What better place to study 19th-century English Romantic literature than to immerse oneself for a few summer weeks in England’s northwest Lake District, wake to a damp shawl of mist over glacial ribbon lakes and hike the rugged mountains while discussing Wordsworth and Coleridge?

Each summer for twenty years, Washington College Professor Emeritus Dr. Richard Gillin, his wife Barbara, and a dozen students from Washington College did just that as part of the Kiplin Hall program they co-founded and chaired.

The learning project’s mission was to connect “literature and landscape” using the our-hundred-year-old ancestral estate of Lord Calvert, whose son Cecil Calvert founded one of Maryland’s first settlements in the 1600s as a haven for persecuted Catholics. 

Each day, the Gillins and students explored the surrounding countryside of North Yorkshire and West Cork, Ireland, an experience he would later describe in his book A Guide to Hiking the Liberal Arts as “an explanation of what the liberal arts are and how learning history, art, philosophy, literature are so important It’s not a matter of collecting numbers or gathering simple facts. It demands experience, time, and contemplation.

Princeton Review selected A Guide to Hiking the Liberal Arts as one of its 2020 Best 300 books. Publisher Robert Frank wrote that the book is a tribute to the extraordinary dedication of America’s best undergraduate college professors “and the vitally important role they play in our culture, and our democracy.

The Spy chatted with Dr. Gillin to talk about how the Kiplin Hall project came about and his reflections on why experiences like the summer learning tours are fundamental to a liberal arts education. 

This video is approximately six minutes in length. The Bookplate bookstore’s ongoing Authors & Oysters series will feature Dr. Gillin at 6 pm. Wednesday, January 8 at the Retriever Bar at 337 ½ High Street. The event is free and open to the public.

The old joke about consultants is that they ask for a client’s watch to tell them what time it is. This attempt at humor does accurately describing the reality that many answers companies seek are actually in plain view. But what it fails to note is that many of those clients simply don’t have the expertise or staff to notice them in the first place.

Historically, these clients have been corporations and other large institutions, but increasingly small towns are turning to outside advisors to help them manage such challenges are tourism, economic development, affordable housing and the like. Lacking the internal resources to identify unique opportunities, as well as funding sources to pay for those initiatives, these tiny municipalities are increasingly breaking from their “do-it-yourself” problem-solving approach and are bringing in real pros to analyse those issues and develop thoughtful action plans to address them.

In the case of Mid-Shore towns, it would be hard to find more capable or well-known outsiders than Ross Benincasa & Sam Shoge, the partners of the newly-formed Roads and Rivers Consulting firm based in Easton.

Active Talbot County residents will immediately recognize both men. Before starting on his own, Ross had been the highly-regarded executive director of Discover Easton at a time when Sam was serving as the economic development coordinator for the County. Benincasa led the effort of Talbot County’s first Arts & Entertainment District during his tenure and has remained an active board member of Chesapeake Music and Talbot Interfaith Shelter. The Elizabethtown College graduate also serves as an advisor at the innovative SVN Miller Commercial Real Estate firm, focusing on infill development projects.

And Kent County citizens have known Sam since he grew up in Chestertown and later when he was a member of Washington College’s admissions office just after graduating from Elon College and more recently as the former director of the Kent County Chamber of Commerce and member of the Chestertown Town Council.

The Spy asked Ross and Sam to stop by the Spy studio earlier this month to talk about this new partnership and why small towns and organizations benefit from having a new set of eyes look at their structural challenges.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information on River and Roads Consulting please go here.

Executive Director of RiverArts wasn’t on Chris Sade’s bingo card for mid-2022, but lucky for the Chestertown community, here we are.

Sade and his wife Marianne discovered Chestertown in 2015 during a visit to explore a job opportunity for Marianne at Washington College Library. Months later, accepting the job, the couple made the leap of faith and moved to town.

Fast forward to July 2002 and RiverArts’s search for a new executive director to steer one of the community’s paramount arts organizations into 2023 and beyond. Enter Chris Sade.

