The beloved Twigs and Teacups is back open at 111 S. Cross Street just in time for the holidays.

The popular gift shop known for its quirky array of treasures had been temporarily moved to High Street while renovations took place.

For Paul, Jayne, and daughter Erin Heckles, it has been a year of decisions, toil, and patience as they and their building team headed by Taylor Loughry Construction gutted the 1922 brick building, removing the warren of unused second-floor offices and opening up the ceiling to its original rafter structure.

“We’ve been kind of the Three Musketeers through thick and thin, and we are just happy to share this with you,” Paul Heckles said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Originally built by the Gill brothers for their ice cream factory, Heckles notes that the original plan called for the second floor to remain open for community dances and other social events. This tradition continued for 25 years or more. Today it has been opened as their second-floor gift display area, complete with an elevator.

After the Gill brothers, a succession of owners used the space for various businesses until 1997, when April Marshall moved her small Twigs and Teacups gift shop into the building from across the street.

“It was April who brought together Twigs and Teacups and this location and created a cherished home away from home in Chestertown for almost three generations.”

The Spy met with the Heckles last week to talk about their year renovating the building and continuing the legacy of one of the region’s most charming gift shops.

The Heckles’ original intention was only to renovate the front of the building. “It was like peeling an onion,” Heckles says. One thing led to another until the structure was down to its shell.

A year later, the newly designed front entrance opens into the new Twigs and Teacups, and while you might be amazed by the dramatic change, you will still feel its intimacy and find that unique gift for that birthday party you almost forgot.

This video is approximately six minutes in length. To find out more about Twigs and Teacups please go here.

Many of us have leaped down the genealogical rabbit hole as rainy-day detectives searching for clues to identify our forebears, only to be hampered by duplicate names, confusing archives, and contradictory family stories.

For author Edward Ball, an investigation into the Ball family history led to a National Book Award for his 1998 Slaves in the family, additional recognition for his current book, Life of a Klansman, along with his current position as Patrick Henry Fellow at Starr Center for the American Experience at Washington College where he is at work on his third title about other members of the Ball family.

The Ball family history harkens back to the rice plantations of 17th-century Charleston, South Carolina. Up to the Civil War, six generations of the Ball family enslaved more than 4,000 people on more than a dozen plantations.

After hearing much about his ancestors during Edward’s childhood, complete with visits with his father to the vestiges of some of the old family houses, the young writer began to look closer at his legacy and ask questions that would change the trajectory of his life: who were these individual humans that had been enslaved?

Determined to challenge the silence shrouding the topic in his family, Ball set off on an investigation that would send him into a three-year search through thousands of Ball family records across the country to archives and oral histories, and even to Africa.

Eschewing the idea of “guilt of the past,” Ball sought to demythologize the family’s self-identification as compassionate overseers, saying in a New York Times article by Drew Faust that “Rather than responsible, I felt accountable for what had happened, called on to try to explain it.”

Along with documenting the white slave-owning family, the centerpiece of that accounting became a search for descendants of the Ball family enslaved people. Often, living descendants were unaware of their lineage, while others added to the historical narrative from family oral traditions linking them to one of the Ball Plantations.

In his 2020 book Life of Klansman, Edward Ball explores the matrilineal side of his family and another great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne of New Orleans. Lecorgne, a Confederate discharged for misconduct, was the Klansman in the family and a primary resident evil during the white supremacy backlash to Reconstruction’s promise of rights to formerly enslaved people as Southern states moved into the Jim Crow era.

Ball says that a series of horrific murders—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Dylan Roof—compelled him to look at Lecorgne through the lens of contextual post-Civil War history to see if he could identify and confront the roots of white authority and privilege.

Ball sees ex-Confederate Lecorgne as part of the virulent strain of white supremacy that rose during the Reconstruction and still echoes sometimes loudly, sometimes as inaudible as a rattlesnake in repose, waking to bite us in your everyday lives. Readers will be hard-pressed to find a difference between the life of Klansman Constant Lecorgne and the white identity movements of today.

Katy Shenk at the Starr Center adds, “We’re delighted to have a writer of Edward’s stature here in residence, whose work speaks to contemporary concerns while chronicling the past. Already, he has embraced life in Chestertown to the fullest and is a valued member of the Starr Center and Washington College community.”

The Spy sat down with Edward Ball to talk about his extraordinary investigation into the Ball family, Constant Lecorgne, and what accounting for the past can mean for us today.

