I think you could call it. I just think of it as a big old frame country house, low, rather big. It had a lot of interesting things, that my father told me about, connected with it. His great-uncle George had built a gas house . . . let me think in the days when they had gas lights, before they had electric lights. You could generate or make the gas on your own place and have your own lighting system. And it had greenhouses where they grew fruit and vegetables and, I believe, had some orange trees at one time.
There were black snakes that lived in the cellar. There was a gamekeeper who made a pet of the black snakes, and wound the biggest one around his neck and gave it a bowl of milk every day to eat. And they liked the black snakes because they kept away the rats and mice.
R: What happened to the hunting lodge?
C: I really don't know. I just think that the Army destroyed it.
R: I forgot to ask you this question earlier - was the land farmed around Edgewood Arsenal and what did they raise?
C:	It was beautiful farms according to my father. The Rembold's
had one big farm. They sold tomatoes and corn and wheat. Each farm grew whatever it needed and sold what was left over. One or two of the farms had very good orchards, because I remember hearing that peaches from Gunpowder Neck sold for a dollar apiece in Philadelphia, and this is a long time ago - a hundred years ago - and a dollar was a lot of money in those days, so it would be about like ten dollars apiece nowadays.
R: What were the hunts like?
C: Well, I only remember bits of what my father's told me. He used to love to shoot ducks and geese and, I suppose, in those days they could even kill swans, though they're protected now. They would - whoever was staying at the house . . . they always had lots of friends and cousins come down from Philadelphia and visit with them in the shooting season, which I suppose is October, November and December. They would go out before dawn in boats or to duck blinds and wait till the ducks came in and shoot, and then maybe later in the day they would take dogs .. oh, they always had Chesapeake Bay dogs to bring in the ducks. You know, Chesapeake's can swim and they would swim out in the water and retrieve the ducks. Later in the day they would walk through the fields and marshes and shoot woodcock, snipe, rail-birds, all those . . . partridges . . . all those little gamebirds that lived on the land, and then they'd have them for dinner
 
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INTERVIEW WITH MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: that night or the next night. I suppose they did some fishing. And they just lounged around and enjoyed the country.
R: Did your family tell you any stories of things that would be interesting for children today?
C: Well, the gamekeeper that I mentioned was an old man named Cowan and I don't know whether it was true or not, and I'm not sure whether my father knew it was true or not, but Cowan claimed that he had been with the raiders - Harry Gilmore's Raiders. You know, Harry Gilmore was a Confederate general who rode from over near Towson somewhere all the way over to burn the railroad bridge across the Gunpowder River, because he wanted to stop the Yankees from sending more troops down to reinforce their lines. Cowan claimed that he was one of the men who set fire to the railroad bridge in the middle of the river just before the troop train got there, and then had to swim ashore . . . I think he got knocked over off the railroad trestle in the battle and had to swim ashore. And he always claimed he'd lost his best hat!
R: Miss Cadwalader, how did people travel a long time ago?
C: Well, of course, if you lived near the water, you could go quite a . . . do a lot of traveling by boat. My father had a sailboat just for fun. I don't think they had any boats with engines, though; they really counted on horses and buggies and walking. The house at Maxwell's Point was five or six miles from the railroad station and they drove ... when the whole family was coming, they had somebody meet them at the train with the horse and carriage, and then they'd put all their bags and things in the carriage and drive down. But my father, when he lived there and went to law school ... he was studying law around 1903-04 . . . he lived there in the spring and fall and summer, and he would ride his horse up to the station and there was a little stable - he'd get off the horse and slap it and it would walk in the stable, and then he'd climb on the train and ride into Baltimore that way to his office or to the law school and come home the same way. And somebody at the station during the day would go out and give the horse a little hay or an ear of corn, and then when my father got back off the train, he'd ride home again.
He took much longer rides than that - he rode to Bel Air sometimes on business, and I remember he and his brother used to ride up to St. Mary's Church at Emmorton on Sundays, which must be ten or twelve miles, at least, from where the house was, and I don't believe they ever drove or rode all the way to Philadelphia. You see, my father's family lived in Philadelphia. I don't think he ever rode a horse all that way 'cause the trains
 
