The People’s View: Constructing History through Collective memory is an article published by the San Fransisco Musem of Modern Art in April 2018.
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Mike Dixon first met Rein Jelle Terpstra in a bowling alley parking lot in Elkton, Maryland, in 2015. Terpstra, an artist from the Netherlands interested in the connections between perception and memory, had come to town the day before doing research for The People’s View (2014–18). The project aimed to collect photographs, home movies, and stories from people who had witnessed Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train as it traveled from New York City to Washington, D.C., on June 8, 1968.
Terpstra had been hanging around an out-of-service train station in
Elkton, looking for people who had been there that day 50 years ago.
When he noticed the Elk Lanes bowling center across the street, he went
over to investigate and saw senior bowling on the schedule for the next
morning. Returning early that day, he approached the man at the desk,
who took the microphone and introduced him over the loud speakers. While
friendly, the bowlers didn’t have any train photographs, but they did
have a suggestion: call Mike Dixon. Terpstra reached out to Dixon, who
told him, “Hold on, wait half an hour there. Don’t move.” And he
interviewed Terpstra with a reporter from the Cecil Whig, a local paper, in the parking lot. After that initial meeting, Dixon began helping Terpstra find leads in Cecil County.
A local Maryland historian specializing in social and community history, Dixon says, “My whole practice is around the people who do not make the headlines. And [Terpstra’s] not looking for the professional journalists, the photographers, the politicians; he’s looking for the memories of everyday people.”
The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project is working to open a discussion about a violent chapter in Maryland’s past, racial terror lynchings. These troubling incidents have not generally been studied or documented, so little is known about this grim history. Thus, the project is working to address this gap in our understanding of these episodes of mob violence.
In Cecil County, local knowledge of these tragic events was not brought down to the twentieth century, and the subject was not being taken up by local historians, journalists, or heritage groups. As the memory of the 19th-century episodes quickly faded and one generation gave way to another, the narratives related to the troubling violence hastily disappeared from the collective memory and history.
I studied Cecil County for the committee to answer research questions focused on how many killings occurred here and develop historical narratives associated with mob violence. The investigation concluded that at least two lynchings occurred in Cecil County.
On September 26, 1861, an enslaved 14-year-old boy belonging to Capt. Matthew Carroll Pearce was arrested near Cecilton (perhaps the Earleville area) for allegedly attempting to rape a young 14-year-old girl. He was arrested and taken to Cecilton, where one newspaper reported that the matter was investigated. He was then taken to a tree in the vicinity of the act and hung. Another narrative reports that the citizens of Cecilton seized Frederick and hanged him from the nearest tree. The location of this extrajudicial hanging was between Cecilton and Earleville, in Sassafras Neck.
Around the 9 o’clock hour on the evening of July 29, 1872, John Jones was taken from the custody of a special constable and lynched, alongside the old Telegraph Road a short distance south of the community of Pivot Bridge on the C & D Canal. When the Cecil County Sheriff and Deputy arrived early the next morning, Jones was found swinging from a small hickory tree near a fruit farm. The coroner’s jury rendered a verdict of “death by hanging at the hands of persons unknown to the jury.” This remains an unsolved murder. The location of the 1872 murder is on the old telegraph road not too far south of the present-day Bethel Cemetery along the C & D Canal. At the time of the incident, there was a small village on the canal known as Pivot Bridge.
My interest in researching this difficult understudied part of our past started around 2006 as I researched a police officer killed in the line of duty in Crisfield, MD. My research then focused on getting a fallen officer listed on the National Law Enforcement Memorial. My fieldwork took some troubling twists along the way as a mob grabbed a suspect and lynched the man. While I was broadly familiar with this sort of street violence, I soon became aware of many undocumented cases on the Eastern Shore.
Thus, as I became familiar with the history that was not in my textbook while also discovering the scope and magnitude of these mob killings, I continued doing some research. Along the way, I became aware of the work of Salisbury University Folklorist Polly Stewart. Dr. Stewart arrived at the University in 1973 and started collecting oral histories about killings at the hands of mobs.
By the way, Dr. Stewart’s groundbreaking work at the time created adverse reactions. Her papers are a valuable resource at the Nabb Center.
An investigation of racial terror lynchings in Cecil County, MD.
