Interview with John Bertram Stump

              Interview with John Bertram Stump, Harford County Library Living Treasure Oral History, by Michael Dante, March 30, 1981.

MD:	First of all, I see that you were born in Baltimore County and I wondered how you came to Harford County.
JS:		Well, my mother and father had lived here before and it was just happenstance they were living there.	My daddy's business was in Baltimore, but my dad's family always lived in Harford County and my mother's family has been down here for sometime, too, in the county.
MD:	And what was your father's business?
JS:		He was in charge of the U.S. Immigration Service in Baltimore.	He was called the Commissioner of Immigration.	He commuted to his work after he started his own home here.	That was just chance, more or less.		Daddy was living near his business there in Baltimore.
MD:	What was his name?
JS:	Bertram N., Bertram North Stump.
MD:	And so then when you came along in 1900, did you live in Harford County?
JS:		Well, I don't remember living anywhere else, but I
was about three years old when I was moved here to Harford County.	We lived near Emmorton, down Route
24.	I don't remember any other place, really, other than Harford County.
 
MD:	And what was Emmorton like?	Can you remember much as a child what it was like?
JS:	Oh, yes.	It was a very small hamlet.	They had an
Episcopal Church there, St. Mary's and Mount Carmel, the Methodist Church.	It had one country store and a blacksmith shop and a wheelwright was in with the blacksmith.	In the little village itself along the road, I guess there were about--on Old Emmorton Road
they call it now--there were about six houses on the
 
north side other side.
 
of the road.	There weren't any on the All the rest was just farm land.	The
 
store was a combination post office and country
store, a rather small one.	It was run by an old man called Warren and his daughter.	They had an old
fashioned desk something like that there, only the
top of it was pigeon holes for putting in the mail,
and the lower part lifted up and that was where he
kept his cash.	The top part lifted up.	It was just
a very small country store where you could get a few
staples, and a surprising number of things, really.
A few bags of feed and eggs and things like that.
That was about what Emmorton amounted to in those
days, but there were farms all around, of course. While the population of the town was very small, there were a considerable number of people that traded there from the neighboring farms.	I think
the mail came to Emmorton from Edgewood.	I think
 
s	3
so.	And you had to go to the post office to get your mail.		That was before the days of rural free delivery.	That's the way Emmorton was.
MD:	Who were some of the farmers that had the farms in the Emmorton area?
JS:		Well, coming up from say, down Bambibber, the lower part of the county on Route 24 there weren't very many farms along that road of any size until you got up to a farm called Constant Friendship and that was the old Paul farm.	It goes back a long way.	That was the first really large farm and across from that there was a farm owned at that time by a Mr. DeGaul, a Frenchman.	Later on we wondered whether he was related to the famous DeGaul of France.	That was a fairly large farm and that's now called Box Hill, and it's now under development.	The DeGaul part of it is not yet developed, but the part farther up, at Narcy's Corner, now called Berchie's Corner, Box Hill North, that was the old Hall farm.	That was a very large farm, a very good farm.	The farms in the lower part of the county were not as good until you got way down towards the river.	They were good down there, but in the intervening part the farms weren't so large or so fertile.	But the Hall farm was a very large farm.	It ran back from Emmorton Road all the way to Laurel Bush Road.	The Hall family were a very old land owning family here in the county.	It
 
goes way back to Revolutionary times, I guess. Then, also, the one up the road, the next larger place is Judge Walter Preston's home.		He was a great man.	He was a doctor and a lawyer and a judge and his brother was mayor of Baltimore, Jim Preston.	His main business was the law and banking, but he loved his farm just the same.	His house is
still standing there, but it's surrounded by a development that's now called Preston Manor.		It's just about Birchies' Corner.	He and his wife, Mrs. Lilly Preston, who live there, are great friends of ours.	We've been fairly close.	Then coming up a little farther was a farm where some relatives of mine lived, Dr. Stump.	He was a retired doctor and he didn't farm himself.		He rented it out to a tenant there.	Then next up the road about opposite St. Mary's Church was a farm fronted on the road that belonged to Mr. Daily Wilson, who was a lawyer in town.	He had a pretty large farm there.	If you worked on a way up the road you could name every farm almost, and who lived there, and who the tenants were, or who operated the farm.	Most of the farmers were, I guess, about half and half.	Some of them I'd say were own operated farms and others, like my daddy and Mr. Judge Preston, they just had tenants that farmed on the shares.	Sometimes they hired men to do the farm work and they supervised
 