This video is approximately fourteen minutes in length. More about the Starr Center for the Study of the American experience may be found here.

By the time Andrew Hamilton reached the Eastern Shore in 1708, Chestertown was well on the way to becoming a prosperous Royal Port, just two years after its founding.

For a 32-year-old attorney, the era was a rich mine of opportunities: land and shipping contracts, tobacco, town charters, boundary disputes, all the growing pains of a wealthy merchant class town.

Hamilton, a Scottish immigrant, first landed in the Virginia colonies, where he learned law and taught classics while building his reputation as a brilliant lawyer. It took him little time to establish a law practice in Chestertown after purchasing the 600-acre farm “Henberry,” an area we know as the town of Millington while keeping property—and clients— in Virginia.

1712 was a watershed year for the attorney. He left for England and joined Gray’s Inn, one of London’s prominent societies for barristers. The society’s membership included Francis Bacon, and William Cecil, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and proponent for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

Hamilton was admitted to the Bar, a necessary accreditation for practicing law in Britain. That same year William Penn hired Hamilton in a replevin case whereby the seized goods, in this case property, were returned to the owner until the case outcome. Penn was impressed with the colonial barrister, and Hamilton would go on in Penn’s service when he returned to Pennsylvania to tend to his friend’s many business interests.

For the next 17 years, Hamilton practiced law in Pennsylvania, but it would be a New York case in 1730 that would anchor his legacy as “The Philadelphia Lawyer.”

At that time, New York’s governor was William Cosby, a greedy, jealous, petty tyrant who lived up to one historian’s assessment of colonial governors as “often being members of aristocratic families whose personal morals, or whose incompetence, were such that it was impossible to employ them nearer home.” Cosby had already fired the Chief Justice of New York for deciding a case against him and justified his decision in the New York Weekly Journal, printed by one of two printers in the colonies, John Peter Zenger.

Scathing satires and controversial editorials written under pseudonyms were fired back at Cosby. Cosby had none of it and had Zenger arrested on charges of seditious libel, a holdover from Henry VIII’s Privy Counselors of Star Chamber. Dare to criticize authority with the truth, go to prison. Zenger spent ten months in prison awaiting trial, never revealing the authors of the editorials and satires. At the same time, his wife kept the press running, only missing one edition of the paper.

Cosby used the State Supreme Court, minus the Chief Justice he fired, had two attorneys defending Zenger disbarred, and appointed a pro-Cosby public attorney to the printer.

Things took a Perry Mason turn. Zenger’s remaining attorneys arranged for Andrew Hamilton, “the lawyer from Philadelphia,” to take over the defense. Ne accepted the job for no fee.

What happened next planted the idea of freedom of the press. 

Hamilton addressed the jury attending the trial, admitting that Zenger had printed the editorials, but the Crown would be required to prove that they were false statements.

“The question before the Court and you, Gentlemen of the jury, is not of small or private concern. It is not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty.”

In other words, the truth is the best defense against libel. “The laws of our country have given us a right to liberty of both exposing and opposing arbitrary power (in these parts of the world at least) by speaking and writing truth,” he said.

The judge, however, ordered the jury to dismiss Hamilton’s plea, adhere to the current laws of sedition and convict Zenger for printing the editorials. 

The jury, convinced by Hamilton to judge the law of the case rather than Zenger’s action as a printer, took ten minutes to return a “not guilty” verdict. It became one of the most famous cases of a jury nullifying a standing law.

Decades later, one of the Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris, wrote that the case was “the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America!” His grandfather was the judge dismissed by Cosby at the outset of the Zenger trial.

In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court cited the Zenger case in its landmark free-press decision of New York Times v. Sullivan, a dispute over a full-page ad by supporters of Dr. Martin Luther King. The ad criticized southern officials for violating the rights of African Americans. The Court said that the Zenger case showed Americans valued the right to complain about the government and their leaders.

If it weren’t enough for Hamilton to have planted the seeds for the First Amendment of the Constitution, the “Lawyer from Philadelphia” had another interest: architecture. Look no further than his design for a building in Philadelphia that would come to be known as Independence Hall, the site of the 1787 Convention that created the United States Constitution.

“Truth does not matter” is not a new dictum. It’s an age-old flag hoisted by kings, authoritarians, and insurrectionists now flaunted in a post-factual era of fake news, alternative facts, and the push to exhaust critical thinking. Whether or not we have the spirit and ability of Alexander Hamilton to reset the guardrails for the truth to matter remains to be seen.