What's in a Name and Why We Should Remember:
Two Examples from Two million Places
remarks by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse
Council of Geographic Names (COGNA) Annual Conference Banquet
July 26, 2002
Welcome to Maryland, nicknamed the Free State and the Old Line State.
Our web site, mdsa.net, will tell you that we have been known as the Free State since the 1920s. A newspaper editor, Hamilton Owens, was opposed to prohibition. When Alabama Congressman William D. Upshaw, a firm supporter of Prohibition, denounced Maryland as a traitor to the Union for refusing to pass a State enforcement act which meant that the bars in the state would remain open, Owens gleefully wrote an editorial proclaiming Maryland the Free State. Although he never published it, he began calling Maryland the "Free State" in other editorials and it caught on, even though very few people today know what he intended it to mean.
There is more currency to our claim to being the Old Line State. Not only is it imprinted on our version of the U.S. quarter, but also it is derived from a sound historical tradition. It does not refer to the Mason Dixon Line, but to the fact that George Washington described his Maryland troops during the American Revolution as his reliable "Old Line."
As I thought about what I might say of interest tonight to an audience
that has a passion about accurately remembering names and places, I was
reminded of our unsuccessful efforts at the Archives in 1983 to become
a part of Donald Orth's and Roger Payne's National Geographic Names Data
Base: Phase II project. The previous year Joe Coale and I had
published our Historical Atlas of Maryland Maps and my Deputy Commissioner
of Land Patents, Richard Richardson approached me with an application for
a grant to do the Maryland volume of historical place and feature names.
Unfortunately we did not have the staff time available to undertake the
challenge as we were about to begin building a new Archives in celebration
of the State's 350 anniversary. I dug out Richard's meticulous files
on what he had proposed and wondered at the enormity of the task he outlined.
It would have been great fun to do, and a tremendous contribution to our
sense of place. I decided to take a moment and find out what had become
of the project. You all know the answer, of course, but I did not.
To quote the web site:
The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), developed by the USGS in cooperation with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), contains [on line] information about almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features in the United States. The Federally recognized name of each feature described in the data base is identified, and references are made to a feature's location by State, county, and geographic coordinates. The GNIS is our Nation's official repository of domestic geographic names information.
Instead of getting down to the business of writing some remarks,
I had a great time testing the system for Maryland places. I even
tried an
obscure subdivision in Anne Arundel County about which there is currently
a mapping controversy and sure enough it was there. I could peruse
a 1994 aerial photograph and a wide range of relative mapping efforts including
the USGS quad map from 1983 and the Census
Tiger Map files. I must say that the return was somewhat misleading.
It indicates that the subdivision is an island possibly in the South River
which is not true, but it is placed properly on the maps and the name assigned
to the subdivision in 1933 has become a permanent part of our place name
authority file.
It is simply amazing what you can do today with web-based tools and the internet. We have the 1941 Gazetteer of Maryland searchable and on line at our Archives of Maryland On Line web site (http://www.aomol.net) and hope to have all historical gazetteers there before too long. Four years ago I designed a simple system for imaging and indexing all subdivision plats and condominium plans recorded in the Maryland Courts which is now on line as plats.net (user name: plato, password: plato#). Now anyone anywhere can find an authentic map or plan of places where a large share of Marylanders own their own homes and/or condominiums. It would not take much more effort to include our retrieval databases in the GNIS system if someone would only give us a grant to do the programming.
Tonight, out of the 2 million names in the GNIS system, I thought I would be ambitious and talk about two that have special signficance to Maryland. The first is a no longer lost town in Prince George's County called Charles Town, easily found in the GNIS system, although I will say to call it a 'populated place' is somewhat of a stretch as it has no permanent residents today that I know of above ground. The second is probably the most important place name in all of Maryland History, Watkins Point, which has the distinction of having two entries in GNIS, one of which I am sure is there because I was the second person in print to say it ought to be. There is, as you all know, a certain satisfaction in being an authority on obscure places that deserve a better press.
I first became aware of the importance of the Charles Town, the former County seat of Prince George's County when I was asked to provide a few remarks on the historical importance of the place six years ago on the anniversary of the founding of the county. Sandwiched between the Governor (who was the former chief executive of the County) and the current County Executive, who were not on the best of terms, I attempted to educate, enlighten, and retreat as quickly as possible.
It is always dangerous to assume the mantle of principal speaker at any event. Who remembers what Edward Everett said in his two hour oration at Gettysburg? Yet some of us still can recite the three minutes of the other fellow.
That morning I tried to take my lead from the other fellow, and confine myself to briefly addressing the significance of the day, and the importance of the place where Prince George's County officially began over 300 years before.