s	5
it, but they weren't what you might call dirt farmers.	But they still loved the rural ways.	So that's the way the farms were.	They tended to be large and land owner and his family and a tenant living on the place.	Now you have developments with half-acre lots or less.
MD:	What was your farm like?
JS:		Well, it was two-hundred acres.	It was fronted on Laurel Bush Road at the intersection of St. Mary's Church Road.	It was about half in woods, so it couldn't be construed as really a very large farm. My father, having his business in Baltimore, he had tenants farmers mostly.	Once in a while he had a man that farmed independently, but he had tenant farmers.	It was just a general crop farm.	It grains, wheat, corn, oats, and maybe a good year we'd try to get a little cash out of tomatoes.
Coming farther up the road the Magnuses were large land owners.	Lee Magnus.		My uncles had a large farm that laid back on Wheel Road, between Wheel Road and Emmorton Road.	Their farm ran around five-hundred acres.	They were two brothers, my
uncle Roy and Alec Bell.	It was the same way mostly out to Bel Air, mostly large farms.	About the only people that are living on a farm now that I recall are Tom Brooks and his mother.	They still love on the farm on Emmorton Road just south of Patterson
 
Mill Road.	It used to be sad.	My family told me one time all the land beginning from about here, what was known as the Homestead Estate, was owned by the Fernandez family.	They owned all the land fronting on Emmorton Road from where the town of Bel Air ended in those days, which was right here, all the way down including the Brooks farm near
Emmorton.	That was fronting on road.	Of course, I wouldn't say how far back their land holdings went. At the time I began to know anything that farm had been broken up to a certain extent to small places. But that was the way farms were then.
MD:	What was it like growing up on your farm?
JS:		Well, it was the ideal way to grow up, to my way of thinking.	We had plenty of ground to run around in, to explore.	We had woods.	It had fields, gardens.   My dad loved gardening and we had a large garden; flower garden and vegetable garden.	We could run around anywhere and get into our own little mischiefs and troubles.	It was really a nice way of growing up, except that in those days you were much more isolated.	We didn't know very many --	There weren't very many young people my age around, it seems to me, and we didn't have the mobility in those days that you have now with cars.	To go anywhere involved hitching up a horse and getting him ready to a buggy, currying him, feeding him, and
 
STUMP	7
that would take about twenty minutes or so.		Then if the drive was three or four miles that would be another thirty minutes or so.		So children stayed put more or less except to go to school.		It was a very small school at Emmorton, public school.		That was on Wheel Road.	It's still there, a little stone building now occupied as a residence.	I think it had about twenty kids at the most, one room.		The other school was the public school at Banbibber along Emmorton Road.	That was just at the top of  what we called Snow's Hill.	It's called Snow's   Manor now, a development.	It stood in a grove of trees.	That was a little one-room school.	Harford County has changed greatly since, say, 1910.		Before World War I, Harford County was purely agricultural, I might say.	The Bata Shoe Company was not here, and all you had in Bel Air were professional lawyers, doctors and residents of the town.		Well, maybe you can get at it this way, by imagining how things were.	Let's say first, there were no government posts, Aberdeen or Edgewood.	All that   was farm land, large farms, see.	Then there was the Pennsylvania Railroad and the B&O Railroad.		They were the only means of getting to Baltimore with any speed, unless you wanted to walk or drive.	Then you could imagine that there was no Route 40, all the businesses, all the automobiles, all the restaurants
 
and everything else, you can imagine not being there at all, see.	Nothing.		Of course, the Kennedy Highway was not that.	That left the Old Post Road, Route 7, as the only highway north and south in that part of the county.	I first remember it as being, you might call it an improved dirt road.	The hills were sort of packed here and there with stones, rough stones put in and gravel.	Every spring they'd go out with road scrapers and spread gravel and level the dirt road to make it a little more passable.	But you can imagine what a difference that would be from now with all the government grounds, the private hands, the County Highway and the Route 40 not there.		Nothing there but farms.
This Emmorton Road, we called it the road from Bel Air to Edgewood, was just a dirt road with hills sometimes with gravel on them or a little bit of stone.	Back in the horse and buggy days in late February or early March when the frost was coming out of the ground, some of those roads would be almost impassable.	Buggies with horses could hardly force through.	Sometimes mud would be, they say axle deep, but it really wasn't that deep.	But it was pretty deep at times.	Of course, automobiles didn't come in around here as I remember until, I guess there were a few here around 1905 or '06 maybe, just a few.	The farmers hauled their stuff
 
from the railroad stations in big farm wagons with probably four horses pulling.	One man would ride a horse or walk along side of them and then they'd load up the wagon.	In the spring they'd haul fertilizer up from Banbibber Station on big wagons and they would be very hard on the road because they'd sink deep into the much were the frost had left the ground very unstable.		Even buggies, wagons, had a hard time to get over these roads.
Sometimes it would freeze in the spring overnight from muddy conditions and the next morning it would be frozen stiff and there would be deep ruts frozen and a narrow buggy would get in a rut sometimes and you had to be careful if you tried to turn your horse from one side to another.	You would either break the wheel or break the shaft because the wheels couldn't get out of the rut.	I bet some days in the winter the horse-drawn vehicles, I don't think there would be more than maybe two dozen would pass up and down Emmorton Road in a day.	Now they're bumper to bumper almost.		You know how it is.	That's the difference.	But it was a nice  life.	You had the land owners and they all mostly knew each other.	Their pleasures were simple.	The telephone was just coming in in rural areas about the time we moved.		Mother and father built a house in 1903.	We had it put in a year or so later, I
 
