The Eastern Shore was also home to two great abolitionists. Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass spent his childhood in Talbot County and started his work life as a slave at an estate near the town of St. Michaels. Judged to have an arrogant attitude, he was sent to the infamous “slave breaker,” Edward Covey. Bearing permanent scars from whippings, Douglass escaped to the North to continue his lifelong pursuit of racial equality.
Harriet Tubman, born in the next county south, led many slaves north on foot, on the Underground Railroad, which passed through the region’s woods, swamps, creeks, and rivers. After her own escape, Tubman returned at least nineteen times to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom, including her aged parents. Harriet Tubman was considered a saint by blacks and a devil by white slaveholders. The bounty placed on her head was $40,000. She was never caught, and as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, she said she “never lost a single passenger.”
In and around the ports of the Chesapeake Bay, black ships’ pilots helped fugitives and white boat captains also smuggled slaves north, sometimes for a bribe. Fleeing slaves traveled the bay so often it became known as Chesapeake Station.
After the war ended, animosity between pro- and antislavery factions of the Methodist Church continued. The Southern Methodists, who during the war were said to climb out the windows of a local church rather than walk under the American flag hanging over the doorway, were offended by the antislavery stance of the mother church. The Northern Methodists, equally critical of the Southern Methodists (citing as just one example the bishop who had refused to relinquish his wife’s slaves), determined to establish a greater presence on the Eastern Shore, including an outpost in Royal Oak. In 1883 they constructed an imposing three-story parsonage, painted white with red sashes and green shutters, for a circuit-riding minister. The foundation was built of brick and solid oak timbers.
A few years later a fine white country church, complete with a graceful steeple and Gothic windows of pearlescent stained glass, was built close by. But the project did not flourish. The parsonage was sold off during the Depression and ten years later the church was abandoned.
By 2000 the church, painted ochre with turquoise trim, was home to an occasional business in used furniture. The roofleaked, siding had fallen away from the steeple, and some of the stained glass was cracked or missing. The parsonage, anchoring the other side of the village a quarter-mile away, retained shreds of white paint but was otherwise in similar dilapidated condition. Partly rented out and partly boarded up, this house that Hugo happened on, for sale by owner, had been on the market for seven years.
The owner returned our third phone call. He reminisced about happy childhood times spent at his grandmother’s house, picking apples, hunting for arrowheads in the fields, and sliding down the steep, frontstairs banister while trying to hold a chamber pot upright. He refused to let the house fall into the wrong hands. Others had made offers, and he had turned them all down. He might sell it to us if we promised to restore it. It was a good house, he said, and a good location.
The tenants offered a different view of its location when we drove out to see the house together for the first time one Friday afternoon. “It’s a real sweet house,” the young woman who met us at the door said. “Of course, some people might be bothered by what goes on around here . . . smuggling, motorcycle gangs, too.”
I glanced past her out to the yard and the garage. She followed my eyes. “They’ll use the garage, nothing we can do about it. They just show up here late at night, fifty, sixty at a time . . .”
“I guess it gets pretty dark around here,” I managed.
As she showed me around the first floor, I asked if she had any idea where these smugglers came from.
“Smugglers? They come in the Tred Avon River and they’re up and down this road all night long. You know it’s them because of how fast they drive. Sometimes they’ll miss the curve and land in the ditch or they’ll slam straight into the fence. That’s how it got all dinged up.”
At night she heard weird sounds coming from the padlocked and supposedly uninhabited second floor. “I don’t know what could be going on up there.” She gathered up her baby from the crib, held him close, and looked upward.
It was quite a performance, aimed at scaring us off, and more than once as she showed us around, Hugo and I exchanged knowing this-won’t-work-after-all glances. Out in the yard the woman kicked at plastic sandwich bags, squished in the mud, which, she said, were a sure sign of drug use on the property.
Walking back through the house I saw an extensive computer setup next to the crib and a table covered with empty beer bottles and packages of sandwich bags. In the garage Hugo reported seeing bales of pink packing peanuts.
Whatever else, she was right about the house itself. Tucked away on a little-known byway, it was a sweet one or at least it had once been sweet. Set on high ground, its faded dignity was still evident in the churchlike windows and the formal, wrought-iron fence that ran across the front of the property. It felt like a place where we could reinvent ourselves.
It didn’t look like a dangerous area, what with the country road, the small, neat houses, wide fields, and woods. Besides we were determined, Hugo and I.
Gossip about the neighborhood couldn’t stop us. The house itself was clearly an authentic touchstone to history and, almost miraculously, the village retained an engaging aura of a bygone time. With a little more work than Hugo initially estimated on his napkin, we thought it could be a bed-and-breakfast.
Maybe more important, it was the only house to turn up in two years of hunting that we could almost afford. If we didn’t act soon, the impetus for change, for remaking our lives, was going to drift away.
So the tenant could not put us off. Neither could the lawyer Hugo hired to make the deal happen. As we walked up the boxwood-lined brick path to his imposing office in Easton, the county seat, he had this to say:
“Royal Oak?”
