Photographs are particularly rich with all sorts of historical clues about what life was like in an earlier era. Since the daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of Civil War battlefields when photojournalists published some of the first images that broke away from the static “painterly” format of early photography, we’ve been poring over them with magnifying lenses and insatiable, gnawing curiosity. We look for signs that these captured people dressed, ate, slept, loved, worked, and played like us- or something like it, at least. We look to see that they are connected to us, somehow; that we understand their purposes and ambitions, and through a patch on a skirt, the jaunty grin of a picket fence, and a bead of sweat easing down a stevedore’s face, we see through the film of time and distance that they are indeed human, after all. Often, too, we see that not so much has changed.

This image, entitled “Hut of Oyster Fisherman, Chesapeake Bay near Sherwood, MD USA” is a stereoscope card produced in 1905, and it comes from the photography collections of the Library of Congress (source). Made to fit into a 19th century stereoscope device that was held up to the viewer’s face and pointed at a source of light, the effect produced was one of a three-dimensional “real” view.

The picture of the Sherwood waterman would have been one of a series purchased by theme- you could buy shots of Yellowstone National Park, Niagara Falls, scenes of orchards or vistas of cities or lakes. Some stereoscope images were topical- like a stranded U boat from World War I. Others were comical, or even risque (but very tamely so). The Chesapeake series would have been the sort that illuminated a picturesque landscape, peppered with rustic shots of working class people like our oysterman. Members of the burgeoning middle classes could have enjoyed an evening of diversion looking at pictures like these, popping out into vivid relief and providing a contrast to their own overstuffed, over-draped interiors.

It’s autumn in this image. Two women chat with the oysterman of the description. But he isn’t oystering today- he’s hunting. Shotgun slung over his shoulder, our oysterman has probably returned from a morning spent hunting waterfowl on an usually warm fall day. In the distance, a fleet of waiting log canoes are moored in in Waterhole Cove. It’s not a work day, or they would all be out, plying their trade on the Miles River or the Bay. But instead, the furled sails and their waiting canoes are floating like dried leaves on the slight chop of the inlet. It’s probably a Sunday, a day for watermen to go to church with their families and eat a big, hot dinner at home, or plunge into the marshes like their counterparts in other fishing villages like Wittman, Bozman, McDaniel, and Bellevue to see what the tide and wind would bring.

Small communities of African-American watermen, their wives, and families clustered in protected coves like this one throughout the Chesapeake. After Emancipation, many African-American men found steady work on the water, where the pay for your catch was the same for everyone, regardless of race. It was hard work and a life with no luxuries, as we can see by the size and state of the small dwelling clinging to the ramshackle waterfront. But many of the Bay’s riches were free, and there for the taking, if you had a boat and some know-how. The waterways pulsed with life, the air filled seasonally with the cries of dinner on the wing, and for these people, it all sat there at their doorstep.

Back in a gaslit apartment building in Baltimore, a woman lowered the stereoscope from her face and sighed for a life that seemed so far away. And her modern counterpart looks away from her computer to the harbor of St Michaels and thinks that it all hasn’t changed, so much.

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• stereoscope

Like dutiful children all over the country, I spent time with my mother yesterday. I brought her a bouquet from my the petal explosions in my flowerbeds, and spent some quality time with the woman who gave me life, along with a penchant for irreverence, as the fifth-generation link in my Chesapeake family. Mothers are important, and it’s always good to stop and consider your gratitude to the woman who bore and raised you.

We also owe a debt of gratitude to a different Chesapeake mother, on Mother’s Day; the source of our summer picnics, our satiation from a pile of the Bay’s finest, a medium for one of the most deliciously fiery spices known to man. The Chesapeake sponge crab.

                                           Source

Each of these expectant females is laden with a whopping 750,000 to 8 million eggs. They’re a crustacean carrying the equivalent of a year’s population boom in China. It’s pretty wild stuff, and it gives you a sense of how big an impact the moratorium on female harvests from a few years ago had. As any Museum-visiting student will tell you, we need the mommies if we want the babies. And that moratorium on catching sponge crabs is especially important when the babies happen to be so delicious, and drive so much of our summertime economy here in the Chesapeake.