think.	It was one of these crank telephones with a party line with quite a number of people on it.	The service was considered wonderful then, but now you couldn't put up with it.	You had about ten people on the line, maybe more and dinner time, supper time, they'd all want to talk.	So things was very
different then.	After World War I, at that time the county began to change, to my opinion.	The army moved into Edgewood and Aberdeen, and that began a change in the general mode of life.	The county had been pretty provincial up to that time, but they brought in soldiers and officers, and the officers mingled with some of the local residents and went to some of their social functions and things like
that.	They gradually become more cosmopolitan
then.	Also, it was a large source of employment, as it is now.	But that marked the beginning of the change.		Then with the automobile coming in about that time, too, and people from out of the county began to buy out farms and estates.	Some people from the city wanted to sort establish a country home around and as some of the older land owners would die off, their farms would sell that way.	It began a gradual change.	The automobile made the big factor in the change, and increasing population.
Then Mr. Longly, he had a large farm called Long Bar Farm.	All that's developed now, Long Bar Harbor.
 
But he pulled together some farm lands down there and then he got the shoe company to come here.	Mr. Bill Longly.	That was the first industry in the county of any size.	Down at Abingdon --	I guess
it was near Stepny was a sewing factory down there. It employed fifteen, thirty people or so.	It was called Stack's Sewing Factory.		A Cech I think he was.	That's no longer there.	So that's sort of a general over view of early days as I remember them in the county.
MD:	Well, now, where did you go to school?
JS:		Well, to start out with my sister and brother, we were taught at home.	Calvert School had a correspondence course.		Members of our family and another local lady, Miss Alice Wilson, lived with us during the winter, and she taught us elementary school through this correspondence course.	Then for a couple of years I commuted with my father to the Calvert School in Baltimore and attended the regular school there in Baltimore.		I got a fondness for traveling on trains then.	It was an interesting thing because trains were the only way of getting around with any speed.		Horses were the only way on land, before automobiles, of course.
MD:	Where would you catch the train to go to Baltimore?
JS:		Banbibber Station was on the B&O.	I think that railroad came through in about 1885, or something
 
like that.	Before that if anyone wanted to go from Bel Air or south of Bel Air they had to go to Edgewood on the Pennsylvania Railroad.	That was the earlier railroad.	We had good train service.	There
were at least three accommodation trains going into Baltimore in the morning you could get.	The early train was called th	milk train because it would haul a lot of milk.	Farmers would come down in their wagons with a big five gallon can, and then later ten gallon cans of milk, and they'd haul them into Baltimore in the baggage car.		Those accommodation trains would make about fifteen stops between Banbibber and Baltimore.		Banbibber was the station, you might say, for Bel Air in those days. Of course, they had the Modern Pennsylvania Railroad, too, but I don't recall when that came through.	At any rate, for north and south travel the B&O offered fairly good express service from Banbibber because if they wanted to go to Philadelphia, New York of Washington you could get some express trains in Banbibber.		But now Banbibber Station itself is gone.	There's nothing there to show there had been a railroad station there.	The railroad station, the store, and quite a number of houses still there.	Around that area has been developed into a lot of houses.	That was named for old Judge Banbibber.		He lived in the Banbibber
 
STUMP	13
House here, you know, on Yiain Street.	That's how it got its name, Banbibber.	They had water tanks there, or a water tank where engines took on water. Of course, they were all steam engines there.	Two
side tracks and they had a big warehouse where they'd store things like fertilizer coming in for the farmers.	They'd unload it from the cars into the warehouse and then the agent would call the farmer and say that "your shipment's here," whatever it was fertilizer, or food, or coal.	They also had, I think at one time, a ramp for loading cattle.
There were a good many beef cattle farms here and trucks came in that just drove them along the country roads.	I can remember meeting droves of cattle.	All the farmer's family, kids and all, would get out with long switches and they'd be driving these cattle.	Sometimes they'd try to break off and when you'd come to pass in a buggy or something, and they'd have a big excitement.	They'd drive them down to the railroad station and then they'd be shipped in cattle cars.	I don't think there were very many cattle farms here, and I'm not positive that they had a cattle corral and loading shout at Banbibber, but I know they did at Chappa.
That's the way farmers got their livestock to market, large quantities of them.
MD:	Did you have chores and things to do on the farm?
 