Yes, I confirmed.
“The—boys are over there, you know.”
He let the words linger. I did not know and it was going to be necessary to admit as much if I wanted more information.
“Really?”
“They’re bad news,” he confided. “Drunk, naked, firing shotguns at the moon, that type of thing.”
We shook hands and I dismissed his remark just as I had dismissed what the tenant said. You can’t believe everything you hear . . .
Or can you? The question would haunt me a hundred times in the next year, especially at night when I walked from room to room in this house, straining to see out windows, into dark corners, and up the unlit attic stairs, trying to discover the reason for a sudden clang or a window-rattling thump.
The owner, Robbie, had neglected the place for decades, but still regretted selling off his grandmother’s house. So when our lowball offer insulted his family heritage, it took weeks of faxed apologies, many more promises that our intentions for the house were honorable, and, of course, more money to win his forgiveness. After that he dragged out negotiations for eleven months and put off two dates to close the deal.
On a return visit to Royal Oak, while we waited for him to set a third date, we found the tenants gone, but as we walked around looking the place up and down, a visitor arrived by bicycle.
Flying a red bandanna from his back pocket, Mr. Louis Scott Kilmon, in neat khakis, flannel shirt, and straw hat, dismounted inside the rusted iron fence, introduced himself, and offered words of welcome. He had heard we were buying the place. I said how much we liked the village.
He responded that he hoped it would stay that way.
He rested his hand on the fence. “A few years back, the feds came around here with big plans to widen the road.” He waved at the narrow road following the creek that winds between our house and his, three doors down.
“Of course they didn’t mention that right off. Tried to bribe us with promises of—” He paused and leaned into the words. “A bike path. So we t
old them we didn’t want any fool bike path around here and we didn’t want the road widened either. If they widened the road, then we’d really have traffic and there’s too much already.”
He shot an appraising look at Hugo and me.
One of my first thoughts about the area was that a bike or walking path would be a big improvement because the road has a three-foot drainage ditch on either side and no shoulders. But I decided not to say so right then. Obviously, there were other perspectives to be considered.
While I was thinking things over, Hugo spoke up. “I see what you mean.”
“We don’t want any bike paths around here,” Mr. Kilmon repeated.
I decided our position on the spot. “We wouldn’t want a bike path either.”
Sensing our willingness to fit in, and undoubtedly wanting to keep a close eye on the newcomers, Mr. Kilmon would come by often once we took over the place some months later. Taking note of even tiny signs of progress, he always offered an encouraging word, which we lapped up like starving dogs. When the true extent of what we had to do to fix up the house before even starting a business began to dawn on us, and with it the constantly nagging thought that we were hopeless romantic fools, I looked to Scott’s encouragement as validation of the project and the idea that it wasn’t doomed.
He came to know as much about the project as we did.
“I see you’re replacing those old cinderblock steps with mahogany,” he might call out from his front porch as I walked by on my way to the post office.
“Yes, a gift from my brother,” I called back on that occasion. He waved me over to his porch, from where he could conveniently observe all the comings and goings at the post office. It was the first invitation to sit on his porch so I quickly accepted, not suspecting what he had in mind.
I didn’t want to overstay or seem impolite by leaving too soon and hoped half an hour was the proper amount of time for a first visit, country style. It was long enough for Scott Kilmon to extract most of my family history. His technique centered on the apparently casual, cunningly well-placed question. By asking if my parents were local, he got straight to the knowledge of my Maryland-born grandmother, which drew an approving nod, and the fact that my great-greatgrandfather had preached to Union families at Antietam before the battle, which drew no comment.
After that, when walls and doors were down and renovation of the future bed-and-breakfast was in full swing, it was Scott who kept a close eye on the place.
“If you ever find anything missing, you just let me know,” he said on one of his regular bicycle visits. “Between my brothers and myself,” he added, “we pretty much see whatever’s going on around here.”
What Scott meant, I eventually found out, was that two of his brothers, a son, and a niece owned houses lining the main road into the village and also at the intersection of the second road, which leads to the little ferry, established back in 1683, to Oxford. (Further along, another road called Ferry Neck, by the way, does not go to the ferry.) This means that you can’t easily enter or leave the village without being seen by at least one Kilmon.
It also explains why his niece feels comfortable closing up the used furniture and antiques shops at night just by draping rope across the outdoor displays of objects for sale.
In time I learned that Scott, a retired high school music teacher, is an environmentalist who heats his house with scrap lumber and that he is a gardener. Tourists will stop to photograph his artistic creation, the tomatoes on towering vines, the lettuces, lima beans, potatoes, squashes, spinach, cucumbers, okra, and peppers, all framed by red, orange, yellow, and magenta zinnias. In the background, sunflowers grow almost as high as his barn. Once one of our guests asked us if they might pick flowers from his garden. This would not be appreciated, Hugo advised. Scott’s own Garden of Eden is what it is.
