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The Present Past – Town House, Country House

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by “My Father’s Son”

Around eight o’clock on August 27, 1925, Doctor Morris A. Birely was ushered by Lester Unger across the street from his home to the Thurmont house of Peter N. Hammaker at 26 North Church Street. Unger, employee and backyard-neighbor of Hammaker, had recognized the sound of an automobile motor running inside Hammaker’s locked garage and rushed to the doctor’s home. When the pair returned, Birely forced open the garage and recovered sixty-seven-year-old Hammaker, whom Unger had rightfully assumed inside.

Born in 1858, Peter N. Hammaker came to Thurmont in 1874, where he entered the marble and granite memorial business with brother, B. Frank Hammaker. Peter bought the entire Hammaker Bros. Memorial Company from his brother in 1878, when B. Frank relocated to Libertytown to start again in the same trade. Nine years later, Peter Hammaker wed Ida Miller of Lewistown on the morning of February 17, 1887. That same afternoon, elder brother B. Frank Hammaker wed Jennie Ensor. Peter, age twenty-nine, and bride Ida, twenty-eight, were wed nearly thirty years before Ida passed away of heart failure in 1916. Together, Peter and Ida endured the infant deaths of their only two children and constructed the stately “Hammaker House” at the summit of North Church Street that the couple moved to in 1908 (the new residence less than a dozen rods away from their former home, 106 N. Church St., sited with the Hammaker Bros. stone operations).

Two years later, in 1910, the Hammaker House’s near-duplicate was completed in Frederick City at 200 Rockwell Terrace; the comparable town residence was commissioned by Middletown native Oscar B. Coblentz, who came to Frederick upon his 1904 appointment as city Civil Engineer. In his lifetime, Coblentz would also work for the Frederick & Middletown, and WF&G Railways, act as Superintendant of Frederick County Schools, and be admitted to the Frederick County Bar after studying Law at the University of Maryland, while simultaneously tending his professional positions. August 1908 shifted Coblentz’s attentions to a new law practice, formed with Charles C. Waters after the death of Waters’ former affiliate, Chas. E. Cassell.

Coblentz and wife, Margaret Elizabeth Pontius (a student from Cochranton, Pennsylvania, attending The Women’s College of Frederick—renamed Hood College in 1912—whose first cousin, Joseph Henry Apple, was the College’s President), wed in 1903, and later purchased the first lot on Rockwell Terrace. Removed one block from the Women’s College’s 28-acre campus (donated in 1898), Rockwell Terrace was, and continues to be, the prestigious residential addition to Frederick, developed on the former land-holdings of Elihu Hall Rockwell. The Rockwell Street, extending W. Third St. westward, was laid out in 1905 after demolition of the Rockwell residence obstructing its path. The Coblentz home was begun in 1907 on Lot 2 and half of adjoining Lot 4.

The Hammaker and Coblentz homes exemplify the American- Victorian style, emerging after the Civil War. Residential Architecture authors, James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, describe this style as one that “popped up everywhere… in cities, suburbs, and rural areas.” Features of these homes’ Queen Anne sub-categorization include large, usually curvilinear wraparound verandas, balanced facades, turreted bay windows, many gables, and sporadic decoratively-shaped windows, usually maintained on even the simpler of Queen Anne constructs.

Many notable architects were drafting these desirable homes at the turn of the century. These Frederick County dwellings, however, appear less decorated than San Francisco’s Samuel & Joseph Newsom designs, less sprawling than Boston’s Peabody & Stearn’s, less “cottage” than Bruce Price’s New York clientele’s resort homes, and less palatial than the home plans of Philadelphia Hotel builders G.W. & H.D. Hewitt. The Hammaker and Coblentz residences seem more closely attuned to the blueprints of George F. Barber. Barber’s homes are present in all fifty states, and in countries such as Japan and the Philippines. Barber’s first catalog, released just before 1900, contained fifty-nine plans in the Queen Ann style. “Many Barber houses survive today—there’s probably at least one in a neighborhood near you.” (Massey, Maxwell)

No definite claim is laid that either of these homes is indeed of Barber creation, but suggests an educated point-of-reference. The primary differences between the Hammaker and Coblentz homes are the variations at the front porch (Coblentz’s reversed, allowing a large solarium), gable versus hip-dormered roof terminations, and, most noticeably, a greater footprint that deepens the Coblentz home by at least one room-depth overall—all differences difficult to identify when the homes are not viewed side by side. Overall, the finishes, window placements, grill patterns, and brick used unite the pair, their identical corner-bay towers their most revealing relation.

Oscar and Margaret Coblentz sold their home on December 31, 1917, moving with their five children to Baltimore. Mr. Coblentz was on the State Education Board. He was also a dedicated member of the Hood College Board of Trustees, a seat his son, Edward Coblentz, and daughter, Katharine Crook, sustained, leading Hood College to commemorate the family’s contributions with the Coffman Chapel memorial organ and pews, given in Oscar Coblentz’s name in the 1950s, and the Coblentz Memorial Hall dormitory that was dedicated in 1965. The Coblentzs are also recognized as “the first family to graduate three generations of Hood College students.”

