Another Leaf on the Pryor Tree: James Walter Pryor, Market Master of Hagerstown

After researching the Pryor family of Washington and Frederick counties for a playful Pryor group portrait awhile ago, I was primed to respond when I saw this cabinet card portrait come up for sale on an internet auction site.

An inscription on the back in period ink identifies the sitter as “Mr. J. Walter Pryor, Wolfsville, Fred. Co., Md., Oct. 17th, ’95”.  Based on what I have learned about the Pryors, I believe this young man was James Walter Pryor (1874-1965) the son of Frederick County farmers Peter Columbus Pryor (1853-1925) and Catherine Sensenbaugh (1851-1929).

Both James Walter Pryor and the Pryor boys in my other card photograph trace their ancestors to “Reds” Elliot (1760-ca. 1810-1820) and common-law wife Hannah Prior/Pryor (1760-1839). Both are believed by family history researchers to have emigrated from the British Isles and to have had 11 children together.

Known as J. Walter Pryor, perhaps to distinguish himself from cousin James Albert Pryor (1872-1919), our subject in 1902 married Olive Idella Wolfe, daughter of  a neighboring Wolfsville, Frederick County farmer and carpenter Jonathan N. Wolfe (1843-1918) and Amanda Blickenstaff (1844-1895).

The couple settled in Hagerstown, where J. Walter followed a variety of occupations. He worked as a bleacher in a knitting mill, and as a foreman for the Maryland Pressed Steel Company. In his later years he worked as a carpenter and a painting contractor.  He and Olive raised their seven children first in a brick duplex at 202 Cannon Avenue and later in a wood-frame house on North Mulberry Street.

It wasn’t until 1946 that he was appointed, by a narrow margin, master of the Hagerstown City Market, a position he held until  1954. In the announcement of his retirement at the age of 80, the Hagerstown Morning Herald said that he “was considered by many the best market master the city had ever had, “doubling the number of rented market stalls” and carrying out much-needed repairs and refurbishment to the building and fixtures (Hagerstown Morning Herald, 31 December 1954, p. 12).

Those who are familiar with Hagerstown history know that the City Market House, since 1928 located at 25 W. Church Street,  has been a center economic and social life in the county for over two hundred years, surviving the rise of supermarkets and international food distribution.

J. Walter sat for this bust portrait at the studio of Bascom W. T. Phreaner (1845-1932), who operated a photographic gallery in Hagerstown from 1866 to 1901. Phreaner used a traditional burned-out background to highlight the simple dignity of the young man’s clear-eyed gaze. Pryor chose a 5″x7″ cream card mount with a subtle pebbled texture.

James Walter Pryor and Olive Idella Wolfe Pryor are buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown. Peter Columbus Pryor and Catherine Sensenbaugh Pryor are buried in the cemetery adjoining St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Wolfsville.

Thanks to the many family history researchers and volunteers who have documented the Pryors of Hagertown and Frederick County.

A Manor Brethren Church Album: Rev. David Long

Attempted album rescues inspire both excitement and anguish, satisfaction and sadness.

All these emotions and more permeate my thoughts about an old, red velvet-covered album I snatched back from online auction oblivion in 2012.

But this is going about the story backwards. It began with the appearance on ebay of a cabinet card photograph of Nora Welty as a child. Having acquired a portrait of the same person as a young woman more than a year before, I was eager to win the auction, and did so.

I had already done some family history research on Nora (Welty) Barnheisel (1878-1951), daughter of Fairplay, Md. cabinetmaker  David Welty (1832-1916) and Laura A. (Shafer) Welty (1840-1917), so when I noticed a number of other identified Hagerstown-area vintage card photographs up for auction, I quickly realized that the individuals were all part of the same group of linked families from Washington County, whose surnames include Long, Shafer, Coffman, Slifer, Fahrney, Reichard and Middlekauff.

The common thread was their connection to  Manor Church of the Brethren just south of Hagerstown.