                                              source

The survival of sponge crabs, and the success of their great migration at the end of the summer from the mudflats of our rivers to the salty confluence of the Bay and ocean’s meeting point, is pivotal to our summertime picnic table’s success. As each inseminated female makes her way to the briny mouth of the Chesapeake, she runs a gauntlet of nets, pots, traps, and the occasional dead zone, sidling ever closer to her winter hibernation grounds. Once she succeeds, she’ll nestle in the saline sands of the Bay’s terminal point, waiting for the warmer waters of spring as her eggs develop from a bright orange to black. Watermen in Virginia used to harvest females at this point, as they lay in expectant stasis in the wintertime brackish depth.  They would use dredges to unearth the females from their fluffy mud comforters, and would sell the sponge crabs, resplendent with eggs, to restaurants that simmered them in a decadent she-crab soup.

One of our historic vessels here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Old Point, was part of that wintertime fleet that went out searching for the lower Bay’s hibernating matrons. As the crab population dropped, so too did log-built crab dredges like her, as the sponge crab catch was limited and ultimately discontinued for good. Nowadays, Old Point spends her time docked alongside our small boat shed, as her would-be catch winkles away along the bottom unscathed. And that sponge crab crab limit, while putting boats like Old Point out of business, has exponentially increased the crab populations in the Bay.

So, today, the day after Mother’s Day, send a little prayer of thanks to some of the Bay’s most prodigiously-producing mothers. Because they made it from the mouth of the Bay to the river and back, carrying a glistening burden of apricot-colored life, you can look forward to bushels bursting at the sides this summer with the tasty little children she bore at the Bay’s beginning.

The sassafras is not a showy tree. Tucked in along the scrubby areas where forest meets meadow, Sassafras albidum grow in congenial thickets of their ilk, tolerating poor soils but yearning for light and the opportunity to propagate their seeds via the flocking birds that consume their fall berries. The most visible trait of the sassafras tree is its distinctively tri-lobed leaf that looks like a dinosaur’s footprint. At one point, they were related to evergreens, but the sassafras was open to change, and survived as a deciduous remnant of a tenacious primordial forebear.

But the sassafras tree has a secret. Where the trunk plunges tendrils of spidery roots into the sandy loam, something is brewing. Simultaneously earthy and light, spicy and sweet, complex yet distinctive, deep in the veins of the sassafras a nectar harvested by Indians and colonists alike is slowly emerging: safrole. A pungent oil produced by the sassafras tree, safrole is the sassafras’ self-supplied insecticide. It permeates the wood of the tree, especially in the roots, which exude high concentrations of the strongly aromatic oil. Humans have dug up these fragrant roots of sassafras saplings for thousands of years to expose their gripping follicles to the green light of the understory and harvest the bounty for medicinal purposes. The trademark scent of the sassafras root is immediately identifiable upon first encounter- in fact, you’re probably pretty familiar with it already. It’s root beer.

      Homemade sassafras root beer fermenting in the bottle. source

Today, the flavoring for root beer is a chemical substitute for the original sassafras-derived ingredient, due to fears of its carcinogenic properties. It’s ironic that we would avoid consuming sassfras for health reasons, when for centuries, that was the whole reason people boiled it in tea, pounded it into powder for capsules, smoked it like a woody cigarillo, and yes, mixed it into frothy soda water with a few mounded spoonfuls of sugar. Since the era of the Indian, Chesapeake residents have been infusing sassfras into every conceivable medium, searching for natural remedies to cure their complaints. In an era before formalized medicine, sassafras was a panacea for a world riddled with disease.

As described in Rafinesque’s 1830 Medical Flora, there wasn’t an ailment that the miracle plant couldn’t soothe:

“[Sassafras is used] in opthalmia, dysentery, gravel, catarrh…as stimulant, antispasmodic, sudorific, and depurative…in rheumatism, cutaneous diseases,
secondary syphilis, typhus fevers… to purge..the body in the spring …for purification of the blood… leaves to make glutinous gombos…buds to flavor beers and spirits…useful in scurvy, cachexy, flatulence. bark … smoked like tobacco. Bowls made of the wood, drives bugs and moths.”

