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Looking Back

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T h e Y e a r i s…1 9 2 8

by James Rada, Jr.

She Wa s the F i r s t L ine in Fire Defense

Photo Courtesy of findagrave.com.

Alice Willard knew all about struggling to get by. The Foxville resident was a 30-year-old single mother of an 11-year-old son, living in a rural area. Even though she had family who could help watch her son, Atley, Alice still needed to earn a living to support the both of them.

In April 1928, she became the only female “lookout” in Maryland. C. Cyril Klein, the district forester for Western Maryland, appointed her the lookout for the Foxville fire tower. A lifelong resident of Foxville who lived in a house her father built the year she was born, Alice knew the area she was to watch over.

“She went on duty Wednesday [April 4] and for the next eight weeks, until about June 1, she will occupy a small room at the top of a 60-foot steel tower in the heart of the Catoctin mountains, about 12 hours a day, on the lookout for mountain fires,” the Frederick Post reported.

Her pay for this job was $60 a month (about $925 in today’s dollars). It was a low-paying job, even among common laborers at the time, but it helped pay her bills.

From the fire tower, Alice had a 12-mile view in every direction.

“At the first indication of fire or smoke, she will telephone to the nearest warden, who in turn will investigate the fire. If it is of a threatening nature, a force sufficient to combat the flames will be summoned and efforts will not be relaxed until the blaze is extinguished,” the Frederick Post reported.

She had experience with the job. She had substituted when her brother needed time off from the job years earlier.

“While she will be some distance from the nearest house, Mr. Klein said she is courageous and he added that she knows how to shoot,” the newspaper reported.

Not only was Alice the only female lookout in Maryland at the time, she was the first woman put in charge of a fire tower in the state. Women had done the work before, but only as a substitute or an assistant.

She said of her experience years later in a Frederick News Post article, “Indeed there were lots of fires! And no lightning ever set those fires. Men set fires! Tossing a cigarette or some other fool thing, that’s what done it. Many’s the fire that was set on purpose, too. Did you know that? I’ll tell you just why! They’d set fires to burn off a clearing in the woods. Then the huckleberries would grow up thick in the burned out places. Huckleberries were a big cash crop here in those days. Many a berry’s been picked and sold for three cents a quart. Every child on the mountain’s picked huckleberries at one time or other.”

In 1930, she was mentioned in an article talking about a rash of fires on Catoctin and South mountains. She had been the first lookout to identify some of them.

She was named an assistant fire warden in 1931.

In 1933, she had a near-fatal encounter with a copperhead that the Hagerstown Morning Herald said she handled with “remarkable coolness and bravery.” She was burning brush while on the job when the snake bit her above the ankle. “She cut open the wound and applied a tourniquet to stop the circulation of blood, then walked to a neighbor’s house, where she secured medical attention.”

She left her job with the State of Maryland in 1934.

The Frederick News noted in 1971 that Alice was still driving a tractor, chopping wood, farming, feeding livestock, keeping house, quilting, sewing clothes, baking, and canning at age 76.

She was also living alone. She had never married, and her son had died from cancer in 1962 at 45 years of age.

“She values her privacy, resents any encroachment upon her land or her rights, and is the personification of the attitudes and traditions of the mountain folk for over two centuries,” Ann Burnside Love wrote for the Frederick News.

Alice died in 1993, a week before her 98th birthday. She is buried in the Mt. Moriah Lutheran Church cemetery.

Looking Back

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The Year is…1918

by James Rada, Jr.

The Pandemic to End All Pandemics — Part 3

Spanish Flu rampaged through Frederick County and the world in the fall of 1918. During October 1918, the State of Maryland shut down public venues and businesses, and those places that could still open had trouble finding healthy workers.

On October 11, the Frederick Post reported that 50 people in the county had died from the flu; however, this seems too low just looking at the daily numbers it was reporting. The newspaper noted on October 12, “There are homes in this city where entire families are ill and bed-ridden with influenza and nobody to help care for them.”

County Health Officer T. C. Routson and the Red Cross called on student nurses to help care for the sick. They only had mixed success because many young women were afraid to help. Afterall, they didn’t want to catch the flu themselves.

On October 14, the Frederick Post tried a good news, bad news thing. New cases of the flu had “slumped.” Yea! However, more people who already had the flu were dying.