According to Jerry Henry’s The History of the Church of the Brethren in Maryland (Elgin, Illinois: Brethren Publishing House, 1936), a group of German Baptists began meeting for services in a structure, possibly a log school house, around 1790, led by Elders David Long and his brother-in-lawn Daniel Reichard. This community eventually became known as the Manor congregation.

Manor Church of the Brethren, located off the Sharpsburg Pike between Hagerstown and Antietam battlefield, still exists today. In its large adjoining cemetery rest many of Nora Welty’s ancestors and relations.

The anguish of this album for me is that I could not afford to save all the photographs that were removed and auctioned off. Of the 54 slots that, carefully labeled in pencil, appear to have contained photographs, I was only able to save 18 plus two copies of a memorial card for Alexander Shafer.

When the empty album came up for sale, I bought it as well. All 18 photographs are now back in their proper places and they and the album will eventually find a home in a public institution in Washington County.

But whose album was it? The  identifications below the photographs provide clues. Pride of place went to “Uncle David Long my mother’s Brother” and “Aunt Mary Reichard Long,” his wife.

The owner of the album was a niece of David Long (1820-1897) and Mary (Reichard) Long. A few pages further into the album, we see “sister Laura Shafer Welty” (1840-1917), wife of David Welty (1832-1916), Nora Welty’s father, and then “my father Alexander Shafer” (1809-1893). Alexander Shafer’s second wife was Catherine Long (1818-1890), one of Rev. David Long’s siblings.

So the owner of the album was one of the four siblings of Laura A. (Shafer) Welty. Another photo is identified as “sister Annie Shafer” (1852-1904). Other siblings were Estella (Shafer) Coffman,  Clara Ellen (Shafer) Slifer, and Charles A. Shafer.

Alexander Shafer was married twice: Clara, Laura and Charles were his children by his first wife, Leah Sarah Eakle (1816-1848); Annie and and Estella were his children by his second wife, Catherine Long. My money is on Estella (Shafer) Coffman as the original owner of the album.

In documenting the people in this venerable, once-cherished album, I begin where the owner began–with Rev. David Long.

This later David Long (1820-1897) appears in Henry’s history of the Brethren in Maryland as a revered leader of the Manor congregation. Son of  wealthy Washington County farmer and miller Joseph Long (1792-1852) and Nancy Ann Rowland (1791-1865),  farmer David Long became an elder at age 25 and then a minister at age 30, presiding over the Manor church for 25 years.

Henry relates several anecdotes about David Long to convey his character, including that Long once bought and freed all the slaves at a slave sale.

Long is said to have delivered the sermon in the Mumma Brethren church the night before the great battle at Antietam in September 1862. This simple white-washed structure became a part of collective American memory as “the Dunker church.“

David and Mary Long had 12 children. Joseph, Walter, Orville and Victor became Brethren ministers; three daughters, Susan, Elizabeth and Catherine, married Brethren ministers: Susan married Eli Yourtee; Elizabeth married Emanuel David Kendig; Catherine married Seth F. Myers.  By my count, David and Mary Long had 48 grandchildren scattered throughout western Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kansas, Missouri and California.

The A. L. Rogers studio operator who created this portrait of Rev. Long used the popular vignette style, which burns out the background of the sitter.

As I’ve written about in my blog Cardtography, Albert Long Rogers  (1853-1934) owned studios in Westminster and Baltimore, Maryland, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as well as  in Hagerstown.

The portrait, taken in Rogers’ Hagerstown location, depicts a full-bearded Rev. Long in his later years, showing many wrinkles, but with eyes still clear and intelligent. His clothing is simple and unadorned, reflecting the back-to-basics values of the Brethren.

Thanks to the work of many dedicated volunteers, I have been able to find 99 graves of Longs, Shafers, Weltys, Reichards, Slifers, Fahrneys, Boyds, Eakles and more, on findagrave.com. All 18 portraits I acquired have been posted to their memorials there.

The Hathi Trust and Google have made the entire digitized History of the Brethren Church in Maryland available on the web.