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INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: were good and there were so many of them,but, of course, you
know, in George Washington's time he rode a horse all the way from Washington to New York.
R: What was it like living in the house?
C: Well, I was a baby and 1 don't remember it, but my mother was very definite about it. I remember once when we were kids and we said at supper table . . . somebody said, "Gosh, that must have been fun - a great big house, and great big porches around it, and a game room and a wine cellar and all kinds of things." And Mother said, "Hmmmp. Straw mats on the floor and tin tubs in the room and mattresses were made out of horse hair and full of lumps - it was the most uncomfortable, cold, dreary place I ever stayed in my whole life"
R: How did the Army get your house?
C: Well, I guess you've heard about World War I. It happened a long, long time before you were born. The Germans were fighting the French and the English and somebody invented something
called gas - it's like what they use nowadays for tear gas only it made you much, much sicker. And the Germans started using it on the battlefield, and so the Allies, which were the French and the British and the Americans, decided that they'd better manu¬facture some poison gas; and they needed a lonely place to do it 'cause they didn't want to make people sick all around them.
So they started shopping around the last year of the war they didn't know it but the war was almost over . . . they started shopping around for lonely pieces of land that were fairly near Washington. They took a look at Kent Island. I don't know whether you know that . . . that's the other end of the Bay Bridge
and they almost bought that. And there was some Congress¬man or Senator who said, no, he didn't want to have to travel across the bay in a boat to get to it. He wanted to be able to get off a train and be there. So they could do that at Edgewood.
So they bought Edgewood Arsenal from my grandfather - fifty dollars an acre, I think, was the price - and the family was given a few weeks to move anything out that they wanted. So they moved the furniture but, much to my disappointment, they left a lot of things I'd like to have now, like gateposts and statues and flower urns and benches out under the trees. We have one or two of the benches now, and Mrs. Rogers at Olney Farm has the gates, because her father went and got the gates before they were destroyed, and in about August of 1918, the Army moved in there and in November of 1918 the war was all over. And they have been making - so far as I know - making poison gas there ever since and nobody's needed it or used it and nobody wants it. But that's what happens in wars.
 
ORAL HISTORY TAPE #16	-5-
INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
R: Did you come right here to live after you left Edgewood Arsenal?
C: Yes, within a year or two my father bought this place which is known as the Mound, but to tell you the truth, I never thought that was a very good name for it 'cause it sounds so dreary. But there's a lovely, romantic story about this place. There was a young man who lived here long before we owned it named, I think, John Carroll Walsh; anyway, his name was Walsh. And he fell in love with Miss Amanda Lee who lived down at
Jerusalem just over the hill there, and he wanted to marry her, but she was a Quaker and her family wouldn't let her marry out of Meeting, so he eloped with her. He put a ladder up to the window of the big white house at Jerusalem, so the story goes, and she stole out of her bedroom during the middle of the night and ran off with Mr. Walsh; and they were married and, as far as I know, lived happily ever after. But the evergreen trees that are planted out on this side of the house were said to be planted so that she would not have to look at her old home, and her father never spoke to her again. I don't think he ever kept a light in the window for her or anything. I think he read her out of Meeting. I may have the names wrong, but that's the story.
Jerusalem which is the name of the big tract of land just to the west of us here, with the big white house where Doctor Pullen lives, used to be a house and a store and a mill and a farm. Jerusalem Mill was running up until eight or ten years ago and we used to take our grain down there to be ground for the cattle. It was started off as a water mill. You know, to have a water mill, they'd build a dam in the river and then build what's called a mill race to carry the water down to the mill wheel. The water would run over the wheel and turn the wheel and that would turn the machinery inside the mill and that would turn the grindstone.
There were mills all up and down the Little Gunpowder every half mile. Some of them . . . none of them, I believe, are still there except Jerusalem Mill, in this part of the county. There are lots of other mills left.
After World War II, this mill here at Jerusalem was converted to electricity. It was no longer a water mill. But it ran up until, I think, about 1962 or 1963. The miller, I remember, kept a cage of ferrets outside the door to eat the rats in the mill.
Let me see if I can think of some other stories to tell you.
We used to swim in the mill race when we were children, 'cause it was about two or three feet deep and it didn't have any big
 