Headlines on August 28, 1925, read “P.N. Hammaker Takes Own Life While in Garage – No reason assigned for act of well-known man.” Found unconscious inside his vehicle, Dr. Birely was unsuccessful in reviving Peter Hammaker. Contrary to the papers, neighbors Unger and Birely were likely aware that the day before Hammaker’s passing had not been a quiet one, as police warrants had been issued against Hammaker’s wife. Peter’s second wife, forty-one-year-old Mae Krise Hammaker (twenty-six years her husband’s junior) had instigated an altercation when she “sprinkled with water” an automobile parked along East Street’s curb beside the Hammaker home. When approached by the vehicles owner, a woman living adjacent the Hammakers, on the opposite North Church and East Street corner, was also “sprinkled with water” and hair “pulled from her head” during the ensuing row. Mrs. Hammaker was to be charged with assault and battery and use of improper language on a public highway. That evening and following day, Peter Hammaker was allegedly very distraught by the interaction between the women and so retreated to his garage. Whispers of a more-than-neighborly relationship between Hammaker and his unmarried, water-sprayed, 102 N. Church Street neighbor, were not unheard in town.

Hammaker’s business was sold to brother B. Frank Hammaker’s two sons, Peter’s nephews: Ernest P. and Frank E. Hammaker. Ernest and wife, Edith, purchased his Uncle Peter’s house for $7,500 to use as their residence. Come 1956, Ernest P. and Edith Hammaker completed construction of their modern, final home on land acquired by A.C. Sylvester, between Woodland and Clarke Avenues, where a stylized carving reading “Windy Woods, Ernest P. Hammaker” still stands. The retro-rancher, embellished with slabs of marble and granite, caused the sale of Ernest’s Uncle’s home, which was then owned by (among others) the Dr. Richard D. Culler family of Frederick, and later, U.S. Army veterinarians Jerry and Nancy Jaax, with whom the address gained notoriety as a momentary setting in Richard Preston’s 1995 best-selling book, The Hot Zone (chronicles the first Ebola outbreaks and the virus’s unsettling entry into a Virginia Monkey House).

The Hammaker House, as well as Peter’s former residence and Memorial Company facility, is nicely preserved between the Thurmont square and Western Maryland Railroad overpass. On Rockwell Terrace, Oscar B. Coblentz’s house had prospered handsomely as well and, although divided into apartments for several years, the home again serves as a single-family residence.

Note: For more pictures, follow Northern Frederick County’s history on Instagram at remembering_Frederick.

Present-Past
The Thurmont Hammaker House at 26 N. Church Street, built by Peter Hammaker and wife Ida in 1908.
Present-Past-2
The Frederick City Coblentz House on Rockwell Terrace, near Hood College, the Coblentz’s residence from 1910-1917.

The Present Past

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                                                                                           A House Divided Part II
by “My Father’s Son”
Aurora-3The house at 601 East Main Street in Thurmont is much more primitive in style than its neighboring Aurora Cottage. A simple square by perimeter, 601 is a 2-1/2 story, typical three-bay façade, differing from others in Thurmont of the same description by its forward-facing, steeply-raked front gable, allowing space for a largely habitable attic beneath the high-pointing rafters. One hundred and eighteen years old, this address is often known as “The Campbell House,” recognizing two scores of ownership by the surname. Removal of the columned wrap-around porch, asphalt-shingle siding, full-sized attic front-gable windows, and the replacement of the sash exchanged for the front door, the “Campbell place” is promptly exposed as Aurora Cottage’s lost Annex.

Before proceeding, let’s resume where Part I concluded in 1912 with the Charles C. Waters family leaving their Fredericktown-house at 116 E. Church Street, returning to Thurmont’s 513 E. Main, this time as their private home. Five years prior, Waters and business partner, Charles Cassell, closed and sold the Aurora Cottage boarding house. Just as this endeavor ended, so would all others involving the pair on June 2, 1907, when Charles E. Cassell died two months after the home’s sale. Cassell’s absence invested Waters further into the legal arena where his reputation as a learned estate attorney had grown since passing the Frederick County Bar in 1898.

The Waters’ second arrival to Aurora Cottage brought the departure of the Annex. By purchasing a bordering sliver of land from owner Blanche Darr Donaldson of Philadelphia allowed Waters to shift the Annex he and Cassell had constructed approximately 100 feet 12° SE to become its own address—the structure’s displacement angled to accommodate a large shed still sited behind the Annex today. As no staircase existed in Aurora’s addition, Waters outfitted an L-shaped stair against the Annex’s severed side incorporated into the stacked passages once linking the guest wing to Aurora. The retro-fitted house was rented until 1919 when Waters would add twenty-five feet of his own holdings to the Annex, creating a satisfactory lot fronting fifty-five feet on E. Main Street. Upon purchase that same year, Edgar and Marguerite Tregoe secured the Annex as a separate entity to be forgotten as a fragment of the neighbor it once coupled.