A “Genial and Courteous Demeanor”: Peter J. Adams of Hagerstown

With his well cared-for wool suit and his neatly trimmed white beard, Peter J. Adams appears the very picture of  affable respectability.

The operator  in Albert Long Rogers‘ Hagerstown studio chose the popular if conventional vignetted bust style to capture Adams’ amiable personality in this 1880s cabinet card photograph.

Peter J. Adams (1818-1889) never made the pages of the news; the Adams family of Hagerstown barely rates a brief mention in Thomas Williams’1,300-page History of Washington County, Maryland.

What we know of Adams comes mainly from his obituary, published in the Hagertown Herald and Torch Light on 3 October 1889.

A Lutheran and a Democrat, Adams served for 12 years as a deputy to the Clerk of the Circuit Court, “where he established a large acquaintance and made many friends.”

He was an early member of the Potomac Lodge of Odd Fellows and a long-time teacher in the Sunday School of St. John’s Lutheran Church, Hagerstown.

Beyond the fact that he was born near Mercersburg, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, little is available about his life or his ancestry.

By trade a carpenter, Adams is said to have settled in the Leitersburg area of Washington County with his parents around 1832; he married Elizabeth Butler about 1841, and with her had two children: printer and Hagerstown Daily News publisher John Underwood Adams (1841-1911) and Martha Florence Adams.

Corroborating information helped me make a confident identification: On the back of this cabinet card is written “Frisby Weaver’s uncle.”

The connection is through Elizabeth Butler, whose sister, Catherine Butler (1823-1887), married Leitersburg area blacksmith J. Henry Weaver (1811-1893), father of farmer Frisby M. Weaver (1845-1913).

Peter Adams’ son John surfaces in Washington County history as co-publisher of the Hagerstown Daily News, first with George H. Nock in 1873 and then with William S. Herbert (History of Washington County, Maryland, vol. 1).

According to John’s obituary, John U. Adams began his career as an apprentice at the Hagertown Mail. Aside from his vocation, Adams’ two other forays into public life were an appointment as Deputy Stamp Collector during Grover Cleveland’s administration, and a two-year stint as Magistrate.

John U. Adams’ daughter, Sarah I. Adams (1869-1963), was a widely liked and respected teacher and librarian in the Washington County schools.

Another daughter, Gertrude Adams (1875-1956), married well-known Hagerstown druggist Harry Robert Rudy Sr. (1873-1941) of the firm of Rudy & Meredith, whose drugstore was situated on the Hotel Hamilton Block in Hagerstown.

It is hard to pin down the period during which Rogers operated in Hagerstown. In its entry on photographer William B. King the History of Washington County says that Rogers’ Hagerstown studio was located at  48 W. Washington Street, and that King bought it from Rogers in 1887. But according to the Biographical Annals of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, volume 1, Rogers conducted a photography business in Hagerstown from 1887 to about 1890.

Whether taken before or after 1887, the photograph depicts Adams as an elderly man, so a mid- to late-1880s date for this cabinet card makes sense.

Thanks to the Washington County Free Library for providing John Underwood Adams’ obituary, and as always, to the many diligent and generous family history researchers and grave documenters of ancestry.com and findagrave.com.

Postscript: Jill Craig of the Western Maryland  Regional Library alerted me to Gertrude Adams Rudy’s painting of the Washington County Free Library book wagon.

Joe Hammersla and the Pryor Boys, King Studio, Hagerstown

This cabinet card photograph of a group of men drew me with its appealing sense of playful, relaxed spontaneity and emotional expressiveness, rare qualities in nineteenth century photographs.

Taken at the studio of William Brown King in Hagerstown, Maryland, this portrait also attracted me because of the identifications on the back: Scott Pryor, James Pryor, Clinton Draper, John Pryor, and, mysteriously, the name “Hammerslea.”

Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900 dates King photos marked 46 & 48 W. Washington Street, Hagerstown, to the period 1891-1901. This gave me a rough way to gauge the birth dates of the men. The younger men had to be in their early to mid-twenties, so they would have been born in the 1860s-1870s, and the elderly central figure couldn’t have been born much later than  the 1840s.

So, off to ancestry.com I went to start researching possible candidates. I ended up creating a tree for the Pryor family, eventually focusing on the descendants of Jacob Pryor (1805-1889), a Frederick County farm laborer and stave-maker.

His son, John Emmanuel Pryor, had in turn three sons who are good candidates for the three young Pryors in this photo.

John Emmanuel Pryor was a shoemaker who lived in the Hauvers district of Frederick County, Md. His sons, Millard Scott Pryor (1860-1937), John Tracy Pryor (1862-1944), and James Albert Pryor (1872-1919), fit the bill.

Millard, who sometimes went by Scott M. Pryor, married Carrie Redman, and worked as a laborer in the Catoctin district of Frederick County. He eventually got work as a track sweeper, but on these modest means raised seven children.

Brother John Tracy Pryor scraped by as a day laborer. He lost his wife, Alice Swope, before 1900 and was left with two children, romantically named Commodore Perry Pryor and Beatrice Pryor. No doubt John’s mother, with whom they lived, helped to raise them. Their situation improved after 1920: He owned his own farm, and his son Commodore Perry had a good job as a mail carrier.

James Albert Pryor, who worked as a molder in a machine shop, raised six children on Ringgold Road with his wife Carrie Winters Pryor.

Young Clinton Albert Draper (1872-1960) related via marriage to the Pryors via his aunt Urillia E. Draper’s marriage to Robert E. Pryor, turned out to be the adventurer of the group: With his wife, Irene Toms Draper, he lived in Iowa and North Dakota before emigrating to Saskatchewan, Canada in 1916 with their three children, Franklin, Emeline, and John.

Clinton Albert Draper appears on Canadian voter lists as a farmer in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1935 and 1945, and then in Midale, Saskatchewan in the 1950s; he died in Midale, and may be buried there.

But the star of the show is clearly Joseph Absalom Hammersla (1832-1912). Looking away to the left of the camera, he relaxes in the center of all this crowding, boyish energy like a man who knows where he belongs in the world and rests content.

I’m confident in my identification because another researcher on ancestry.com posted a different portrait that matches mine unmistakably.

A prosperous miller, he was born in Frederick, Maryland and died in Berkeley County, West Virginia. During the Civil War, he served on the Union side with the 1st Maryland Cavalry Potomac Home Brigade. According to an article on old mills in the Martinsburg, West Virginia Journal, Joseph Hammersla bought the Eversole mill on Tullis’s Branch in 1891, and descendants operated it to grind grain and cut lumber into the 1920s.

I also found an advertisement in the Hagerstown, Md. Herald and Torchlight for “Old Uncle Joe Hammersla’s Saloon,” dated 27 September 1876. The saloon offered “frogs, pigs feet, tripe,” and “Genuine Milwaukee Lager,” among other delights, “under the Lyceum,” a lecture and performance hall located near the Washington County Courthouse on West Washington Street.

He was appointed postmaster of Littletown, Berkeley County, West Virginia in 1895. He and his  second wife Indiana Morris Hammersla (1848-1929) are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, Md.

Hammersla moved to Hedgesville, Berkeley County, West Virginia, between 1870 and 1880, so this photograph may have been taken on a visit back to Hagerstown.

My authority on the life and career of William Brown King is Stephen Recker, author of Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them.

Brown trained in the Baltimore studio of James S. Cummins. Brown came to Hagerstown with his wife, Lelia Hall King, and their son William F. King, in the late 1880s.

Both King and his wife had fathers who’d served in the Civil War: King’s on the Union side and Hall’s on the Confederate.  King’s father, Robert G. King (1834-1886), was a major in Co. C, Purnell’s Legion, Maryland Infantry. Lelia’s father, James Reid Hall (1830-1904), was a sergeant with Co. A, 40th Virginia Infantry. The two had faced each other in some of the same battles, including the Seige of Petersburg.