 
JS:
MD:
JS:
 
Choice of things? Chores?
Well, not too much.	We were allowed to raise our
own chickens.	I had a horse.		A pony, rather.		My folks would look after, but my father had to have three or four horses to use in his commuting, driving every day to Banbibber station.	We had a   man who looked after the horses and gardens and things like that outside, a yard man.	But most farm boys, say, tenant farmer's sons, they had a lot of duties that they helped with.		Cutting firewood and all useful things like that.	We helped when we could.	I remember in harvest time we'd help the tenant farmer harvest crops like wheat when he had a big rush on and so-forth.	We were quite fortunate as kids.	We didn't have an iron bound schedule to perform chores like tenant farmer's kids would.			It was a nice life.	I don't know how youngsters make out.	They're out here in the country but say their home is on a small plot of ground, you know, and there's nothing much that they can do there.	Maybe mow the lawn and help that way, but not very inspiring.		But they don't have woods where they can run free through exactly.	There's a big difference in the way children are brought up, of course.	In those days the children that did help with the farm work, when they got to the school and they got
 
through the farm work in the winter, they'd be tired
and wouldn't want to get a horse and buggy and go out joy riding.	You were tired.	And the summer was even busier, you know.	So they didn't get around.
They didn't have the mobility.	They didn't have all these meetings and sports.	There were no sports in connection with public schools in those days.	All the playgrounds and the publicity that you have in the paper.	There are now pages given over to football, basketball and pitching.	There wasn't any of that at all.	There were no sports in the public schools way back.	But the towns had little pick up ball teams.		Emmorton had sort of a makeshift team. We used to plan Banbibber and some of the neighboring towns just in pasture fields with kind of a little diamond laid out.
MD:		After you went to your Calvert School then you went onto college?
JS:		Well, no.	Then I went to a prep school.		I went to St. James' School up near Haggerstown.	My brother and I both were there.	I was at St. James' School two years and then I went on to college.
MD:		Were there a lot of people [end of side 1, tape l]
MD:		Most of the people in Harford County, they didn't get to go to school?
JS:	Well, there were a good many from Bel Air that went
 
to Princeton University.	That seemed to be a  popular place in those days.		The Hopkins didn't have the reputation then as an undergraduate school.	They were just more or less in the beginning of the undergraduate school at Hopkins. There were a number of men from around here that went to Princeton University for being fairly, relatively close,	Mr. Ned Harland and the oldest  one I can remember		Well, Judge Preston was a graduate of Princeton University.	Mr. Ned Harland was a graduate.	There were a number of others.	I think Mr. Louis William went to Princeton University.	So there were relatively a fairly good number of people went to college in those days, but nothing like in numbers.	Now everyone tries to go  to some form of college, whether it's just a community college or other.	You're right.	There weren't very many who went to college, really, in those days.
MD:		What was the opportunities like once you got out of college?
JS:	Well, nothing like there are now.	You could be a
farmer.	If your family owned a farm you could sort of grow up and farm along with your father and then inherit the farm and be a farmer or owner-manager of the farm.		Or you could study for a profession, lawyer, doctor or go into the ministry.	But outside
 
of that you had to go to a city to get employment around here, I'd say.	The employment was very limited except for the shoe factory and the government post.	A great many people found employment there, but if you wanted to get into business or something you generally had to go to the
city.	There were two banks here, maybe three.  There was a Commercial and Savings.	That's the only bank that's been under the same corporate
structure.	I think Judge Preston started that bank back in the 1900s sometime, and the other banks, all of them have been reorganized during the great banking troubles of the '30s, or taken over by other institutions.	But there was a Commercial and Savings Bank and the Harford Bank and the Harford National Bank.		Where now the First National Bank of Maryland is the head bank.	And then a little later on came the Farmer and Merchants Bank.	That was on Harford Street where the Johnson Credit Company occupies the building now.	So those were the only banks around, and they had no branches except the Commercial and Savings had a sort of halfway branch down at Edgewood.	A man went down there, Mr. Hall, and cashed checks and brought money up from the Post to the bank here by carriage years ago.		Now you wouldn't get from one place to the other.	You'd be robbed.	The county was much more peaceful.		There
 
was very little of this robbing, stealing, vandalism that goes on now.	That's one of the shocking things.	It seems to me we have a sick society.	I don't know why.	Where we lived we had a nice home near Emmorton and silverware and valuable furniture
and things.	It was never locked.	We lived there from 1903 until 1937. and maybe once or twice I remember when we were all away for overnight we had a great trouble finding a key to lock a door.	These days, why, you wouldn't dare to do anything like that.		It's a shame.		I don't know why it is, but it is.	It's more people, more mobility and people can get around faster.	It was more easy to be caught in those days.	Bel Air here, I don't know too much about Bel Air.	I think they had one town Bailey here and I think that was all.
MD:	What was the rest of the town like?	Do you remember
coming in as a child?
JS:		Oh, yes.	The town began about where High Street  is.	Mr. Bob High put up a stone residence there and that was the last house down Emmorton Road in the town, you might say.	There was a large farm right out here from about where the Kenmore Aggie used to me, now the Safeway Store.	And then it was Frank Jacob's house, the old Hayes house.	That's been
removed.	And there were a few other houses and then Mr. High's house and all south of that was farm
 