The Tregoes extended their lot to Apples Church Road by obtaining more of Donaldson’s land. They sold the whole to Ross and Nanna Firor in 1935. Divided into four lots, the Firors sold most of Tregoes Donaldson purchase between 1952 and 1968, returning the Annex’s acreage to near its original conveyance.

Over a year prior to Waters’ sale of the Annex, November 1918 announced World War I’s conclusion and spread peace across the globe quickly cloaked by suffrage even unseen through warfare. The American Medical Association summarized our country’s morale best: “Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all—infectious disease.”

At age eighteen, the Waters’ only son, James, became ill with the “Spanish-Flu,” the wickedest epidemic in recorded history. James was a prime host for the ailment, which spiked the death-by-illness rate of those aged fifteen to thirty-four by 20 times that of the previous year. Over 675,000 American lives were lost, James Waters’ among them.

His son departed, Charles Waters amended his Will to donate Aurora Cottage to the Order of the Holy Cross, instructing his “present home and grounds” be designated the “James Somerset Waters Memorial for religious and charitable purposes.” Per the Will, Rosa Waters received life estate at Aurora Cottage after Charles’ death in 1926, the occasion of her death or remarriage to execute her husband’s final testament. Unexpectedly, Rosa contested the Will and County Case #11557, Rosa Waters v. The Order of the Holy Cross, dishonored the late Mr. Waters’ wishes. Rosa’s legal victory protected her home from institutionalization and reestablished entitlement by Mrs. Waters, allowing sale to occur four years later.

The Dern, Fraley, and Green families succeeded Rosa Waters, each conveying the property to the next after an average inhabitance of eighteen years until the deed was purchased by the Cochran family—Aurora’s longest owners (this month marking thirty years of residence). Nine acres added by the Waters’ between Aurora’s current lot and the Western Maryland Railroad were sold by the Derns in 1940 (later becoming the Cannon Shoe Company), and additional area lost by Fraley’s 1945 purchase and swift construction of a trending bungalow-style home upon the Aurora lot for daughter Mabel and son-in-law Earle Townsend. The Townsend’s created 511 East Main Street, carved from the Aurora parcel, an abnormal allocation, shrinking to around only fifteen feet to dodge Aurora Cottage’s existing carriage house before reopening its bounds.

The Cochrans obtained Aurora Cottage from William and Patricia Green, parents of familiar Frederick News Post photographer, Bill Green. The Green family occupied the home from 1967 until 1986. Bill’s paternal grandparents were houseguests of the family and occupied a “suite” of sorts arranged in the first-floor area, where the Annex earlier joined. This space was repurposed by the Greens, with its own bath and access to a section of the front porch receiving glass-enclosure. “It is told that Mr. Green gave a large ledger, found in the home’s attic, containing Aurora Cottage’s Inn records to a Thurmont resident for historic keeping. The whereabouts of this ledger 49 years later is a mystery but remains an artifact Mrs. Cochran would greatly like the opportunity to view.”

White and trimmed with green at the time of purchase, the most apparent change made by Jim and Debbie Cochran is the colors accentuating the home. Aurora’s palette was realized after Debbie sketched the home and colored in photocopies of her drawing to depict various color schemes using colored pencils matched to paint swatches. The exterior grandeur of the Cochran’s home continues inside where a fireplace opposes the front door; a handsome stairway travels up the rightward wall; and a fine, baby-grand piano floats among floor to ceiling windows. Throughout their thirty years at Aurora, Jim’s vintage Triumph roadster has fittingly posed out front in the circular drive; Debbie haunted the porch as a witch on many an All Hallows Eve; and children, Wes and Wendy, have been seen coming and going from Catoctin High, on college breaks, and now as adults continuing to frequent their childhood home.

Aurora Cottage, as a whole and a house divided, has boarded thousands of guests, hosted splendid soirees, and been the backdrop to the best and least-desirable memories of changing residents. Sallie Boyce’s 513 E. Main St. home stood complete only a relative moment before the Annex was added to its original form. Residing for the last 105 years 100 feet apart only a brief thirteen years united the pair prior to the Annex’s separation to 601 E. Main Street. New ownership and recent improvements leave many hopeful that the Annex will return from prolonged neglect and periods of vacancy (during which one man reserved squatter’s rights for a time) to sustain its status as joint-shareholder of Aurora Cottage’s colorful history. Fortunate that both remain, neither home can be more fairly addressed “Aurora Cottage” than the other although the San Franciscan-colors and tin-fashioned, faux terra-cotta-tile roof of the Cochran’s 513 residence more familiarly claims the moniker, ushering in day’s first light like a shimmer of magic on the foothills of the mountain.

The Cochran Family home on Thurmont’s East Main Street, absent the Annex, once affixed at the home’s right side is presented today in nearly the original vision of Sallie K. Boyce.