Chris brings 35 years of experience in the art world as the founder of a national transportation company in Washington DC that would cater to museums and organizations throughout the country.

“In 1996 we sold it to a firm it was based in DC and from there I ended up working with them for nearly 20 years helping them expand their business and provide services to museums such as packing, storage, transportation, and a conservation lab to help with inventories,” Sade says.

Sade says his role was to find new work for the company and tapped into the many connections he’d made over the years.

“I’ve been to about every major museum in the United States and some others around the world so I got to know people and they got to know me because trust is a large issue and allowing somebody to walk in and take care and custody of their valuable work.”

Connecting is the key, Sade says, and he hopes to expand his network of friends in Kent County to promote RiverArts mission to support artists, offer programming, arts and crafts shows, and arts education to the community.

Sade’s first project will redesign RiverArts’s floorspace by moving the gift area into a newly enhanced adjacent gallery space rather than combining it with the main gallery. Identifying the space as a standalone gift shop will help with retail sales, the foundational revenue that supports the organization. A grand opening for the gift shop will be in February.

The Clay Studio and Arts Education Center will hold a Grand-Re-Opening January 6 at 204 High St. (First Friday) from 5-7 pm, Clay Studio posting may now be found on RiverArts Facebook page, here.

The Spy sat down with Chris Sade last week to discuss his vision for 2023.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. To join RiverArts or volunteer, see their website here.

The last time the Spy interviewed Wendy Palmer was documenting the bittersweet moment when she and her partner, Gretchen Gordon, stepped down as the owners of the very popular Oxford restaurant Latitude 38 in May of this year. 

What we didn’t realize at the time was how far back Wendy’s relationship goes with the Easton Family YMCA. It turns out it went back decades, but in the last five years, as both director of operations and promoted to associate director of the two-campus Y program in Easton. And that relationship changed once again when it was announced in October that she would be the new executive director of one of the YMCA of the Chesapeake’s flagship programs. 

In her first interview with the Spy in her new position, she documents how well the Easton programs have come back from the challenging days of COVID, the major expansion to accommodate the growing popularity of Pickleball, the YMCA’s highly successful fitness programs for those suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and a renovated wellness center at the Peachblossom campus. 

This video is approximately minutes in length. For more information about the Easton Family YMCA please go here.

For Waterfowl Festival president Ken Miller and his colleagues on its board of directors, their mission is simple; help celebrate the unique culture of the Chesapeake and raise money to protect it.

While it is true that the majority of the Board’s work is focused on the smooth operation of a three-day festival now in its 51st year, Waterfowl’s real business is to work with local conservation organizations, artists, artisans, hunters, and watermen to help educate the public on how rare and exceptional life is for those fortunate to live on the Eastern Shore.

Much of this effort has historically gone into land protection. Close to $6 million has been raised and donated to the cause of land protection on the Shore. And more recently, it has started a scholarship fund for young people eager to become leaders in the conservation movement.

But the real challenge for the organization happens every year in the streets and buildings of downtown Easton. Part of the labor is finding sponsorships and attracting the best waterfowl artists and artisans, but more importantly, to continue to creatively engage the thousands of families who attend with programming for all ages.

In Ken’s case, a boyhood in rural New Jersey was where his conservation passion began. Growing up in a small town in the farm country of that state, Ken started hunting as a kid, primarily ducks and muskrats, which led him to a love for duck carving during his teens. And from then on, Miller has always found a way to be part of the culture.

While his real job in life has been a succession of leading insurance companies, followed by a successful role as an entrepreneur in private equity finance, Ken Miller remained a lifelong hunter but has also engaged in land use and conservation. From chairing Morristown’s Open Space Committee to installing living shorelines at his family’s now permanent home on Broad Creek in Talbot County, Ken and his wife, Julia, have been active participants in ecological preservation.

The most recent example has been Ken’s work with the Waterfowl Festival. A Board member for years, he recently agreed to serve as president for a one-year term. The Spy sat down with him last week to talk about the Festival (which starts this weekend), the organization’s mission, and some of the challenges Waterfowl Festival faces as it enters its sixth decade.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For information and advance tickets please go here.

