Editor’s note: This is a new Spy series that will be sharing historic news clippings on Talbot County from the perspective of the newspapers of Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. While the Shore’s local newspapers have faithfully recorded life and times for three centuries, when this Talbot County periodically finds itself being the subject of a major daily story, it’s always been greeted, like any small community, with extreme interest. For when those occasions occur, now, or in the past, it gives a rare opportunity to see how the rest of the world may view it. And thanks to such powerful databases as newspapers.com, we can now able to share some of that coverage from the West of Talbot County.
With Talbot County facing its first heat wave this week, its funny how much more noticeable and grateful for Easton’s remarkable tree canopies the cover a good bit of its downtown. Trees in particular have always been so interconnected with the life of the County’s seat to such a degree that the Baltimore Sun’s special corespondent give it the corespondent in 1910. It was also noticeable how the writer could also see the potential of linking downtown via Port Street to the waterfront.
Baltimore Sun 30 Aug 1908 Photo of the Wisconisin Historical Society
Richard Skinner says
Dear Spy,
Though a newcomer to the Eastern Shore, I have come to trust your editor’s good sense in almost every respect. Yes, I find the views of some of his more frequent and regular writers incite me to outrage, but I also know that my own views are often toxic to those of a different political bent.
I worry at times that The Spy does not address the concerns and issues of young people living in the region. But, then again, in my youth the missives of aging scribes were also generally discounted.
The new feature of drawing upon stories about Easton and I presume other towns of the area printed by newspapers from beyond the Bay is quite interesting. Nevertheless, I hasten to urge caution. As a native of Savannah, Georgia, the periodic accounts of my hometown in the New York Times and other national papers and magazines printed over more than a half century always caused me to wonder if there existed another Savannah, one identical in every detail to mine, but somehow shinier and much more festive.
In the other Savannah, people smiled a great deal more frequently. Instead of an old southern city that kept itself from destruction by promptly surrendering to General Sherman and embedding it’s lovely buildings as well as race relations and a social caste system in “sticky amber” that persists, Savannah in the words of those who visited, left and then wrote of its charm and grace was a place many of us who lived there – or at least me and my peers – simply did not recognize. And since these accounts mimicked one another over time, we began to think we were the ones out of kilter and the stories and accompanying photographs were the real Savannah. And so, we left.
I trust The Spy’s editor to turn an at least slightly-jaundiced eye toward the stories written by visitors to Easton and the Midshore region in the past. Not to disparage the places or detract from the visitors’ delight in these environs. Not to lift a veil and reveal something untoward and unrepresentative of life here. There are ample virtues and extraordinary resources to this part of the world, enough to keep nostalgia from tinting our past as well as our present.