All of the subjects in King’s portrait are dressed in rough work clothes and scuffed boots, perhaps reflecting the spontaneous nature of the photograph. They lean together and on one another, affectionate and informal and filled with life. While we may never know what brought these five men together on that day, we still feel the glow of their vigorous humanity.

Hubert Slifer Smith at Work and Leisure

It’s unusual to find two photographs of the same individual–and even more unusual to find an “occupational” photo. So I was very excited when I found these two for sale, both idenfied in ink on the reverse as “Hubert Smith.”

The first, taken at Academy Studio, Cumberland, Maryland, shows Hubert dressed as a baker, holding one of the implements of his trade.

It wasn’t hard to locate a Hubert Slifer Smith (1885-1949) occupation baker, in the census records for Cumberland.

Born in Boonsboro, Washington County, Maryland to Omar S. Smith and Emma F. Houpt, Hubert Smith (1885-1949) married Scottish immigrant Elizabeth Walker. He and Elizabeth lived in Cumberland, where Hubert worked as a baker.

In 1917, when he registered for the draft, he was working for John M. Streett.

Streett had two bakeries, one in Frostburg, and one in Cumberland, at 80 Centre Street and later at 200-204 Centre Street. I’ve found adversisements in trade publications for Streett’s Famous Mother’s Bread; he also called his business Pure Food Bakery. An undated photograph in the Herman and Stacia Miller Collection shows Streett’s bakery with the proprietor and his workers standing out front.

Streett boasted about the cleanliness of his establishment, a feature dwelt upon in the Baker’s Review of 1915. “Leading grocers throughout Cumberland and ‘up the creek’ sell and recommend Streett’s Mother’s Bread,” said an ad in The Catholic Red Book of Western Maryland.

In the first photo, the skinny, slope-shouldered youth, almost lost in his uniform, wears an elaborate ribbon on his gleaming white shirt, but I haven’t been able to make out what it says. My best guess for the occasion of the portrait is one of Cumberland’s Labor Day parades, in which groups of tradesmen and craftsmen marched, dressed in the uniforms of their occupations.

The elaborate pin with a ribbon and badge resembles  old lodge badges of the Knights of Pythias and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows that I’ve seen.

Confident manhood replaces callow youth in the portrait of Hubert Smith taken at the McCune Studio in Hagerstown, Maryland. Smith proudly shows off his dress clothes, including a top coat, gloves, and a natty homberg hat.

The McCune Studio, like the Academy Studio, isn’t listed in Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900. But Charles Brewer McCune (1869-1953) is memorialized on findagrave.com with his obituary and a photograph of his grave at Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown. According to that obituary, McCune practiced professional photography in Hagerstown for 35 years.

Both of these cabinet cards are non-standard sizes. The earlier card  mount measures 3″ x 6″  and the later McCune card is 5″ x 8″ –perhaps chosen to emphasize his lanky build. Both mounts, with their neutral colors and understated blind-embossed advertising marks reflect the more refined card portrait style of the early 1900s.

The Smiths’ lives were marked by the singular tragedy of deaths of their only child and grandchild.

Doris E. Smith (b. 1909, Cumberland, Md.) married handsome US Naval Academy graduate Robert Allen Joseph English (1899-1969), and they had a daughter, Roberta, in 1943.

Three years later, with her husband in Europe on extended duty with General Eisenhower’s staff, Doris killed herself and her daughter using gas from the oven in their Arlington, Virginia home.

Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them

Thanks to a Hagerstown pal, I’ve acquired and am devouring Steve Recker’s wonderful new book Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them.

A Washington County native, Recker has researched the lives of all the major photographers who took photos of Antietam battlefield: Elias Marken Recher, David Bachrach, W. B. King, J. H. Wagoner, and more.

Recker carefully investigated how each photographer came to take their pictures, and has painstakingly worked to understand what is depicted in each. Also included are some rarely-seen images of the photographers themselves. Some of these cartes de visite and stereoviews have never been seen before.