land.	No developments, just large farms.	On down there was the Richardson's farm and the Fernandez Farm and the Montikaiser farm and so-forth.		But Bel Air was a quiet, sleepy town.	I first remember dad
saying the population was about twelve-hundred. That was around 1910, something like that.	There were hitching posts .in front of the stores on Main Street where you'd drive up and hitch your horse to a hitching rack.	A good many stores had little counters that came out over the street.	Bel Air has changed a great deal since then.	There are very few buildings in the town now, commercial buildings, as I recall.	The old Busy Moon Movie Theater, I think that building is still sort of there.	It's near where Jim's Barber Shop is.	And the Courtland Hardware Store was an old hotel, an old inn years ago.	I think it was called the Eagle Hotel.	But  Bel Air, I didn't know too much.	You'll probably talk to people who know more about Bel Air in the olden days than I do.
MD:	One thing I was a little curious, you said something
 
Factory Road goes through, how it got its name.	I thought maybe there was possibly people by the name of Ring who lived there or maybe there was some sort of little establishment that made some sort of a metal ring or something.	He said there was a little place that made ring shaped things they used in textile mills.	I don't know just what sort of a   ring it was.	Textile machinery.	I think it was located on Winter's Run somewhere.		And that's how the Ring Factory Road.	They called it a factory.
Of course, in those days there were a number of mills--if you call that an industry--there were a number of mills around.	My uncles had a mill on Singer Road.	The mill itself was just off the road where you cross Winter's Run on the bridge.	They  had a dam farther back, approximately where the site of the present Atkinson Dam is, the government dam. Of course, their dam was much smaller.		It was only a few feet high.	They had a miller there and farmers would come with farm, wheat and things to be ground.	Then they'd often take back --		There wouldn't be much exchange of cash.	They'd have their wheat ground and the mill would take so much for his share and then they'd get the flour.		Those mills were dying out as I was growing up.		The Western Flour Mills were taking over.	They produced better flour.		It was just economy of scale.		Well,
 
you know there's a lot of history about the Harford County mills.	I remember on Patterson Mill Road, there was a mill there.	And the Hooker's Mill.
That was farther down off of Emmorton Road.	That was run by a family of Hookers I would imagine.	But they were all in a declining state, up to 1915 along in there.		I think Bell's Mill closed before World War I.	On the Wheel Road instead of a mill was a hydroelectric plant.	Bel Air Electric Company had  its main generating station there.	You can  imagine.		They couldn't turn out very much power from Winter's Run there, but that was their main source of power.	That side is now covered by the Atkinson Lake.	Wheel Road is cut off there now by the Atkinson Lake.	Mr. J. Alexis Shriver was the originator, the founder of the Bel Air Electric
Company.	They had a smaller plant to tie in with it that was run by power generated through a diesel engine, I think.	That small substation was somewhere along Route 1 in the neighborhood of Lake
Fanning.	But the total horsepower was nothing at all, and the lights would often go out at night.	I remember people would complain that the current would be weak, lights would go out due to in the fall the leaves would clog the mill races to the turbines and the water supply would be shut off or diminished enough so the power went down.	That was
 

all a natural thing.	Now, on our farm we only had kerosene lamps, as I first recall.	Upstairs we children were not allowed to have lamps because it
was dangerous.	If children upset a lamp it would  all flow out and burn, you know.	The fire departments then were	Four miles away from Bel Air was a little fire department.		Then you were practically helpless getting any great help.		So we used candles to go to bed by and dress in the morning.	Candle light for a long time.	Then finally got the home electric plant and had the house wired.	Along about 1920   I think what they called a high line, regular electric power.	Was it then, Sis?
MS:	No.
JS:	When did we get the electric power? MS:	It was after I was married.
JS:	Was it?
MS:		Because the photographer came up to take my picture and he said, "Miss Stump, what's the matter?
There's no current and I'm plugging the lights in." I said, "Oh, well, we don't have electricity."	We
 