Valued as a cure-all, sassafras root even enjoyed a brief golden era as one of the top exports from the new Chesapeake colonies, as Europeans sought (and ultimately failed) to find exotic treatments to cure the sexually transmitted disease du jour, the “French Pox”. Spreading voraciously throughout the continent in the 16th century, syphilis was typically treated with mercury, a remedy that could often be more horrible than the disease itself. Sassafras, a much gentler option, was therefore understandably popular in spite of the fact that it was probably completely ineffective.

One of the earliest explorers to document his discoveries along the Chesapeake’s terminal connection with the ocean was Thomas Herriott. He observed the native people ingesting the sassafras’ pungent roots, and remarked in his 1588 book, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia:

“Sassafras, called by the inhabitants Winauk, a kinde of wood of most pleasant and sweete smel; and of most rare vertues in phisick for the cure of many diseases.”

Some of the early maps even included depictions of the redolent resource, like John Ferrar’s 1667 map entitled A mapp of Virginia Discovered to ye hills:

Sassafras remained popular in Europe as a remedy for various ailments throughout the colonial period, and the majority of it was exported from the lush, humid forests of the Chesapeake tidewater. 76.5 tons of sassafras were imported to London in 1770 alone, to the tune of 28 pounds per ton. More sassafras stands were discovered as the colonial footprint expanded, and the price of Europe’s favorite snake oil plummeted. But the taste for sassafras had been whetted, and sassafras was favored as a distinctive flavoring even as its popularity as a literal root medicine waned.

Many 19th century concoctions featured sassafras root as a key ingredient. Salop was a popular late-night warming beverage for all classes in London, and the piping restorative was sold by street vendors from steaming samovars. The licorice scent of the sassafras was savored over large white bowls which warmed the hands as the liquid was sipped. An memoir titled Unctuous Memories from 1863 remarks of the experience:

“Suddenly we came upon a still, whence arose the steam of Early Purl, or Salop, flattering our senses. Ye Gods ! what a breakfast ! …I feel its diffusive warmth stealing through me. I taste its unaccustomed and exquisite flavour. Tea is great, coffee greater ; chocolate, properly made, is for epicures; but these are thin and characterless compared with the salop swallowed in 1826. That was nectar.”

According to this ad, even 19th century babies (and their dogs) drank root beer! source

On the other side of the pond, Americans continued to craft sassafras into all sorts of dishes and drinks, and was even utilized to make a kind of rich, red small beer, the alcoholic predecessor to its later sweetened counterpart. Teas, tisanes, jellies and ice cream were mediums for the earthy taste of the safrole. But the most long-lasting of sassafras’ legacy is, of course, root beer. Marketed to the masses for the first time as a soft drink at the 1876 Centennial Exposition by Philadelphia druggist Charles E. Hires, Hires Root Beer retained its whiff of the medicinal and was promoted as a “temperance” drink and a cough cure.

Today, root beer has been stripped of the ingredient that makes it so distinctive: safrole. Feared to be a carcinogen, safrole is now substituted in food and drink with a chemical additive that recreates the flavor of the Chesapeake forest. And the sassafras stands throughout the Bay sigh greenly in relief, knowing their secretly sweet roots will remain deep in their sandy swales, undisturbed by those wishing to savor the taste of a tree’s essence.

(ant to read more about the role of the sassafras tree in early colonial Chesapeake exports? Check out this article.

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• Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
• Chesapeake Bay
• environment
• colonial period
• sassafras

Early spring is a quiet time at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Since so much of our campus is outside, most of our visitors come see us in the warm months, when you can arrive at the Museum by boat, or in flip-flops, padding down from St. Michaels’ main historic area. The cold months are usually a planning time, an improvement time, when you can hunker down and research, write grants, develop new programs. This is also a great time to leave St. Michaels and see a little of what the outside world and its historical connections have to offer; to “sharpen your tools”, if you will.