And you can’t get it on Amazon–only at area bookstores and at Recker’s site, Virtual Antietam. So virtually run, don’t walk, to his site and grab a copy before they sell out.

Read a Q & A with the author on John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

Read an article about Recker and his career in the Hagerstown Daily Mail.

“Death Came Softly”: Rev. Cornelius L. Keedy, Hagerstown, Maryland

Those are the first words of the headline on Rev. C. L. Keedy’s obituary in the Hagerstown Daily Mail of 25 March 1911. The paper made much of the gentle manner of Rev. Keedy’s passing. It was what used to be known as a “good death”: peaceful and without suffering.

This notion of the good Christian death was very different from mid-19th century accounts that stressed, says  historian Patricia Jalland, the spiritual nature of suffering and its ability to bring dying sinners to God :

“The ordeal could provide punishment for past sins, while also purifying, testing and strengthening the Christian faith of sufferer and attendants. . .[Christan writers’] emphasis was usually on the spiritual struggle and ultimate triumph rather than the physical ordeal” (Death in the Victorian Family, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 51-53)

At the end of the Victorian period, however,”the evangelical model of the good death declined in influence. . . . The decline in Evangelical piety and passion in the late Victorian period was paralleled with an increase in anxiety about the physical suffering of dying” (Death, 53).

Those who mourned Cornelius Keedy, Lutheran minister, physician and long-time president and proprietor of Hagerstown Female Seminary, could take comfort in the ease of his passing.

He had died  “sitting in his natural position when he was in the habit of reading, the paper in his hand, his arm on the table. His features were composed and peaceful, indicating that death was instantaneous, occurring without a struggle or any pain.”

This easy death might be taken as an indication that the longtime Lutheran educator had, in Christian terms, found his heavenly reward for an exemplary life. The obituary writer described him as “widely known” and “prominent in religious and educational circles;” the writer claims that “the news of his death produced a shock throughout the community”–but we really don’t know what kind of a man he was.

Cornelius Keedy (1834-1911) was one of eight children born near Rohrersville, Md. to prosperous Washington County farmers Daniel Keedy (1799-1876) and Sophia (Miller) Keedy (1809-1880). Rev. Keedy graduated from Gettysburg College in 1857 and was ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1859. He  served Lutheran congregations in Johnstown, Waynesboro, and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Barren Hill, Pa.

He married Elizabeth Wyatt Marbourg (1840-1920), daughter of successful Johnstown merchant Alexander Marbourg, in 1860.

In 1863 Keedy earned a degree in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. He practiced, according to his obituary, for about five years in Washington, Iowa, where some of his wife’s relations had settled.

But it was as president and owner of the Hagerstown Female Seminary,  later renamed Kee-Mar College, that Rev. Keedy was chiefly known.

The school, located at E. Antietam and King streets, had been established in 1853 by the Maryland Synod of the Lutheran Church.  Keedy purchased it in 1878, and according to J. Thomas Scharf, “continued to improve it until it has become one of the most beautiful and attractive places in any of the middle states” (J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland, v. 2, 1882, p. 1159).

“The seminary stands upon a commanding eminence just east of Hagerstown, from which may be had a magnificent view of hill and dale and of the town outstretched below. The main edifice is an imposing brick structure, four stories in height, and built in the Romanesque style. There are three wings of equal height with the main building. The grounds, comprising an area of 11 acres, are thickly set with upwards of one hundred handsome evergreens, and about five hundred trees of other varieties. Choice shrubbery marks in graceful lines numerous picturesque divisions of the inclosoure, and over the entire surface is spread a bright carpet of rich green-sward.”

The school had a fairly serious and  ambitious curriculum for its young women,  including ancient and modern languages, English literature, and music.

Mrs. Keedy served as principal, and she may have also had a considerable financial stake in the school. F. J. Halm published a song entitled “The Hagerstown Female Seminary March,” dedicated to Mrs. Keedy, in 1877.