STUMP	23
JS:	We didn't have electric power then.	Our home generating plant had seen its best days and it was out of commission and we were just waiting to get the high power, regular electric power.	Would you
have a cup of coffee now and take a break?
MD:	Well, sure.	[tape turned off]
JS:	The insurance compan_ies they had, the Harford Mutual was a small company then.	That was about the only business in Bel Air outside of the banks and the law offices, things like that.		So I had an offer from
I was in college and old man Firestone's son was in my class and they started up a college recruitment and I went along and went after Firestone and worked in the factory for a while. Sort of learned the business and then I went into sales work and liked that.	I was working three or four years and then my daddy got quite ill with a terminal illness and I was rather unhappy out in Ohio so I left then and came back.	Then I worked for the telephone company after that in Baltimore, commuting on the B&O mostly.		Sometimes by bus.	I don't know which is worse, the bus or the train.
Sometimes I had to use both.	If I had to work overtime in the telephone company, they never paid you any overtime.	They'd give you what they'd call supper tickets, fifty cents and you could get supper on the telephone company.	But maybe you'd put in
 

two or three extra hours at a busy time, but the thing of it was, if I was on a train I'd miss my train, and then I was able to get a late bus out of Baltimore out here, but my car would be down in
Banbibber.	So I had to get my sister or somebody when we were living on the farm to come up here in Bel Air to meet me and take me down to Banbibber the next morning to go in on the train.		That was one of the tribulations.		I remember years ago there was a stage that went between Bel Air and Edgewood.	There were a few commuters then.	I think the stage left Bel Air at 6:30, maybe 6:00 to get to Edgewood around 7:00 or something like that.		Then they'd board an accommodation train to Baltimore.	Of course, that was before my time.		There was a blacksmith shop at Emmorton.		That was quite a gathering place.	It was right on the corner of the old Emmorton Road and the Wheel Road.	There's a  house there now.	I used to go out there and take a horse to be shod.		Often you had to wait around, wait your turn and the blacksmith was a typical blacksmith, Mr. Walter Everett.	He had a forge there and a wheelwright shop, too.	A horse and   buggy would come by and people would be waiting there, they'd all look out and say, "Oh, there goes old man so and so.		I wonder how he gets along with that old horse."	You know, make remarks like that
 
every time they'd see a horse and buggy going by. Then they'd laugh and job, you know.	Now you've got garages in place of them.	The Everetts were great people around Emmorton.	Our neighbor to the south
was Mr. Joe Everett and his daughter was Miss Estelle Everett.	She was very prominent here in the county juvenile services, the rudimentary services they had.	She held that post for a long time.	I don't know just the title that she had, but she was considered to be very, very good in that work.
Judge Preston was influential in getting her that position, I think.	He was a great man, Judge  Preston.	He was very friendly, very jolly.	He loved to laugh.		There were more people in those days who seemed to be characters.	Everybody now is molded in a way.		They're molded by the schools,  mass education, mass entertainment and mass media. In those days, of course, there were no radio and many people didn't have telephone.		Only a few people subscribed to a paper, the morning paper.	It was a climate where individuals developed more because you didn't have the sort of overall sameness that society's sort of afflicted now through the mass media and propaganda agencies and television, all like that.	I can always remember the old county surveyor, Mr. Walter Summerville.	He was a character.	He surveyed farms all through here, you
 

know, change of land things.	He knew everybody for• miles around.	He had an old Ford and went around for years.	His son would help him.	He was a
well-educated man.	He had a hobby of quoting Latin to people.	I don't know whether it was to impress them with his knowledge, but he'd break out in Latin quotations sometimes.	He had funny little ways about him.	He lived on Summerville Road.		It's named for him.	His house is not there.	It burned down, but it was a very picturesque old house and had a nice row of trees around it.	They were sort of more countrified people.	You never hear people speaking of country rubes anymore.	There used to be country rubes around, you know.
MD:	What's that? JS:	Yes.
 
MD:	Now, I don't know what that is. JS:	A rube?	Well, sort of oddity.
 
What do you mean?
A chap with funny
 
mannerisms, funny ways of talking, things like that.	There used to be a famous baseball pitcher named Rube Farnum that came from a farm.	They called him a "Rube".		They were sort of guys, more or less uneducated, but characters, eccentric in a way, maybe.	But generally good natured.	And they had farmers clubs.	There was a Folson Farmers Club. Then, of course, the Grange was more a factor around here than it is now because the number of farms is
 
STUMP	27
so much less.	These farmers clubs, they would have
a dinner meeting where the host farmer would have a big dinner.	Before the dinner they'd go out and
make the inspection of the barns and they would report at the table.	They'd say, "We found so many cows that were well tended, and so many barrels of corn or hay in storage," and then they'd have somebody, maybe a local county agent would give a talk on agricultural subjects.			Then they'd have a nice dinner and maybe a little conviviality or drinking, and then they'd disperse.	Well, of course, that's all gone now.	There aren't many in the lower part of the county.		There aren't many farms left, really, until you get up north of Bel Air.	There are a few left south of here, of course, but a relatively few.
MD:	Were there many people commuting like you were
doing?
JS:	Well, from Banbibber, yes.	I guess there would be six or eight people, regular commuters.	Then they'd often be joined by other members of the family.		The ladies would be going to shop.	It would be a great day.	They'd go into shop at O'Neils Store in Baltimore.	That was a great place for the ladies of the house to get their clothes.		Or go to different dress makers.	And occasional people that way.		A lawyer sometimes would be going to Baltimore.	But
 