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INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: rocks in it. It was nice and smooth. We used to go down and swim at the mill dam, too; jump off the top of the dam into the pool underneath. And then I remember going to a wonderful baptism in the mill race where the Baptist preacher was bap¬tizing some elderly people who were converted to the Baptist Church, and he led this old lady who ran the store, Mrs. McCourtney . . . I remember her very well. We used to go and buy our candy from her - take a penny down, come back with a licorice stick two feet long, and you could suck on the licorice stick all day. We went down . . . my sister and I went down to see Mrs. McCourtney baptized and she had on a long white gown, and they led her down some steps into the mill race and, sure enough, they dumped the poor old lady right underneath and it was a cold day in March. I don't know why she didn't catch pneumonia and die! But she was alright for some years there¬after.
Mr. McCourtney, who kept the store, walked every year on his birthday. He celebrated his birthday by walking to Baltimore and back - twenty-one miles in and twenty-one miles back. And he lived well up into his eighties. And he was still doing it!
Oh, I don't know any biblical significance. Lots of people have asked how come we have a Jerusalem and a Jerico. We don't have a Joshua to fight the battle of, but . . . and Joppa. But all around here there are a lot of biblical names. Did you know that Salem - you see signs lots of places - Salem Church, Salem Methodist Church - that's short for Jerusalem. And there are Bethel's all over - that's short for Bethlehem. I don't believe we have a Nazareth, do we? But, I think, in general it's just The first church - I will tell a little about St. John's Church because the first church in Hayford County was St. John's in what is now Joppatowne. There wasn't any Joppatowne then. It was called Joppa.
Old Joppa was a rip-roaring little town. In fact, it was going to be as big as Baltimore, but Baltimore started later and went past it and got bigger. But in colonial days, about the time of the Revolutionary War, Joppa was a port of entry where people coming from England could get off their boats, and it shipped tobacco and everything the farms produced out; and there was a lot of shipping and a lot of activity; and a town of about a hundred houses and warehouses and docks and storerooms and all kinds of things going on there. So they started the church, St. John's, Joppa, and it's one of the three first parishes in Baltimore County. You know, Hayford County used to be part of Baltimore County; it was only cut out and made a separate county much later on. And all the other Episcopal Churches in Hayford County have stemmed from St. John's which is called the Mother Parish of Hayford County.
 
ORAL HISTORY TAPE luG	-7-
INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: St. George's of Spesutia was another one, and I think the next nearest to the west was old St. Paul's of Baltimore. I think those were the first three on this side. But I forget the details. I studied a lot about this at one time, and I've gotten very blurry on the details.
St. John's moved eventually from old Joppa to Kingsville, some-wherein the nineteenth century, I guess around 1850, and it was given the land for the new church by Edward Day, who had an enormous parcel of land in the Kingsville area, and one of Edward Day's boundary stones which can still be seen, and it's really worth going to have a look at. If you go up the Belair Road from Kingsville toward Bel Air, on your right, half a mile north of Kingsville, you'll see something called the Heathcote Lawn and Garden Center, where they sell lawn mowers and little tractors and on the bank of that place is an enormous granite stone covered with ivy; and chiseled into it is a very long inscription and it ends up "Cursed be he who moveth the marker stone" or something like that. And I asked the minister where it came from in the Bible, and he said it's in Deuteronomy; it's one of the Laws of Moses, one of the ancient Laws of Moses. If you move a boundary marker, you're the one who'll be cursed.
We have a boundary . . . there are two boundary stones on this place, which was called Groom's Chance. You know, all these farms were patented under one name; that is, when they were first carved out of the wilderness and somebody said, "I want this land, and this will be my farm," they patented it under a name which has maybe since been lost. In some cases they're still maintained. Well, this was originally Groom's Chance before it became The Mound much later. And Groom's Chance stone number one is right down on the road from Jerusalem to the covered bridge. Unfortunately, it's not sitting upright; it's toppled on its side. And I've been trying for about ten years to get somebody with a hoist or a front-end loader to pick it up and set it in place again. Groom's Chance number two is on the Jerusalem Road on the way to the mountain in Mr. Barnett's woods just up here on the left. And the surveyors still use these stones, because we had a line run a few years ago and the surveyor found that stone and then sited on that. And we've never found Groom's Chance number three or four. Groom's Chance number three ought to be somewhere in the woods somewhere between your house and Mrs. Alhimook, somewhere up in there, and Groom's Chance four would be somewhere along the river, but I think it's lost. But these are very valuable. Then, in the north of Jerusalem, the next place up was called Ranger's Range and there's a big stone up there that was marked R.R. #4, and that's one of our boundaries, the land that my father bought and added on to this place. And so we feel that's a very important stone, because it tells exactly how far you go. And
 