Hagerstown Female Seminary was created as part of a wave of enthusiasm about women’s education that swept the Lutheran church after David F. Bittle published his 111-page “Plea for Female Education” in 1851 (Richard W. Solberg, Lutheran Higher Education in North America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1985, p. 102). Rev. Bittle even resigned his pastorate to raise funds and support for the proposed school.

After the college closed in 1911, the buildings were occupied by Washington County Hospital. The structures on the site were demolished in 2012, and the city is currently considering how to use the open space.

This cabinet card photograph, taken at the Hagerstown studio of Bascom W. T. Phreaner (1845-1932) is dated in pen on the reverse “1861-1862,” but Keedy’s white hair and wrinkles suggest a later date. Phreaner maintained a photographic studio in Hagerstown from 1866 to 1901.

For this portrait, the photographer chose a vignetted, head-and-shoulders composition, with the sitter facing a quarter turn away from the camera. The pose created deep shadows above eyes that look slightly upward, as if Keedy were thinking about his many responsibilities: four children to educate and provide for, and a school full of 150 lively adolescent young ladies to watch over.

Rev. Cornelius L. Keedy and Elizabeth Marbourg Keedy are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown. Their children were Sarah (Keedy) Updegraff, James Marbourg Keedy, Wyatt M. Keedy, and Cornelius King Keedy.

My thanks to the wonderful Washington County Free Library and to the Hagerstown Neighborhood Development Partnership for the research on Hagerstown Female Seminary posted on their blog [re]Develop Hagerstown.

Mrs. Nora Welty Barnheisel At Rest

According to penciled notes on the back, this oversize McCune Studio card photograph of Nora Welty was “received at Fairplay May 28th, 1905.”

Relaxed and at ease before the photographer’s gaze, Miss Welty wears a  wide “walking skirt” and a silk shirtwaist with a pleated bodice, overlaid with a lovely drop-shoulder lace yoke.

Daughter of Fairplay, Maryland undertaker David Welty and Laura A. Shafer Welty, Nora married Hagerstown coal mine operator William Garfield Barnheisel later that year.

In 1916, the journal Coal Age mentions Barnheisel as president of the newly-organized Casselman River Smokeless Coal Company of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The company, Coal Age rreported, planned to develop mines on 2,000 acres of land it owned in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

Nora grew up in Fairplay, a rural area of Washington County, Maryland.  After her marriage, she lived with her husband and two daughters, Margaret and Jane, in Hagerstown.

Barnheisel appears to have sold his interest in Casselman Coal rather quickly: In 1930, the family lived in San Jose, California, and William Barnheisel described his occupation as “investor.”

Nora died in Santa Monica, California in January 1951, and William followed her to the grave in September of the same year. According to her obituary in the Hagerstown Morning Herald, Nora is interred in the mausoleum at Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, Maryland.

Charles Brewer McCune (1869-1953) operated a photography studio in Hagerstown for some 35 years. Like Nora Welty Barnheisel, his remains rest in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown.

From Susan Bear’s Album: Martin L. Hightman

It’s tricky, trying to glue the fragments  of a family back together through photographs.

This carte de visite by an unidentified photographer is one of only 11 in the Susan Bear album that has some identifying text. In the Washington County, Maryland Bear/Baer family tree I’ve constructed so far, the surname Heightman had not come up. Only when I searched ancestry.com records with a different spelling, Hightman, and without the initials M. L., did something slip into place.

A Martin L. Hightman was born into a Burkittsville, Frederick County family of dry goods merchants about 1852.  Burial records for other Burkittsville Hightmans brought up the grave records of his parents: John Hightman (1825-1891) and M. Elizabeth (Bear) Hightman (1825-1913).

One of Susan Bear’s sisters was named Mary Elizabeth, and her birth year, about 1826, fit. Was there a record of a marriage between a Mary Elizabeth Bear and a John Hightman that fit the time frame?

There was. Mary Elizabeth Bear and John Hightman married in Frederick County on 2 October 1851.