By October 17, Mount St. Mary’s College alone had 160 students and faculty sick with the flu, after first appearing on campus the previous week. Two Daughters of Charity were on the campus trying to help, but it wasn’t enough. The situation at the college was so serious that Monsignor Bradley, president of the college, asked Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower at Camp Colt in Gettysburg for medical assistance. The camp was experiencing its own problems with the flu, but Eisenhower did send two doctors to help. The doctors placed the college under military quarantine, and no one was allowed off the grounds.

The Mountaineer noted, “In consequence of this quarantine, all students who were free from any sign of the disease were sent to their homes early in December and did not return until January was well advanced.”

With only eight deaths on the 17th, the Frederick Post declared that the flu was “waning.” It noted in the article that the death rate was lower, but you don’t see the higher death rates in the paper except for the one instance. The paper reported on October 18, “With only four deaths yesterday, the average death rate per day, which is usually about nine or ten, has been cut down less than half.”

A week later, the newspaper reported that there had only been two flu deaths in the county the previous day. “This is the smallest number of victims for a single day since the influenza became an epidemic.” Sadly, the doctor in charge of the main Red Cross hospital had fallen victim to the flu and died.

The Perfect Storm

Many communities were already shorthanded medically because doctors had been drafted to serve in WWI. Then, along came the flu, which intensified by the shortage, making many of the remaining doctors sick at a time when the workload was drastically increasing. The remaining doctors found themselves working longer hours with contagious people. This would wear them down and make them susceptible to flu and the process would repeat.

One example of this can be seen with Dr. Brown and Dr. Kuhlman in Jefferson. They had 30 patients sick with the flu, but they were sick themselves and bedridden. Dr. Brown tried to help his patients over the phone without much luck.

Routson noted that Thurmont’s efforts to fight the flu were hampered because all of the doctors there were sick with the flu. At its peak, Thurmont doctors were seeing 50 to 60 patients a day.

Other professions faced similar problems. An ad in the Frederick Post urged residents not to make unnecessary phone calls. “The influenza epidemic had brought a heavy overload of calls to our wires. It has caused a serious shortage in our operating force. Calls other than those concerning important government work, and those compelled by the epidemic, embarrass the country’s war program and place lives in jeopardy.”

Even newspaper delivery was affected because many of the carriers were sickened with the flu. In Brunswick, rail service was crippled because “about half of the population has the flu,” according to the Frederick Post.

The Third Wave

Halloween passed on October 31 without any celebration.

Maryland listed its closure order on November 4. There was a resurgence of the flu in December in Washington County, but it didn’t kill anyone. Parts of Frederick County also saw a resurgence. The Catoctin Clarion in late December reported, “Influenza, a disease dreaded by a big majority of people, is not disappearing very rapidly at this time, the number of cases increasing rather than decreasing in various communities.”

The third wave of Spanish Flu hit particularly hard in the Fairfield, Pennsylvania, area, as well as the eastern part of the county. One doctor was quoted in the Star and Sentinel as saying, “I have just come from four homes. Three or four people were sick in every one of them. One of the families had both parents and the two children ill. I have another family in which there were six cases.”

Reports said the second outbreak wasn’t as pervasive, but it could still be deadly. This is typical of locations where there was a third outbreak.

Christmas 1918 was somber. A lot of people had lost someone they knew to the flu. Officials urged people to do their shopping early when fewer people would be in the stores. Church Christmas programs were canceled for fear of having too many people in a confined space.

Determining Impact

Maryland conducted a door-to-door survey in March 1919 in Baltimore, Cumberland, Lonaconing, Frederick, Salisbury, and three rural districts in Frederick, Washington, and Wicomico counties. The information is useful, but not conclusive, something that the survey noted when it acknowledged some of the shortfalls.

Although deaths in Maryland didn’t exceed births in 1918, it came close with 32,183 deaths, which was about 10,000 more than five years in either direction. The death rate was 2,257 per 100,000 or about 700 more than the years on either side. No other year from 1902 to the present day comes close.

The U.S. Census also reported that the decade between 1910 and 1920 is the only decade since 1900 that Frederick County lost population, to which Spanish Flu certainly contributed.

Looking at the Maryland survey, newspaper reports, surrounding county information, and county reports, it appears about 350 people or .7 percent of the county’s population died from the flu. However, this might be underestimated because it is known that during the pandemic’s peak, some doctors were so overwhelmed that they couldn’t fill out death certificates until days later, sometimes leaving the cause of death blank.