Choosing a name for the county in 1695 was probably not very difficult. The heir to the throne of England was Anne, the last of the Stuarts. She had married Prince George of Denmark, and it was only a matter of time before she would be crowned queen. Governor Nicholson had already chosen to honor her by calling the new capital of the province Annapolis. It was only fitting and quite politically shrewd to name the newest county after her husband.
Choosing April 23rd as the day on which the county would begin its government is not difficult to understand either. Saint's days were always used to mark special occasions. The first Lord Baltimore was married on St. Cecilia's Day and his son dispatched the first colonists to Maryland on the same day in 1632. Choosing St. George's Day in 1696 as the day on which to commence the first session of the Prince George's County Court was politically astute as well. Saint George was a 3rd century A.D. Christian martyr known for his power to slay dragons and who, since the time of King Edward III, was also the patron saint of England.
Designating a county seat for the new county was probably not so easy and took a considerable amount of political maneuvering. Hidden in that choice, I believe, is a special story that tells us much about the early history of Maryland, and the lengths to which names were used to make a point, and, perhaps, even play a joke, albeit a small and quiet one, on the governor and the crown.
In today's world places are not named as thoughtfully or with as much meaning as they were three hundred years ago. Just a casual review of Louise Joyner Hienton's tract map in her book Prince George's Heritage reveals the first settlers calling their lands:
Mount Calvert was a logical choice for a county seat. It was centrally located in relation to the homes of the approximately 2000 residents whose lands formerly lay about equally in the counties of Charles and Calvert from which Prince George's was created. But choosing a property once owned by the late Philip Calvert, Chancellor of Maryland and uncle of the then Lord Baltimore, is as much symbolic of a break with the past as it was geographically sound. Philip Calvert's dream of Maryland was a world of a growing metropolis centered at St. Mary's City. Throughout his life he resisted diluting power by creating more counties and increasing the size of the General Assembly, just as he resisted moving the capital away from St. Mary's City. For nearly thirty years, from 1668 until 1695, only one new county, Cecil County, was created and that was to honor the second Lord Baltimore, Philip's brother, Cecil Calvert, in 1674. In 1696 Mt. Calvert was a geographically sound choice, but the name referred to a man whose whole career seemed opposite to the goals of the new county. The name had to go.
The work of the Court kept the court clerk busy that first day in 1696 and thereafter. Possibly even too busy. The first clerk, William Cooper, died after only four months in office. His wake was no mean affair and provides us with a glimpse of what life was like when the court was in session. The farewell party cost nearly four times the price of the coffin, and included 11 pints of brandy, 10 1/2 gallons of cider, 10 gallons of boiled cider with spirits, and what was deemed 'the trouble of the house.'
Attending court must have been a festive occasion. Not only would you learn all the gossip, you could watch the court cope with what at times seemed like a rising tide of bastardy and requests for county relief, the social welfare rolls of their day.
On that very first day the Prince George's County court met in 1696, the justices did something to the bafflement of future historians, if not their contemporaries.
As if an afterthought, as their last action of their first day, they ordered "that this place called Mount Calvert Doe for the Future goe by the name of Charles Town." Why the sudden change? Why no longer Mount Calvert? Why specifically call the county seat Charles Town?
Too often we interpret our past in terms of absolutes with little effort at understanding the shadings of opinion and the degrees of commitment that shape action in the public world. Usually historians interpret the 1690s as a time of growing constraint upon the Catholic population and interpret the disenfranchisement of the Catholics as the abandonment of the Act of Toleration which the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, had so carefully crafted nearly fifty years before. To a point, such an interpretation is a valid one. Catholics would not return to the public arena until the American Revolution when Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his Catholic cousins from Prince George's County, became active members of the extralegal conventions convened to fight British rule.
In fact, Charles Carroll's kinsman, James Carroll, who settled in Prince George's County in the early years of the 18th century would make it clear in his will that, apart from planting, there were only two professions open to Catholics under the current state of the laws, medicine and the law. He encouraged his nephew to choose the former, because, as he put it, "it may afford the least temptation to change his Religion." Indeed, I suspect lawyers at times are enough to make anyone change his religion.
But in spite of the increasing legal restrictions on the public role of Catholics and the severe restraints placed upon them with regard to the practice of their religion in any other than the most private of circumstances, the Protestant judges of Prince George's County made an overture of conciliation that first day of court in 1696 that surely did not go unnoticed in London at the town house of the third Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert.
By the revolution of 1689, the crown of England took over the government of Maryland. Governor Nicholson, who did so much to foster the creation of Prince George's County, was a Royal Governor. But Catholic Lord Baltimore retained a base of power that could not be ignored and to which even Royal governors were forced to pay heed. Lord Baltimore still retained title to the land in Maryland not yet granted. Prince George's County represented the future of Maryland in 1696. It boundaries to the west extended to the source of the Potomac and then northward to the 40th degree of north latitude and back eastward to the bounds of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties, or nearly 2800 square miles, of which only a fraction had been granted to anyone by Lord Baltimore.
