This talk explores stories about getting hitched in a hurry in days gone by.
Eloping couples once came to Wilmington for a licenses and a quick ceremony, but just before World War I, Delaware passed more restrictive laws. A city newspaper, proclaiming that Wilmington was no longer a “mecca” for marriages, remarked that “Wilmington’s Days as a Gretna Green has gone glimmering.”
Since the “honeymoon express” was no longer able to deliver cupid’s hurried business to the City, passenger trains steamed on down the tracks, stopping at the first county seat beyond the Mason Dixon Line.
There the marrying parsons picked up the trade as the marrying parsons worked overtime completing a ceremony every 15 minutes. Quirky marrying parsons, humorous occurrences, and an international incident involving Iran, are part of this colorful narrative.
The program will also sketch out marriage practices and customs and how they have changed over the longer period.
The lecture was offered by the Friends of Old Dover in for Valentine’s Day 2017. Here is the post, they shared for that talk.
Wilmington was the place for elopements and quick marriages.
The FB Memorial Page for the PSA Fligh5 182 which went down in San Diego Friday, September 25, 1978. https://www.facebook.com/PSA-Flight-182-Memorial-149177461803120/timeline/?ref=page_internal
A story about the passage of 37 years since a sudden, life-shattering tragedy hit San Diego came up in my Delmarva Newsfeed yesterday.
In those unimaginable few seconds, 144 people perished in the widely observed incident that morning at the end of the workweek. So many lives (family members, the community, and the first responders) were shattered at that moment.
A moving FB memorial page and an article from the aviation news site, NYCAviation reminded me of a similar experience in Cecil County with the “flight 214 Remembrance Program.” On December 8, 2013, family members. the community and first responders paused to mark the passage of 50 years since the Pan American World Airways crashed at the edge of Elkton.
The purpose of our program was to honor the memory of those who died when the big plane exploded in flight and went down in a cornfield. It also honored the emergency personnel answering the alarm as periodic flashes of lighting illuminated a scene that would live with those firefighters and police officers throughout their lives. As that day in 2013 marked the passage of a half-century, we invited those affected to come together to honor the memory of those who perished and the generation of emergency personnel who answered the call.
The experiences of the two communities, Elkton and San Diego, were similar in that unimaginable disasters struck, altering the lives of so many people. For the Elkton community, no one living here would forget the sudden explosion in the sky on a stormy Sunday night in Cecil County as a thunderstorm swept through the area. For the firefighters and police officers, It was something they, too, would never forget as they desperately searched for survivors in the cornfield. One firefighter from the North East Volunteer Fire company, Steward W. Godwin, fell in the line of duty that night—while combing the debris field, he suddenly collapsed and died.
In San Diego, the PSA Flight 182 Memorial Committee is working to have a maker placed at the crash site. As the group noted, “PSA 182 is a major part of San Diego’s History. The memory of that day is still vivid in the minds of many San Diegans and continued to affect them as well as many of the first responders who were on duty . . . Our hope is to create a memorial that will honor the victims, their families, the neighborhood, and the law enforcement and emergency workers that still live with the memories of what they saw that day. The memorial will be a place of peace and reflection that can be visited . . . .”
Late last night, I looked over the committee’s FB page as they get ready to gather on the 37th anniversary of the incident this Friday, September 25, at 9:02 a.m. in San Diego. For those in Elkton who answered the call and for the family members on the Maryland crash, this is something we relate to as you read the posts, remarks, and comments. It was a moving experience reading the page, and I hope to read soon that they have the support of the City and can place a memorial on the crash site.
In Elkton, Mayor Joe Fisonia, several years before he was elected to public office, had a memorial placed on the site here. At the time, he was the president of the homeowners association in the area, and he is also a first responder with the Singerly Fire Company.
A sudden, horrible tragedy of this scope is part of a community’s history, as the San Diego committee noted. It is a part of Elkton’s history too.
