I had an article on firefighting in the early 19th century published in the June edition of Maryland Life Magazine. The piece examines how a rural Eastern Shore Town, Elkton used two old hand pumpers to fight blazes until those veterans of many a struggle with flames were retired after a steam engine arrived. The first pumper was acquired in the 1820s from Philadelphia, and the second one came to Elkton about 1859 when Baltimore was going to steam engines. It was an interesting article to research, and along the way, I found several interesting photos showing those old pumpers.
Singerly Fire Company, 19th-century firefighting pumpers
Congratulations to the Town of Rising Sun. The municipality officially kicked off its Sequicentennail Celebration today with a ribbon cutting at the town hall and an open house in the museum. As brilliant April sunshine warmed the crowd, it was great to see the sense of history that exists in an old Maryland municipality as remarks by Mayor Cox and others indicated. Additionally an enthusiastic crowd gathered to help remember the town’s past.
Mike Dixon in a photo for a Maryland Library Association campaign
I just finished serving a ten-year term as a trustee for the Cecil County Public Library (CCPL) in March. I started in January 2000 and in the decade that followed served as vice-president and president. It has been gratifying to see CCPL grow to meet the demands of citizens in the 21st century with critical things like computers for surfing the net and support for job searches while circulation climbed to the historic level of 1-million items.
Cecil County is served by some of the hardest working library staff members anywhere and they and the management staff made this task my most rewarding board experience through their professionalism and can-do approach to delivering services to patrons.
Driving home after the meeting I was mulling over the changes I’ve seen at CCPL over a half-century. As a kid, one of my hangouts in the 1960s was that old library on Main Street where those 43,000 volumes held enough insight to keep me pouring over the titles. (Of course, my other hangouts were the jail, firehouse, newspaper office, radio station, and police station, so I’d had it all covered in a small town.)
We had two great librarians back in those days, Mrs. Dorothy Jefferson and Miss Slocum, overseeing operations where everything was done manually and a computer for CCPL was still decades away. When they moved into a new facility in 1985, the county was getting closer to the personal computer age, but they weren’t a presence on the library floor and the net was still another decade away. The old, well-used card catalog was the repository for information and my go-to source for finding back articles in magazines was the “Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”
I remember staff members saying that in the mid-1980s the big innovation wasn’t PCs, but was the photocopier and the installation of telephones for the few small branches in the system. They had to depend on postal mail to communicate with the outlying locations or call someone to carry the message over to the librarian. Today’s it an entirely different story and the demands for library services are different than those days in the 1960s when books, magazines, and newspapers were what a system was all about. I think I watched the communications revolution arrive at CCPL as we went from the 19th century into the 21st century in perhaps two decades.
A new Smithsonian Museum traveling exhibit, “Between Fences,” is being brought to the state by the Maryland Humanities Council. By evoking the many meanings of these everyday barriers, the “Museum on Main Street” program helps audiences discover how tightly fences are intertwined with history, politics, industry and daily life. Maryland has many stories connected to the exhibit theme as a border state between north and south, steward of the Chesapeake, a place that saw the arrival of the country’s first immigrants and much more.
To help audiences find new ways to think about boundaries in our lives, the Humanities Council has selected 17 scholars to engage audiences and create conversations that inspire community members to come together across borders and backyard fences. Nonprofits are encouraged to invite speakers to their towns. Topics such as the making of the Chesapeake, Maryland’s role in the Civil War, the Mason-Dixon Line, technology and fragmentation, liberty and security in America, immigration and lots more are addressed by the scholars.
I am pleased to be selected to serve as one of the presenting scholars. One of my topics, the Mason-Dixon Line: The Stories of a Geographic Boundary, examines the history of this legal and symbolic dividing line. The other, Uncovering the Boundaries in our Communities, helps people understand how to do research in their community.
Click here to go the list of programs available from the Maryland Humanities Council
with history, politics, industry and daily life. Maryland has many stories connected to the exhibit theme as a border state between north and south, steward of the Chesapeake, a place that saw the arrival of the country’s first immigrants and much more.