STUMP	28
steady commuters from Banbibber, there were generally about my father, and Mr. Ledig, and Mr. DeGaul.	Oh, about four or five generally.	And then
as you went toward Baltimore they'd pick up more. Choppa and different stations there more in the south.	Sometimes there would be quite a rush of people.		Holidays the trains would get crowded with shoppers going in.	And in the spring, a little later in April, people would come out to Banbibber to go gudgeon fishing.	Gudgeon fishing.	The little fish would come up into Winter's Run down there.
They'd come up on the accommodation in the morning, bring their lunch and they'd walk a few hundred yards down to Winter's Run.	That would be a bring thing in the spring.		The gudgeon fishers would come out from Baltimore.	Maybe a whole lot of them.
Maybe fifteen or twenty and that was a big crowd in those days.
MD:	You went back to the farm around the Depression?
JS:		Yes.	The telephone company began cutting back and single men that hadn't been there too long, they were the first to go.	I came back, as a lot of people did, they'd fall back on the farm.	We were lucky enough to have a farm.	That's when I did most of my farming.		I wasn't really brought up as a farm boy, but I had to learn.	Our farm had been run down a good deal.	My dad had been dead a good number of
 

years and he had tenant farmers there and the place tended to run down.	So I had to do a lot of breaking up of old sod fields that were over grown, and things like that.	It was mostly just a general
farm.		We grew corn, wheat, and mostly for cash crops, tomatoes.	There were a good many canning factories, so-called factories around here, little local places.	Mr. Lee Magnus had one up at Emmorton and farmers would haul tomatoes from their fields up to this canning house up on Plum Tree Road just off of Emmorton Road.		And there were others.	There was one canning house down at Banbibber, I think a small one.	They're all' gone now.	At one time we had seven acres in tomatoes and about twenty-thousand plants.		That was a job growing those things and putting them out.		Oh, boy, back breaking.
MD:	The Depression wasn't as hard as it could have been if you had a farm?	Was that the way it was?
JS:		Well, no, farmers were relatively better off.	They could have enough to live on and eat.	They'd have [unclear) and they could store a lot of vegetables over the winter like apples and potatoes and maybe carrots and parsnips, things like that.	They could store those for winter use.	They had chickens.
They had pigs and sometimes they'd slaughter a calf or so.	So eating, they were in much better shape then city dwellers, much better.	Of course,
 
they could afford some coffee and tea and store
bought stuff, as they called it.	But the Depression, you can't imagine what the prices were
so low then.	Now, we sold tomatoes.	We hauled tomatoes up to Magnus's canning house, I did, and the lowest price I think was thirty-two cents a bushel.		That was sixty pounds of tomatoes.	They were carried up in there in what was called a tomato box.	They held a bushel.	They were sort of a crate with slats in it and two ends in the center, a dividing piece.	We loaded it up with sixty pounds of tomatoes and then the weight of the box and all it maybe it about seventy-five pounds.		It took a lot of tomatoes to make any money at that price, but in those days fertilizer was maybe ten dollars a ton.	I paid my pickers			Some people paid them piece wage, so much per bushel.	I generally paid them by the day because we got a better grade of tomatoes that way.	People working on piece work would pick a half ripe tomato and that wouldn't be so good.		Canning people didn't like it.	They'd  pick all the ripe ones.	For day labor on the farm I think I used to pay two dollars and a half a day, and that was considered pretty good.	Two and a half a day.	Things were correspondingly cheaper in the stores.		I've seen some old advertisements and they are shoes, two dollars a pair; some sorts of beans,
 
or peas or something, hard peas -­ [end of side 2, tape l]
JS:	Sort of a regular immigration almost.
MD:	And people around here, how did they feel about it coming in?
JS:		Well, there was a little friction sometimes, but they were generally_very good citizens, the farmers.		Some of the most substantial farmers now, as you know, came from North Carolina.	Of course, you had some that weren't so good like anything else, but on the whole they were fine.	The were fine citizens.	A lot of them came from around Sparta.	I remember going through Sparta.		It's a pretty little place.	I think it's on the western side of the Blue Ridge, as I remember.	It was a lousy day.	We wanted to come up the Blue Ridge Parkway, but it was too foggy and rainy.	We had to make a little space, so somebody said, "Well, go down on another parallel road," that went down to the valley more.	I think Sparta was on that ride. But you say your family originally came from North Carolina?
MD:	Yes.
JS:	What part?
MD:	Ashville.
JS:		Ashville.	[unclear] the river for an outing, and at
Ida Point there was a Captain John Light that had an
 