This photograph had to be of Mary Elizabeth Bear Hightman’s eldest son, Martin Luther  Hightman (1852-1891). It was, judging by the subject’s age and the style of the carte, probably taken in the early to mid-1860s.

Why it lacks a photographer’s imprint is hard to say. Certainly the photographers of Hagerstown and Frederick of the era–E. M. Recher, Jacob Byerly and others–promoted their work vigorously with a variety of advertising backmarks. The photographer may have been one of the many itinerants who worked during the Civil War. Or it could have been a copy.

Like his father, Martin L. Hightman became a Burkittsville dry goods merchant. He was also the village’s postmaster. He and his wife Lovetta Arnold had five children: Frederick Arnold, Cora, John Roy, Harrison Martin, and Mabell E. Hightman.

Frederick obtained a bachelor’s degree at Gettysburg College in 1902 and graduated from Gettysburg Theological Seminary in 1905.  In 1908, Rev. Frederick Arnold Hightman  (1876-1967) founded the northeast Baltimore congregation that became Ephiphany Evangelical Lutheran Church. The stone church in the Gothic Revival style still flourishes on Raspe Avenue just south of Belair Road.

Martin and Lovetta Hightman are buried in Burkittsville Union Cemetery in Frederick County. Rev. Hightman is buried in Moreland Memoral Park, Parkville, Maryland, a few miles from his church.

From Susan Bear’s Album: Mr. and Mrs. Martin Bear

Taken at the Hagerstown, Maryland studio of Elias Marken Recher, this carte de visite photograph was found in an album that belonged to their daughter, Susan Bear (1836-1909) of Hagerstown.

On the reverse is written “Mr. and Mrs. Martin Bear’s pictures taken from a Ferrotype [aka tintype] June 18th 1872”.

Well-to-do Maryland-born  farmer Martin Bear or Baer (1799-1872) and Elizabeth (Stahl) Bear (1795-1875) had seven daughters: Christianna (b. 1824), Mary Elizabeth (b. 1825), Lydia (1828-1865), Sarah Catherine (b. 1831), Louisa (1834-1888), Susan and Anna (1839-1927) .

Only four of the seven Bear girls married that I can determine: Lydia married Washington County farmer William Wisherd, Louisa married a Troup,  Mary Elizabeth married Burkittsville, Maryland dry goods merchant John Hightman or Heightman, and Sarah married Williamsport grocer Caleb F. Eakle.

According to the 1878 advertisement of the trustees’ sale of Martin Bear’s estate, Bear owned at his death 208 acres about five miles from Hagerstown, where the Williamsport and Greencastle Turnpike crossed the Western Turnpike. The estate included a stone house, orchards, a well, a stream, a barn, etc.

Although I have not yet been able to determine Martin Bear’s parentage, I am guessing that two others who lived close to him–Isaac Bear (b. abt. 1790, Md.) and John Bear (b. abt. 1796, Md.) were his brothers or close relations.

Another Bear/Baer named John M. Bear (1822-1878), who was probably a close relation, emigrated quite early to Pine Creek Township, Ogle County, Illinois. The evidence for the connection is the presence in Susan Bear’s album of six tintype portraits of John M. Bear’s children: Isaac Martin Bear, John Buchman Bear, Levi Rowland Bear, Rose Miranda Bear, Lilly Almira or Elmira Bear, and Mary Kate Bear (more about this family in future posts).

Susan’s jewel-like album, studded with white beads and held by metal clasps, measures about 4-1/2″ x 6″. It is inscribed on the flyleaf “Christmas gift / Presented to Susan Bear / Dec 25th 1869 by / Mr. L . . . R . . . . . “

The Bear family may have scattered to Ogle County and beyond, but the affection Martin Bear felt for his wife, even after a long and arduous life together, still feels fresh in this wonderful image.

Martin Bear and Elizabeth (Stahl) Bear are both buried in Riverview Cemetery, Williamsport, Washington County, Maryland.