What is known is that Spanish Flu was the worst disease to hit Frederick County.

Employees needed to wear facemasks while at work during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.

The 39th Regiment on its way to France, marching through Seattle, Washington. The Seattle Chapter of the Red Cross made masks for them. 

Looking Back-1915

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A Thurmont Family’s Dangerous Ride on the National Road

On June 1, 1915, the Brenamans drove their Ford along the National Road, which had passed its first century of service a few years before. The road had improved a lot since the days of it being a graded dirt path, but it was still a rough ride.

William and his wife, Cora, rode up front as they drove home to Thurmont from Baltimore. William was a cigar salesman, who had previously lived in Baltimore and still had many family members living in the city. Two-year-old Omar sat in his mother’s lap. He didn’t mind the rough ride. He enjoyed seeing the landscape pass by.

The car started to slide. Suddenly, a rear tire blew out while the family was in Howard County. The back corner of the car dropped and rolled along the hub, which was ripped apart by the weight of the car pressing it against the road surface.

“The accident was caused by the machine skidding on the slippery road, which had just been oiled a few hours previously,” The Frederick Post reported. “The front wheel broke off (left rear wheel we are told) and the car turned turtle into a yard of a farmer.”

Residents who lived nearby heard the crash and rushed to the scene of the accident. They heard the Brenamans crying and yelling and lifted the car off of them. William was badly bruised across his thighs, and he had cuts on his head. Sarah was bruised on one of her legs. Omar was worse off.

“The skull of the child was fractured and the side of its head laid open,” The Frederick Post reported.

Dr. John Hebb was one of the residents who heard the crash and came to see what had happened. He treated Omar and wrapped the child’s head so that he could be taken to the Frederick City Hospital.

Doctors at the hospital rushed the boy into an operating room and worked on him for over an hour before admitting nothing could be done to save Omar’s life. One doctor said it was remarkable that Omar had survived as long as he did.

Omar’s 17-year-old brother, Charles, was attending Class Day at the Thurmont Town Hall when he was told the news. L. R. Waesche took him to Frederick to meet his family. Two other Brenaman boys, Cheston, who was 14, and Stuart, who was 8, stayed home to await news. Their sister, 20-year-old Sarah, was notified of the accident where she was staying with family in Baltimore.

The Brenaman Family left for Baltimore on the following day to take Omar to Loudon Park Cemetery for burial in a family lot.

“The accident was a shock to the community,” the Catoctin Clarion reported.

Photo shows a stretch of the National Road in Maryland during the early 20th century.

Looking Back – 1915 — The Wreck of the Blue Mountain Express, Part 3

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Note: This is the third of three articles about the wreck of the Blue Mountain Express between Thurmont and Sabillasville in 1915.

by James Rada, Jr.

On June 25, 1915, the Blue Mountain Express bound for Hagerstown crashed head-on with a mail train coming east from Hagerstown, crumpling the two engines and sending a baggage car off the bridge where the wreck occurred and into the ravine below. Coleman Cook, engineer; Luther Hull, fireman; J. R. Hayes, fireman; Mrs. W. C. Chipchase, Baltimore; and Walter Chipchase, Baltimore, all died in the crash. Twelve others suffered serious injuries.

Edgar Bloom, a dispatcher for the Western Maryland Railroad, took responsibility for mixing up the right-of-way orders issued from Hagerstown that had caused the crash.

What if there was another contributing factor in the accident that no one realized because it had happened months earlier?

William H. Webb was a sixty-five-year-old watchman on the bridges west of Thurmont. Each day, he would walk to his shanty next to the bridges from his home on Kelbaugh Road. Every day, his wife, Sarah, would have one of their children or grandchildren take William his lunch.

“As watchman of those bridges, Mr. Webb’s position was an important one. The safety of many passengers and trains depended upon his watchfulness during the hours of the night. He walked those bridges at regular intervals during all hours of the night,” the Frederick Post reported.

By 1915, he’d been an employee of the Western Maryland Railroad for thirty-five years. His job was isolated, but he enjoyed it.

Webb was Roger Troxell’s great-grandfather. According to stories that his mother told him, “One of the children or grandchildren took him his lunch one day. It was pouring down rain and he found him (Webb) sitting on the railing holding his umbrella, and he was dead.”

This differs from the accounts in the Frederick Post and Catoctin Clarion. They reported that the day watchman had found William lying beside the cross-tie block on February 24, 1915.