On that spring day over 300 years ago, the justices of Prince George's County thumbed their noses at the official policy against Catholics and tipped their hats to Lord Baltimore by naming their county seat Charles Town after the third Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert.. Prejudice and religious discrimination was by no means abolished that day, but the acknowledgement of the importance of a modicum of accommodation was in evidence, and would serve to ameliorate the rhetoric of anti-Catholic sentiment to such a degree that only eighty-seven years later in 1783, Catholic and Protestant residents of Prince George's county could join in celebrating the arrival of the news that peace was at hand and the Treaty of Paris acknowledging the acceptance of the United States as a nation among nations would be on its way to Annapolis to be ratified by Congress.
In time, the center of population of the county moved westward and the overseers of the roads did their job. Pressure mounted to move the county seat to an even better crossroads of commerce than Charles Town. In 1721, Upper Marlboro became the capital of the county. Gradually the buildings of Charles Town fell into disrepair and ultimately disappeared under the cultivated fields of Mt. Calvert, leaving only one fine house today, built in the late 18th century.
What's In a Name? Why Should we Remember?
Those are questions to which the fields that now cover the first
county seat of Prince George's County, Charles Town, formerly Mount Calvert,
pay silent tribute. They are also questions that lay at the heart
of a costly public issue: just where is Watkin's Point?
I first became intrigued with Watkins Point over twenty years ago when writing the chapter on boundaries in the first edition of our Historical Maps of Maryland. The fascination remains. We are publishing a twentieth Annivesary Edition next Maryland Day, March 25, with twice as many maps, all in color, the bulk of which are the magnificient 19th century county maps on which much of our place name data is based. I particularly enjoyed revisiting the Watkins Point saga in light of Virginia's challenge to Maryland's ownership and management of the waters of the Potomac River. We own it of course, and Virginia has no rights to the water, save to navigate, fish, and build piers out from their shore, but I suspect the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom will decide otherwise. The political stakes of development are too high and Maryland has invariably lost almost all of its boundary disputes with its neighbors regardless of the righteousness of her cause. Establishing where Watkins Point was meant to be is but the chief example among many including the loss of what became Delaware, and thousands of acres in Pennsylvania. Indeed by all rights Philadelphia should be in Maryland, but do we really want another urban problem on our hands?
Where then is Watkins Point? For almost two centuries after 1668, when Edmund Scarburgh and Philip Calvert actually cut a line through the fifteen miles of trees and marsh from the Pocomoke River to Sinepuxent Bay on the Eastern Shore, no one much cared. Lord Baltimore's charter, while providing for the fortieth degree north latitude as the northern boundary of Maryland, only vaguely drew a southern boundary from
Who could have known in 1668 that the value of Watkins Point lay hidden in the water around it? Who would have guessed that Victorian America would develop such a passion for oysters? Between 1840 and 1850 the oyster harvest in Maryland nearly doubled, from 710,000 to 1.4 million bushels. By 1884 the harvest reached an all- time peak of 15 million bushels. "Drudges," tongers, and oyster police from Virginia and Maryland were locked in a controversy that has since been labeled the Oyster Wars.4 As early as 1820 Maryland tried to prevent over overharvesting of the beds by passing legislation curtailing dredging and favoring more labor-intensive, less efficient tonging. There is considerable question about how effectively the law was enforced, but until 1851 there were cases of dredgers being hauled before a justice of the peace in Somerset County, being fined, and even losing their boats, as the law stipulated.
By 1851 the demand for oysters was too great for even token enforcement of measures against over overharvesting, and unlimited commercial exploitation triumphed over prudent management of natural resources. On 13 March 1851, the schooner Fashion was taken in Tangier Sound, by Captain John Cullen, and condemned as a dredger by a Smith Island justice of the peace. The jury agreed that Captain Cullen had taken the Fashion in Virginia waters, not in Maryland waters, even though he was well above what Augustine Herrman and all subsequent map makers had labeled Watkins Point. Obviously, who had the right to fish and police the waters of Tangier Sound and Pocomoke Bay had become an issue that neither Maryland nor Virginia authorities could ignore.5
The year after the Fashion was determined to have been taken in Virginia waters (the charge of dredging was never denied), the Maryland General Assembly decided to approach Virginia and settle their southeastern boundary problems once and for all. It was not the first time that the Maryland legislature considered the matter and it was not to be the last, but as a direct result of the 1852 legislation, a careful survey of the area in dispute was undertaken. In a sense, the precision became an additional stumbling block to negotiation. So controversial were some of the findings that it took another twenty years and a panel of three nationally known arbitrators to resolve the matter.6 By 1877, when the award of the arbitrators was announced, both sides had examined the then extant historical record in depth and consulted every printed map they could find in Europe and America, back to Captain John Smith's, that located Watkins Point. They recorded oral testimony on the whereabouts of the boundary. that today Although is more valuable today for the local lore it contains, than for resolvingthe testimony did not go far in helping resolve any of the substantive issues before the arbitrators.7
And yet, despite all the proceedings and argument, no one was able to dispute effectively what Lieutenant Michler found in 1858 when he surveyed the line that had been established by Calvert and Scarburgh nearly two hundred years earlier. Assigned to Maryland from the United States U.S. Topographical Engineers, Lieutenant Michler had no difficulty finding the 1668 line east of the Pocomoke River. It was well marked. Unfortunately for Maryland, however, the boundary had been run, not according to a true east line, but according to what was indicated as east on the compass in 1668. Because a compass points to magnetic north and because magnetic north in 1668 was to the west of true north, the Calvert-Scarburgh line slanted to the north instead of being a true "right," or east, line. Maryland lost ground to Virginia without knowing it. If Calvert and Scarburgh had taken the latitude at the end of their line as they did at the beginning, they would have found it to be over a mile above the thirty-eighth degree north latitude.
