This July 2, 1929, photo of the Santa Fe Hillside Arizona train station came from an album full of pictures I purchased thirty to forty years ago. An unidentified adventurer compiled the images as he motored across the country. His series of albums had been dumped in a secondhand shop in Newark, DE. But, one containing photos from Maryland and Delaware Caught my attention, so I purchased that volume, which also had pictures of his western trips.
An internet search revealed that the Santa Fe opened the station in 1902. It was moved to Prescott, Arizona, much later. There the Iron Springs Cafe occupied it, but they closed not long ago. Hillside, an apparently abandoned community, is in Yavapai County.
Here is a link to a 2011 photo of the station when the Iron Springs Cafe occupied the structure.
Delaware Humanities has selected a new program I have been researching for inclusion in the speaker’s bureau and visiting scholar programs. The lecture, “Life in the Past Lane; Delaware Roads,” encourages people to get off the highway and enjoy some of the State’s most scenic, cultural and historic roads — along with the surrounding landscape and resources.
Here’s the description of the program:
With the arrival of modern, high-speed highways, many of Delaware’s scenic routes and the small hamlets and villages clustered around those old corridors are overlooked. This talk explores the character, ambiance, and history of some of these lesser-traveled roads today. These historic roadways are much more than just a line on the map. So come along for an enjoyable trip. You will hear intriguing stories about waterfront towns, agricultural communities, and country hamlets and villages, where discovery awaits you.
Come along and find your road in this talk. Along the way, we will explore science byways, old historic corridors, and the connections between the past and today.
Travel was difficult in mid-March 1923 as this automobile travels along. The road connects Kirkwood and Tybouts Corner. (Source: Delaware Public Archives)
In My Memory Oldsmobile, by Edward Gus, 1905 (Source: Historic America Sheet Music, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)
As the nation marks 50 years since the remnants of Hurricane Agnes ripped across Maryland, WBAL-TV’s Tommie Clark stopped by the Conowingo Dam to interview me about the destructive storm’s impact on Maryland.
The Weather Service downgraded the hurricane to a tropical storm by the time it hit Maryland on June 21, 1972. But Agnes stalled over Pennsylvania and New York, causing the worst flooding on record for the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania and northeastern Maryland.
Mike Dixon talking to WBAL about Hurricane Agnes
As a record rainfall soaked the river basin between June 21 and 24, the flood-swollen waterway spread over a wide area. Once all the gates on the Conowingo Dam opened Port Deposit’s Main Street filled with rushing water. Earlier, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation — only one small part of a block in the center of town remained dry as rescue boats floated down Main Street.
Havre de Grace, Port Deposit, Perryville, and other places suffered enormous destruction. Those who lived through this record-breaking storm will never forget the destructive force that disrupted lives. So as we mark the passage of a half-century, 11 news Baltimore, took a look back at the damage and the progress made in weather forecasting in “Hurricane Agnes: 50 Years Later.”
I talked to WBAL about those destructive days, discussing the impact of Agnes and how people nearly two generations later remember it in northeastern Maryland. Having taken 21 lives in Maryland, it remains the deadliest named storm in state history.
As today marks the 80th anniversary of the Feb. 19, 1942, presidential order authorizing the internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry, I recalled an April day in 2016 in Bridgeton, NJ. On that Wednesday as spring got underway, I spent a delightful morning talking with 92-year-old Frank Hitoshi Ono.
Mr. Ono greeted me as I arrived at his home on a Wednesday in April 2016 (Photo: Dixon)
At the time I was doing some fieldwork related to developing a program for the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center in Cumberland County, NJ. The Center presents the stories of relocated Japanese Americans, wartime refugees, and migrant laborers to the “largest vegetable factory on earth.” As part of the research, I met with a number of people including Mr. Ono.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Mr. Ono, 18, was living in San Pedro, CA, where his family had a tuna fishing business. Worried that people of Japanese ancestry would act as spies, the United States Government ordered about 120,000 people, mostly U.S. citizens, placed in internment camps.
This forced relocation included the Ono family, the teenage college student ending up at Camp Manzanar, CA. As the war dragged on, a large-scale commercial agricultural enterprise in South Jersey, Seabrook Farms, needed employees due to the wartime labor shortage. Consequently, about 2,500 residents of the relocation centers were permitted to come to the fields of Cumberland County to help harvest crops and support processing operations. Mr. Ono’s family was in that group.
18-year-old Frank Ono at the Manzanar Relocation Center. He was working as a mailman at the camp. (Source: Ono)
After the war, Mr. Ono got a job with a radio sales and service company in Bridgeton and within a couple of years, he established his own business in Millville, the Arrow Radio & TV Sales & Service Company. As television came in and tubes gave way to transistors and other things he kept up with the times. He operated the business for about 40 years, eventually selling it when he retired in 1985.
He had many talents and hobbies, but in retirement, he focused on educating people about this period of history, and he was deeply involved with the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center.
I thoroughly enjoyed that spring morning six years ago and still recall his rich, vivid stories. I was fortunate to have met Mr. Ono, and have the opportunity to directly learn about a different time and place in our nation’s past. It’s an experience I will never forget so as my newsfeed alerted me to the 80th anniversary of Japanese Internment the conversation from some years earlier was still fresh in my mind. As Mr. Ono remarked, this is a story that more people need to know, and I was thankful that he shared the accounts and his photos with me.