After moving to St. Michaels after a long and successful law career, Jeff McGuiness set out to catch up on many things he had missed out on during his professional life. The first was to return to his passion for photography which he abandoned after serving as an Air Force photographer to enter law school. The other was catching up on his reading, beginning with David Blight’s award-winning biography of Frederick Douglass a few years back.

Like many in America,  McGuiness was profoundly moved by Blight’s portrait of Douglass, including passages devoted to the formerly enslaved person’s life in Talbot County, some of which occurred just a stone’s throw away from his home. But it also started to occur to Jeff that what Douglass had literally seen two hundred years ago could still be seen just outside his door in the 21st Century. Be it the Miles River, the historic estate where he was enslaved, or an old-growth forest down the street, those fields of vision were still there. More importantly, those images could be captured and synchronized to Douglass’s own words, so brilliantly documented in his three autobiographies about his life on the Mid-Shore.

The intersection of photography, history, and sense of place started Jeff McGuiness on a five-year journey to connect all three into a new book, Bear Me Into Freedom, which will be released next week. The photographer came by the Spy studio last week to discuss the project.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about Bear Me Into Freedom please go here.

Frederick Douglass Day in Talbot County is set for Saturday, September 24. It will begin with hundreds parading from Easton Middle School to the County Courthouse, a walk that will commemorate the experiences and achievements of the county’s most famous native son. It will also remind us of a walk 198 years earlier that involved just two people—six-year-old Frederick Bailey and his grandmother Betsey.

In August of 1824, Frederick Bailey, who would become Frederick Douglass, was being taken by his grandmother from the cabin that he had grown up in along Tuckahoe Creek to the Lloyd Plantation at Wye House twelve miles away. Betsey Bailey had nine daughters and at least twenty-five grandchildren, all enslaved. After their birth, many of the grandchildren grew up under her care, but with so many coming along, those reaching the age of six or seven would have to be moved out of her cabin to make way for the newcomers. Typically, they would be transferred to the home of their enslaver, Aaron Anthony. He was the chief overseer of the thirteen farms that were part of the Lloyd empire and lived on the Wye House grounds.

Frederick’s walk to Wye House was probably the first traumatic experience of a life that would be filled with traumas. Frederick rarely saw his mother, and now he was leaving the warmth of his grandmother’s care to be placed in what was, among other things, an orphanage for enslaved youth. But the experience was not just distressing for him. It must have been far more so for his grandmother who saw Frederick as the very special person he was and was fully aware of the potential path before him. Not only might she never see her grandson again, Betsey Bailey had no idea where a life of bondage and its attendant violence might eventually take him.

To observe this important event in Douglass’s life, Brie Wooden and her five-year-old son Keegan were invited to walk the Wye House grounds and imagine what Frederick and Betsey were thinking at the time. I was asked to photograph their meditation.

Looking at the resulting images, we can glimpse what may have been going in the minds of Frederick and Betsey. “The liability to be separated from my grandmother, seldom or never to see her again, haunted me,” Douglass wrote in one of his autobiographies. He remembered his “grandmamma” as “looking sad. She was soon to lose another object of affection, as she had lost many before.” 

Frederick recalled that when he and his grandmother reached Wye plantation that August day, “Great houses loomed up in different directions, and a great many men and women were at work in the fields. All this hurry, noise, and singing was very different from the stillness of Tuckahoe.” Young Frederick must have stood there transfixed by the spectacle, gazing at the new world he was entering, wondering how his life would be changing.

As Frederick neared the end of the walk, he looked up at his grandmother. “I knew she was unhappy, and the shadow fell from her brow on me, though I knew not the cause.” 