More controversial than where the actual Calvert-Scarburgh line lay on the ground, however, was Lieutenant Michler's definition of Watkins Point. Michler argued that the commissioners in 1668 had chosen a point, not on Cedar Straits, but four miles to the north, as the "Western most Angle" of Watkins Point from which to begin their line. To Lieutenant Michler, the point chosen in 1668 fell at approximately thirty-seven degrees, fifty-five minutes north latitude, and, if extended west to Smith Island, divided the island between Virginia and Maryland.8
Subsequent evidence produced by the dissenting arbitrator in 1877 and supplemented by research at the Maryland State Archives strongly suggests that in the late seventeenth century both Marylanders and Virginians accepted the "Western most Angle" of Watkins Point to be where Lieutenant Michler said it was, on land that by Michler's time had been eroded and was under water at about the Jane's Island Light Ship.
Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifier, a Virginian, labeled this location Watkins Point in his manuscript map of about 1693, and a 1672 Maryland deed specifically calls that spit of land with its orchard and duckpond Watkins Point on a tract of land named "too late to repent."9
Perhaps it was "too late to repent" where the commissioners in 1668 had meant Watkins Point to be, but not until Lieutenant Michler meticulously surveyed and hypothetically extended the 1668 line was there any real cause for concern. If Michler was correct, about twenty-three square miles containing five thousand acres of firm land and fifteen thousand acres of marsh belonged in Virginia. Even more ominous, Maryland would be excluded from any jurisdiction over oyster beds in Tangier and Pocomoke sSounds.
In 1860, Maryland published the results of Lieutenant Michler's survey in a summary map by John de la Camp. Unlike Michler's survey, this map asserted Maryland's weak contention that the boundary line across the Bay to Smith's Point in Virginia missed Smith Island completely and ignored a considerable body of local evidence to the contrary.10
In the end, the arbitration of 1877 decided on a broken line that gave some of Smith Island to Virginia, gave all of the land and marsh north of Cedar Straits and west of the Pocomoke to Maryland, and sharallowed Tangier Sound below James Island and Pocomoke Bay to be shared by the two states. It was a reasonable decision rendered by a majority of the arbitrators that, without their knowing so, was corroborated by Jenifer's 1693? Hand hand-drawn map, but it left future generations of scholars and lawyers to ponder what Captain John Smith had really meant by "Watkins Point" and Lord Baltimore's southern boundary.11
Today, sadly without attribution, GNIS confirms Captain Michler's and my documented assertions, and tells us on line that there are two Watkins Points. One is correctly identified as being under water, but the truth is, both are as they were understood and known in the 17th Century. Sometimes, like Atlantis, we need to remember a place because it is no longer recognizeable as it once was, especially when like, Watkin's Point, it was intended to be the beginning and ending 'point' of the whole State of Maryland.
What's in a name and Why Should we Remember?
I hope that with my two examples out of two million, you will agree with me that the journey through history to understand the importance of place and the need to remember names accurately in the historical context of their derivation, is one certain way we can maintain our own sense of humor, and our connectivity with the lives and accomplishments of all who have gone before us.
Enjoy your trip down the bay tomorrow, even though you will not be going
as far as what was Watkins Point.
thank you.
http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web_query.GetDetail?tab=Y&id=596930
http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web_query.gnisprod?f_name=Watkins+Point&variant=Y&f_state=Maryland&f_cnty=Somerset&f_ty=&elev1=&elev2=&cell=&pop1=&pop2=&my_function=Send+Query&f_ty=&last_name=&last_state=&last_cnty=&page_cnt=&record_cnt=&tab=Y