McLear & Kendall Carriage Factory, French Street, Wilmington, by the Hexamer General Survey. Source: Philadelphia Free Library
While digging up some historical records on a Delaware property earlier this week, I discovered a large body of helpful online maps published by the Philadelphia Free Library. This urban institution has substantial online collections, including a large holding of maps.
The resources that helped with my investigation was the Hexamer General Survey collection. Between 1866 and 1895, Ernest Hexamer sketched out detailed plates on nearly 3,000 industrial and commercial properties in the Greater Philadelphia area. These meticulous illustrations included breweries, textile mills, printers, car works, dye and chemical plants, planning mills, and much more. The renderings were created for fire insurance underwriters and are similar to the Sanborn Maps, which are available for many Delmarva communities.
Hexamer was a German immigrant, according to the blog, Hexamer Redux. “He began his career creating insurance maps in New York City. In 1856, he moved to Philadelphia and established the fire insurance map business in the city.”
For researchers on the upper part of the Delmarva Peninsula, there are a many industrial plates from Wilmington, as well as New Castle and Cecil counties. The Star Bone Phosphate Works at Rothwell Landing is the only one for Kent County, DE. Companies such as the Jackson & Sharp’s Delaware Car Works, Bancroft and lots of others are represented in the records.
In addition to floor plans similar to architectural drawings lots of additional details are provided. There are notes about the construction, fire protection, occupancy, and other elements of interest to an insurance carrier. Many include perspective sketches of the actual building, which is great.
This will be a valuable resource for many Delmarva researchers. Thank you Philadelphia Free Library for providing this excellent resource.
Providence MIll, Wm. M. Singerly, 1890 by Hexamer General Survey; Source: Philadelphia Free Library.New Castle Mills, New Castle, DE., 1887 by Hexamer Surveys. Source: Philadelphia Free Library
Jackson and Sharp Rail Works, 1872, by Hexamer General Survey. Source: Philadelphia Free Library
This afternoon while driving home from the University of Delaware during a heavy downpour, I listened to Transom, a new public media show. The broadcast, “Southern Flight 242: Bringing My Father Home” by Will Coley, was the piece that had me attentively listening as the rain came down. In it, an audio documentarian digs deeply into the story of his father’s death in a commercial plane crash in New Hope George on April 4, 1977.
Will was seven when Southern Flight 242 went down, taking 72 lives, including nine residents of New Hope, but 22 passengers walked away from the wreckage. He was reluctant to search out the narrative for decades, although many people encouraged him to look into the tragedy. As times made the sad event grow a little more distant, Will stumbled onto a New York Times article describing how surviving passengers and townspeople, who were “brought together by fate and a relentless hailstorm,” came back together in the town of New Hope twenty years after the impact on a Georgia highway.
At the reunion, “eight of the surviving passengers joined more than 100 others whose lives crossed the path of flight 242, including rescue workers, volunteers, doctors, nurses, and relatives of the deceased. Jack Barker, a retired Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, said he had never heard of a similar reunion,” the newspaper reported.
This tragedy deeply affected many people, and Will lost his father when he was seven years old. Left with some photos and a few audio tapes to remember him, it took 35 years before he was ready to look more deeply into the occurrence memorialized in New Hope, GA, as the big jet came down in the center of town.
But while he was cleaning out his grandmother’s house after she passed away, he found a cassette tape with a few brief moments of sounds from long ago as his father showed him how to record something. He had no memory of this as his dad explained audio to the child, a medium he now works in.
With this, he decided to look into the tragedy, as it might help him better understand his father and himself. The material was put together for the show Transom, and the broadcast essay is now available on public media.
This excellent audio essay reminded me of an experience we had in Cecil County on December 8, 2013, when the community and family members of Flight 214 paused to mark the passage of 50 years since the crash of Pan American World Airways Jet, Flight 214, took 81 lives in a cornfield at the edge of Elkton. On the day that marked the passage of a half-century, we invited family members, first responders, and community residents to come together to honor the memory of those who lost their lives and to remember a generation of first responders who answered an unimaginable call that changed so many lives in a split-second.
There are some great new public media outlets, such as Transom and Unfictionalized, sharing first-person stories these days.