establishment down there.	He had a fishery there and he also took people out boating.	They'd hire a launch and go down Bush River in this big old
launch.	It was called "The Ida".	And before that he had a sailboat.	I don't remember the sailboat.   I think it was called "The Gypsy".		He'd take people out into the Bay maybe.	But his main thing there was his fishery at Ida Point.	The fish were
plentiful then.	I remember seeing big nets down the lower end of Bush River.		They'd fish those nets in little boats they'd call gilling skiffs.	They were propelled by sail.	That was a regular commercial fishery.		They'd catch and bring that fish up to Ida Point, and then they'd ice them and they'd be shipped to Baltimore.		I don't know how.	Either by wagon or maybe by train, and later on by truck.	But also they had an entertainment side of it beside crabbing.		A lot of people would go down and they'd hire a rowboat and a crab line for a day's crabbing. That was a great sport.	Crabs were plentiful and they'd take you down the river and put out a trout line and you could get a bushel of crabs in two hours.		Nice crabs.		They would cook them there for you.	That was one of the nice things to do.	Of course, he crabbed commercially.	He had soft
crabs.	He had tanks that held these soft crabs and others.		He had snapping turtles they'd get in his
 
fishery.	That was sort of a little industry of itself, the fishing down there.	They had big runs of shad in the spring and farmers would go down
there and country people and they'd buy a whole shad for fifty cents.	A big thing, maybe weighed six or eight pounds.	I remember one old water man who used to work for Captain Light, he said they had a haul of rock fish there on the upper part of Bush River. I think it was over a thousand pounds in one haul of rock fish.	In the summertime people would go down there and they'd have picnic parties and you'd hire a rowboat and go down the riverway to Flying Point. It's Flying Point Park now, but that was all farm.
There was a big dairy farm there owned by Yir. Fry, and all that area through there.	He didn't mind.  It was a nice sandy point there in fairly deep water in those days.	Maybe six or seven feet.	It went
down fairly quickly.	People would go down there for the swimming.	Then later on a social establish, more of a club affair, came into being called Harford Boat Club.	That was one of the main social attractions in a social way around here.	It was originally started as sort of a gun club because there was good duck shooting.	People came down from New York to be able to shoot ducks in the Chesapeake Bay, the Bush River and places like that.
Especially the duck shooting that was up on
 

Susquehanna	Flats.	J,	Pierpont Morgan had a big place on Spesutie	Island.	I remember being there. He had a big gun club and all these tycoons,
financiers he'd entertain down there.		He had game keepers, wardens and blinds scattered all out.	But Bush River wasn't anything that elaborate, but there was a good deal of sport duck hunting down there, fishing, and then the social where this boat club came.	They would have dances there.	It's now the Elk's Club, but the old Harford Boat Club building was frame and it was destroyed by fire during World War II sometime.	There's nothing there now that looks like the old Harford Boat Club.		But it was a nice club.	It had a number of boats there.		There weren't too many really avid yachtsmen.		The younger crowd had nice dances there, subscription dances that people would come out from Baltimore.	Bob Yuler used to play there.	He was a great man that came out of Baltimore to play at social functions around the county.	In the Bel Air Armory in the wintertime they'd have two social gatherings there would be the Library Dance.	The ladies of the  Harford County Library would sponsor a dance there to raise money, subscription dance in the Armory.
And then the Red Cross would do the same thing.
That would be the highlights of the social season in the wintertime for the younger people.	These Armory
 
Dances we called them.	They had a big band come up from Baltimore and all the young people would gather round.	They were really nice dances.	I guess
they'd have two or three-hundred people dancing there.	The floor would cleared off.	The chairs would be all up against the wall, you know, and
so-forth.	The Harford Boat Club was quite a social
center before automobiles got too many.	It was  within driving distance of Bel Air and the lower part of the county.	But as time went on, people would go to Ocean City.	They had cars and they   could afford to go to bigger and better places. Harford Boat Club sort of went into a decline and passed out of business.		During World War II all the younger people were in the army and there wasn't much social activity.	That was one of the nice  things about the county, the water and the entertainment if furnished, and the source of income from the fishery and crabbing and things like that. All that's no more.	All that's gone.	Of course, they have large marinas there now.	There's Ida Point Boat Club and there's Harford County Boat Club at Long Bar Harbor and Trojan Harbor Marina down Edgewood side.	Then there's another marina down near the Pennsylvania Railroad on Bush River.	I imagine there's --	I would hate to say how many motor boats, power boats that or on the river now,
 
As I remember as a kid there was just a handful of commercial fishing boats and a few launches.	The wealthy individuals had their own power boats, you know.	Maybe ten or fifteen, twenty-five boats would be a whole lot in those days.	That's about it for
me.


End of Interview