Recently, a group of museum volunteers and I headed over to Baltimore to check out some the vessels and landmarks at Historic Ships of Baltimore. Historic Ships, like CBMM, is a non-traditional museum, where the exhibit spaces are floating in the harbor rather than the stereotype of a single building with art-lined walls. Focusing on ships and artifacts with military history, the collections of Historic Ships are as varied in theme and era as they are location in Baltimore Harbor. They’ve got a sloop-of-war from 1855, a lightship from 1930, and a 19th century lighthouse, and those are just the things we explored. There is a lot more on top of that, if you’re in Baltimore and feeling adventurous: http://bit.ly/8GXNBb

The first one is hard to miss: The USS Constellation. Most interestingly used (amongst other things) to capture illegal slave ships off the coast of Africa, she also has a great story of a double identity: for a long time, she was wrongly assumed to be the frigate Constellation built in 1797, famously built in Baltimore’s Sterret Shipyard and participating in the War of 1812. “Restored” in 1955 to resemble the 1797 vessel,  the confusion started with the Navy and continued on down the line, according to the definitve report on the matter, “Fouled Anchors: the Constellation Question Answered.” From the report:

“The first Constellation, was designed by Joshua Humphreys and Josiah Fox in 1795 and built by David Stodder in Baltimore. Completed in 1797,it saw considerable service before it was brought to Gosport Navy Yard, dismantled in 1853 and her timbers auctioned off. At about the same time, the second Constellation was built in Gosport about 600 feet away. The second Constellation was designed by U.S. naval constructor John Lenthall as a completely new ship. The new ship was built simultaneously with the destruction of the old, and employed the old name.

The second Constellation was commissioned in 1855 and saw long service but by 1909 the Navy had confused the 1855 ship with the 1797 one. In 1946 the Navy decided to scrap the ship but citizens, especially from Baltimore, pressed to save her. In 1948 Howard I. Chapelle. a well-known naval architectural historian, revealed that the present ship was built in 1855. The public was confused and turned to the Navy for advice. The Navy did not investigate historical records thoroughly at this time. It based its opinion on the negative findings that it could not locate a document which specifically said that the first Constellation had been destroyed, therefore the Navy had to presume that the present ship was built in 1797.”

That’s a pretty epic historical “uh-oh, ” and one that, in the public consciousness at least, is tenaciously (and mistakenly) memorable.  You can read more about what must have been a pretty embarrassing mix-up on the original document here: www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA241916

            Constellation #1 or Constellation #2, we love her either way.

We also had the pleasure of seeing some familiar faces while exploring Constellation #2 and learning about the crew and officers that lived aboard the ship in her heyday with one of their living history programs reenactor, a former (and very talented) CBMM staffer and intern, Marian Robbins.

Can you guess which one is Marian and which one is the author of this blog? Yes, you think so? The one in the black seaman’s attire is Marian? Very good, gentle reader. It appears your eyesight is just fine.

Other captures from the day in Baltimore:

                       Peerless (but not pier-less) volunteers

View of Baltimore Harbor from the deck of the Constellation, looking towards Federal Hill with the Domino Sugar factory in the distance.

  Rakishly handsome and bewhiskered crew members pose in the mid 19th century.

                   A jungle of hammocks swing from a lower deck.

Listening to the audio tour. It was like touchdown at the airport- everybody was on their own cell phone.

The lightship Chesapeake

Seven Foot Knoll lighthouse, which once housed a head keeper, an assistant keeper (who was also the head keeper’s wife), their four children (one of whom was born in the lighthouse and was summarily nicknamed “Knollie”), and another assistant keeper, is the oldest example of a cast-iron screwpile lighthouse in Maryland. While the interior was much more spacious than our own Hooper Strait Lighthouse at CBMM, it was hard to imagine the keeper and his ever-growing family suffering through an intensely humid Chesapeake summer in the stifling hotbox the iron lighthouse must have become. Also, the idea of being that second assistant keeper, stranded out in the middle of the Chesapeake with another keeper’s small, energetic children, nursing wife, and wailing baby seemed like the best reason for cabin fever and/ or a nervous breakdown that I can imagine.

All in all, it was a wonderful day spent, as the Water Rat said in Wind in the Willows, “simply messing about in boats.” Like every trip away, as much as we enjoyed soaking up the salty history of Baltimore, everyone sighed with satisfaction as the gently curved twin spans of the Bay Bridge and the Eastern Shore, with our own slice of Chesapeake maritime culture, came into view. 

                                            So long, Baltimore!

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• Chesapeake Bay
• Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
• lighthouse
• Constellation
• tall ship
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