Frederick Bailey would return to Wye House as Frederick Douglass in 1881 when he was 63, and this time not on foot. He was transported there by the United States Revenue Cutter Guthrie that docked at the farm’s landing. In those intervening 57 years, Frederick Douglass had become a fixture in America’s history, one of the most consequential figures of the nineteenth century. He was invited by members of the Lloyd family into “the Great House” and graciously entertained. The shadow that had fallen from his grandmother’s brow so many years earlier had been obliterated by the brilliance of his works during the intervening half century. “To say that our reception was every way gratifying is but a feeble expression of the feeling of each and all of us,” Douglass penned.

Frederick Douglass Day will be held on Saturday, September 24, 2022. The program and schedule can be downloaded here.

Jeff McGuiness was the senior partner of a public policy law firm based in Washington, DC, and founder of HR Policy Association. A fine arts major in college who served as a photographer in the Air Force during the Vietnam War Era, he is the author of the forthcoming book, Bear Me Into Freedom: The Talbot County of Frederick Douglass.

For more than 22 years visitors to Talbot County and local residents have enjoyed a unique dining experience at Out of the Fire restaurant on 22 Goldsborough Street.  In September, Amy Haines, proprietor and founder, is relocating her restaurant to 111 South Washington Street, making it an appropriate time to reflect on the past and ponder the future of one of the most popular dining places on the Eastern Shore.

Eat Well, Be Well, Give Back, the mantra of Out of the Fire, personifies Amy Haines, a business leader, philanthropist, steward of the environment and restaurateur. Opening the doors on June 1, 2000, Amy pioneered the farm to table dining experience on the Eastern Shore. Together with Chef, Chris Berger, Sous Chef, Jed St. Landau and the rest of the Out of The Fire team, Haines has created a warm and unpretentious local dining destination offering quality food for long time Easton residents, newcomers and visitors to the shore.

Haines is always doing cool things before they become popular or trendy.  After a west coast stint in the biotech industry, she moved to Talbot County in 1998. Two years later, Haines opened Out of the Fire, melding together her many passions.

She was at the vanguard of sourcing food from local and sustainable vendors.

According to Cleo Braver, Owner of Cottingham Farm, “Amy and her crew, really focus on fresh sustainably and locally produced foods, the raw materials from which they craft their amazing meals. It’s a wonderful thing that they support the local agricultural heritage and allow it to flourish and grow.”

Her love of art led Haines to make the restaurant a home for local artists to display and sell their work. She also became a local business leader focusing on “giving back” to the community and a role model for other women business owners.

Local artist Howard Lapp described Out of the Fire as being more than a restaurant. “It’s been a community meeting place, one that has supported the art community by virtue of Amy’s generous use of her knowledge of art. And right from when she started the restaurant this was her theme, to support artists and their work. And she’s done so consistently for 22 years.”

Haines and her team’s pioneering work at Out of the Fire was also a foundational ingredient that helped create today’s thriving culinary scene in Easton, which has garnered much attention. When asked about her restaurant’s durability and success, she always deflects giving the big share of the credit to her Chef, Chris Berger, Sous Chef, Jed St. Landau and her Out of the Fire family, local partner growers and of course, to her loyal patrons and humbly says, “I just provide the canvas.” 

Haines’ canvas significantly expanded with the purchase of a two-story house located at 111 South Washington Street in a historic Easton district, which will be the restaurant’s home this fall. The new location will incorporate many lessons learned, especially the last few challenging pandemic years. Out of the Fire 2.0 will offer a different dining experience compared to the original location. The Washington Street location will feature smaller, more intimate dining areas, outdoor seating, a private dining area for special gatherings, a 900 square foot kitchen with a vaulted ceiling, among other amenities. Out of the Fire will close its doors temporarily at the end of August and reopen in September. The official opening date will be posted on Out of the Fire’s social media. What will not change is the restaurant’s spirit of friendship, community and good food. 

This video is approximately nine minutes in length.

The video and this article were written and produced by Mary Beth Durkin and Hugh Panero. Mary Beth Durkin is an award winning filmmaker and freelance journalist who focuses on food and its intersection with the environment, our health and public policy. Her work can be seen on PBSNewsHour’s online site at pbsnewshour.org and ybrproductions.com.