ORAL HISTORY TAPE #16
INTERVIEW WITH WTTJ-I MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: they're deeply carved; I don't know how .. I suppose, with a chisel they carved those names in in those days? They must have had a lot of time to do it, because some of them have long inscriptions on them - latitude and longitude, and direction.
•	. . Oh, yes, I think they've lasted much better than tombstones or else the granite was a tougher form of stone, I don't know which. But they're usually great big stones and quite easy
•	. . once you've spotted them, you don't forget them.
Yes, there's a stone on the south bank of the Jerusalem Road on the way to Kingsville, and it's marked - it's either 14 or 17 - it's the number of miles from the city limits. And it marks the old ... before they had a Belair Road, they had some¬thing called the Baltimore-Jerusalem-Bel Air Turnpike and the original road to Bel Air came right up there through Jerusalem and then went north to Bel Air.
We've always understood that the property was named The Mound because one of the sons of an early owner went out west to fight in an Indian war, and west in those days, I believe, was in
Ohio, which isn't so very far west today, but it was the frontier. And he fell in love with Chief Blackhawk's daughter, so the story goes. And he came home and told his father he wanted to marry an Indian maiden, an Indian princess, and his father said, "Oh, no, you don't. You're a good Roman Catholic; you're not going to marry any Indian girl." And he gave him this farm to run to keep him busy and to keep him from thinking about the Indian girl, but he kept thinking about her, so he named it The Mound, because that particular part of Ohio was full of Indian mounds. That was ... I don't know whether they lived in mounds, or had buried their dead in mounds, but there is a place called Moundsville, Ohio and there was a certain Indian culture that revolves around mounds, and so he named it The Mound, but we always thought it sounded rather dreary.
Mr. Marye always said that the proper full name should have been The Nannisaw Mound. So I thought Nannisaw was rather a pretty word. I don't know where Mr. Marye got it from, and about twenty years ago, I tried to persuade Dad to change the name of the place to just Nannisaw by itself, because I thought that sounded Indian and different, but he said, nonsense, he wasn't going to change it - it was The Mound.
We have a date stone in this house - 1785 - underneath the dining room on the cellar stairs, carved 1785, and underneath it says J. F A.M., and that stands for John and Ann Mason. They were the second owners. Moses Groom was the first owner which is why he named it Groom's Chance, but he, I don't think, ever lived here. His name is in the records of old Joppa. He was a
 
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INTERVIEW WITH MISS MARY HELEN CADWALADER
C: merchant, I think, in Joppa, and he bought this land. But then John and Ann Mason and James Mason, John's brother, bought it and then they later divided it and the lower half of Groom's Chance went to James Mason. Mr. Marye said he called that "Orkney", but I've never run into the name "Orkney" in the records, but then I've never searched for it. And I think that's now the farm next door here; it's part of it. So there's a lot of history around here, but it's pretty hard to find.
Well, I'll tell you the next person you should interview. How about that? Do you know Mr. Edwin Bond? You don't know
Mr. Edwin Bond? Up here at the corner, in the old stone shop? Someday you go and you sit down and you talk to Mr. Edwin Bond and you'll learn more than probably anybody else knows around here. He is a fascinating man and he has the best collection of Indian arrowheads. What made me think of him was that I was going to tell you that we have one field, right up here beyond the orchard, and every time we plow it, we pick up Indian arrow¬heads. My nephew can find them the way some people can find a four-leaf clover. He can find them by the dozen. I've never found one yet. But he always goes to that one spot. So he decided some years ago that the Indians - the Indian arrow-maker - must have pitched his teepee right up there because there were so many arrowheads around. Well, I took him up one time to see Mr. Edwin Bond and he went and looked at his collec¬tion and they are fantastic. He has tomahawks. We found a toma¬hawk in the stream not long ago - a real Indian stone tomahawk. Benny Lay found it - in our stream hack here. Anyway, you go and see Mr. Edwin Bond and ask him about springs that never go dry... no, he told me . . . what was it? Springs that go with the tides. He said - had I ever heard of a stream that obeyed the tide table. And I told him he was dreaming. And he said - no, sir, when he was a young man, he remembered a spring in some¬body's field and it was .
END OF TAPE