“When found his overcoat was drawn up over his shoulders, and a raised umbrella lay beside him,” the Frederick Post reported.

The Catoctin Clarion explained that it appeared as if Webb had come east from his shack, across the iron bridge to “signal” the Fast Mail train going west soon after 6 o’clock, and while walking to his post east of the bridge was stricken with heart trouble and died.

The day watchman telephoned to Thurmont and Dr. Morris Birely, and Magistrate E. E. Black came out to the bridges to examine the body. No marks were found on it, and Birely said that heart failure was the cause of death.

Although this was months before the summer wreck, there’s no indication that another watchman was hired to replace Webb. Also, one of the trains that wrecked was the fast mail train that Webb usually signaled.

Had Webb still been alive and on the job, he may have been able to signal the trains to stop before they wrecked on the bridges. Bloom may also have been able to call the shanty directly about the mix-up, rather than telegraphing a message to the Western Maryland Railroad Station in Thurmont in the hopes to stop the train before it left the station.

William H. Webb

The Founder of Boys Town Returns to the Town that Gave Him His Start

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style=”text-align: left;”>                                                                                                                 1945

by James Rada, Jr.

The second of his back-to-back Best Actor Oscars that the legendary Spencer Tracy won was for his role in the 1938 movie Boys Town. He played the role of Father Edward Flanagan, the Catholic priest who founded the pioneering boys’ home in Nebraska. The boys’ home is credited for giving many disadvantaged youths a better life and helping them through their turbulent childhood.

Flanagan was a graduate of Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, and he also experienced some struggles while there.

During his first day on campus, a schoolmate pushed him into St. Anthony’s Lake.

“I learned to swim because I had to,” Flanagan told the Frederick Post in a 1945 interview. He later credited that experience, along with the forced swimming lessons, for allowing him to save his father from drowning on a fishing trip at age seventy-five.

His second day on campus was just as noteworthy. “When a schoolmate challenged him to a fight in the gym, the youngster from Ireland proved himself a willing mixer. The battle lasted four hours,” the Frederick Post reported. His opponent spent the next week in bed. “I was in worse shape than he was and the only reason I didn’t go to bed, too, was because I was new in this country and too green to know that I should have,” Flanagan told the newspaper.

Luckily, most of his time at the Mount was not so exciting. He applied himself to his studies and developed a focused concentration on his work that would help him later in life.
Flanagan’s biographers have noted that Flanagan enjoyed his time in Emmitsburg and his frequent visits to his alma mater bear this out. He sang with the glee club and chapel choir and was elected to the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Frederick News also noted in a 1982 article that Flanagan was considered the best handball player on campus.

When he graduated in 1906 as the youngest in his class, he was recognized for his distinguished study in Latin and Greek and for a speech called “The Gaelic Revival,” during the college elocution contest.

His one regret apparently was that he didn’t get into any trouble. According to the Frederick News, it was a tradition at the time that a boy had to get in trouble with the administration at least once during his time at the Mount to be considered a true “Mountaineer.” “Perhaps I should have misbehaved a little,” Flanagan was quoted in one of his biographies.

He was granted a Master’s Degree from the Mount in 1911, while he was working in Austria. It was during this time overseas in Austria and Rome when he was also ordained a priest.

When he returned to the United States in 1913, he worked in Omaha as the assistant pastor at St. Patrick’s and as the proprietor of the Workingmen’s Hotel, which was temporary housing for vagrants. Seeing these men, Flanagan began wondering if they would have led different lives if they had been helped as boys.

This led to his idea of opening a home for boys in 1917. The Boys’ Industrial Home began with only five boys. It was more than just an orphanage, it was a home for boys that also used new parenting methods to raise and educate the boys so that they would be productive adults. As it grew in size, it was renamed Boys’ Town.

While the Spencer Tracy film was great PR for the organization, the film actually caused cutbacks in donations. “Viewers apparently made the judgement that if Boys’ Town could survive all the crises contained in the film, Flanagan and his troops might then withstand anything else that might happen,” according to the Frederick News.

In 1938, Mount St. Mary’s awarded Flanagan an honorary Doctor of Laws in recognition of his work at Boys’ Town.
Flanagan died in 1948 at the age of fifty-two.

“To have actually lived Flanagan is perhaps too much the perpetrator of the happy ending, too strong the personification of the American dream come true,” the Frederick News noted.
20160607_112320                                                                                                                                                                Father Edward Flanagan