“Oswald had some literary taste, the dilettante kind, and was particularly fond of delving among old records and family papers. No occupation had greater charm for him than that of building up, bit by bit, from material obtained in this way, a picture of the long-buried past ...”
So begins my favorite passage from
the novel about 19th-century Poplar Grove,
A Maryland Manor, that I wrote about here the other day. It's honestly felt and beautifully described because, I am certain, the author was writing about himself. Frederic Emory (he's the owlish chap you see above) recalled in a different context that while still a child, he happened to contract "a taste for rummaging among old papers and records, while exploring the garrets of certain venerable houses in Queen Anne's."
To all of us who have spent at least part of this summer exploring the nooks and crannies of Poplar Grove and its history, the rest of the passage - which I'll quote in its entirety - has the shock of the familiar, even though the scene it describes is set in 1861. The character is Oswald Reeve, a young gentleman living at the Manor, and the setting is the "lumber room" [an old-fashioned term for a room used to store documents, unused furniture, etc.] in the attic:
“It was a very large room, covering nearly the entire floor space of the main building. The steeply slanting roof showed its rafters and the sheathing of shingles untouched by paint. The large dormer windows looked out upon a zigzag line of roofs, thickly coated with moss, and upon chimneys of various heights and dimensions. Huge locust trees waved their scraggy branches almost against the window panes, and Lombardy poplars reared their shining green leafage above the tallest of the chimneys. A circular window in the front gable [NB: see the photo at the top of this blog] commanded a view of the lane, with its avenue of elms; a square window, at the opposite end of the room, afforded glimpses of the garden, the Quarter, the overseer’s house, with the cove in the distance.
“Oswald seated himself one afternoon upon an old armchair of colonial pattern, upholstered in faded red velvet, in one of the dormer recesses, and was soon absorbed in examining a package of letters which revealed a touching romance of the Cheston family during the Protestant Revolution of 1689. The floor in front of him was strewn with a great variety of objects – bits of rare China; broken articles of furniture; old, worm-eaten books; piles of yellow title-deeds, mortgages, letters; heaps of laces, silks, and velvets, the remains of clothing which had adorned some belle or beau of the family in the olden days. From rusty nails driven into one of the rafters, hung three suits of military uniform, each representing a different period of army service. One of them was the scarlet and buff of the Maryland 'macaronis' during the Revolution. Another was the militia colonel’s regimentals worn by our Colonel’s father, the Judge, in the War of 1812. The third, of much more modern pattern, was the dragoon suit which the Colonel himself had donned upon his promotion to a captaincy at the close of the last campaign against Osceola, the noted Seminole chief.
“There was scarcely an object in the room which did not possess some interest for Oswald in the associations it suggested. The silks and velvets and laces, for example, called up vividly the scenes of colonial times – the stately minuets in the parlors downstairs; the formal water parties in large bateaux, propelled by negro oarsmen, which were also used in making visits of ceremony at neighboring plantations; the foppish audiences in the tiny theatre of quaint old Annapolis, the provincial capital, which was visited frequently by strolling players; the groups of brilliant youths and maidens moving with slow, measured tread over the lawn or among the shaded, fragrant paths of the garden. But the chief interest for him lay in the collection of letters, and as he slowly deciphered the faded characters which told the romance upon which he had stumbled, he was brought close in sympathy to the poor ghosts who, in the flesh, had traced the lines which had secured to them a chance resurrection. How plainly were they brought to life again by their unconscious disclosures! A single sentence, in some instances, presented an individuality with all its distinguishing traits – its weaknesses, its faults, its prejudices, or perhaps, its worthy, lovable qualities – in clear outline. So real were some of the images, limned with a naively graphic power, that Oswald almost fancied he could see the originals before him.”
Those few last sentences, in particular, ring true with uncanny resonance in light of our experiences this summer. (When we were in that attic, though, it was so ungodly hot, not to mention bee-infested, that we were hardly tempted to settle down in a cozy dormer as Oswald did. See
this post.)
How odd to reflect, however, that many of the Poplar Grove documents that seem so old and quaint to us now were new - or not yet written - in 1861. As Abbie suggested in his
last post, there were no doubt many papers that disappeared from the house over the years, perhaps some at the hands of Frederic himself. His own modernity, the era of the Civil War, is now even more remote and foreign to us than the colonial period was to him (or to Oswald).
Although we have not, alas, unearthed any 17th-century love letters like the ones that enchanted Oswald, the "piles of yellow title-deeds" were still waiting for us.
[The one shown here (click to enlarge) is among the oldest pieces of paper that we have found. It is dated at the top, in Roman numerals, November 24, 1665 (it may possibly be a very early copy). The deed is to Samuel Withers, for "a parcell of land called Witherington lying in Talbot County on the north side of Choptank River ... to be held of the mannor of Baltamore." Withers was one of the founders of Ann Arundel County, and was one of the Commissioners of the colony under the Cromwellian government of the 1650s, when Maryland was taken away from Lord Baltimore. Clearly all had been forgiven enough by 1665 for Withers to get a nice land grant from the very nobleman he had formerly displaced. So there's not a 17th-century love story written in this document, but perhaps a political romance of betrayal and reconciliation.]
[... and there may no longer be any Seminole War dragoon uniforms hanging from the rafters at Poplar Grove, but in a similar spirit, we did come across someone's - probably Lloyd Tilghman Emory, Jr.'s - campaign jacket from World War II.]
Now, I've long been a fan of history. Ever since I can remember, one of my strongest 
And the best part is, not only am I getting the opportunity to preserve the past, but I'm getting the opportunity to help those people in the future — the ones hungry for the same quest of knowledge that keeps all of us coming back to this very blog.