Scott’s family settled in the area in the 1700s when much of the land was still forested. He himself never mentions this, I think because he belongs so intimately to this place that he doesn’t feel any need to say it. I came across the information at the public library. Shipbuilding at the nearby ports of Oxford and St. Michaels first brought sea captains and merchants, shipwrights, lumberjacks, and blacksmiths, many as indentured servants, to the region in the seventeenth century. As trade picked up and shipping and shipbuilding prospered, more arrived and settlement spread out. By the 1750s, along the only road leading down the peninsula to St. Michaels, surveyors found a few old houses standing as the forerunner of the village of Royal Oak along with “about forty apple trees.” Over the next century, a church, a general store, a carriage maker and funeral director, a blacksmith, a schoolhouse, a post office, and the nearby Royal Oak train station were established.
By the early 1900s “Black Cinders and Ashes,” as passengers called the Baltimore, Chesapeake and Atlantic Railway, brought summertime visitors in substantial numbers to the area. Spewing cinders and smoke, the train raced through the countryside at more than fifty miles an hour. Others arrived by steamship and carriages transported the vacationers down shady roads to boardinghouses like the Pasadena, which advertised for “summer boarders—$5 a week—children half rates.” The region began to promote itself as the “land of pleasant living,” “God’s own country,” and even “the healthiest place in America.” In its heyday, Royal Oak boasted, in addition to the post office and schoolhouse, two churches, two saloons, one barbershop, and five stores.
Reserved about himself and his family’s history, Scott Kilmon easily shared his knowledge of the surroundings.
The gigantic white oak that, according to legend, gave the village its name? “It stood just a few yards down from my house in front of the general store.”
Much has been written about this tree, and it is still discussed locally as if it had died recently. I was surprised to learn that it has been gone for almost 150 years. Farmers banded together under its branches to form the Hearts of Oak Company, which fought in the Revolution and then again in the War of 1812. Forty feet around, it stood as a landmark for at least two centuries and it must have been quite a sight, to judge by a local historian’s description of the tree “majestically clad in his forest green, a king in the forest, truly a Royal Oak.”
At one point the tree was trimmed back because, according to a news account, “the branches overspread the county road, causing a menace to travel.” When the tree finally died, it was widely lamented:
In the passage of time all things must decay—as an evidence of this, the Old Royal Oak, about eight miles from Easton, so extensively known since the Revolution, and more recently since the War of 1812, from being pierced in both conflicts by the balls of some of Britain’s “Long Shooters,” and ever since having some of them suspended from its limbs—has from old age and the heat of the summer’s sun withered and died. This old tree has a tremendous body and no one living, we presume can tell its age.
Easton Gazette, July 31, 1868
A competing story about how the village got its name centers on the shelling of the town of St. Michaels, three miles away, during the War of 1812. Known as “the town that fooled the British,” St. Michaels would have suffered considerably, according to the locally published history, Tales of Old Maryland, but for “the long head of one General Benson” who ordered the houses darkened and instructed residents to carry lights to their upper rooms and roofs. This, it was said, caused the British on ships in the harbor to aim their cannonfire too high and largely miss St. Michaels. Two shots did reach the huge oak tree over in Royal Oak, according to this version of events, which was thereafter called the Royal Oak. While Benson can certainly be credited for preparation of the town’s defense, Pete Lesher of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum observes, “The lantern story first appeared in print in the Tales, almost a century after the battle, and contemporary sources make no mention of lanterns or a blackout.”
In any case, two cannonballs with metal straps crafted by a Kilmon ancestor hung for many years in the Royal Oa
k. Did they really come from a British ship? I asked Scott.
“Probably not,” he thought. “More likely, militiamen brought them back as a souvenir, but they did hang there in the tree for years and periodically it was sport for someone to steal them.”
Whoever stole the cannonballs always returned them, he said. “So now we keep them locked up in the post office.”
This is true. You can see them suspended from the ceiling over a display of postal service envelopes. Near the cannon-balls hangs a framed, yellowed newspaper clipping about the famous Royal Oak fried chicken, which visitors enjoyed at the inn, along with the fresh air, sandy beaches, boating, fishing and crabbing, “watermelon feeds,” dancing to live band music, and relaxing in hammocks strung in “cozy nooks” among the trees.
How to make this famous fried chicken turned out to be one of those secrets folks were not in a hurry to share. The postmistress, Miss Ebbie, answered vaguely. Someone else suggested asking the man who helped Hugo haul away a lot of junk from our property, whose family has lived in the area for generations. If members of his family hadn’t been cooks at the Pasadena, they would know someone who had cooked there. Hugo called him up to ask if I could come over. That’s how things are done around here.
When I arrived fifteen minutes later, his sister uncovered a pan on the stove. “Is this what you’re talking about?” I looked in the pan, which was full of crispy, caramel-colored fried chicken. Oh, yes.
After forking a serving onto a plate and handing it to me, she came to the point. “It’s supposed to be made with lard, but you can do without.”
The House at Royal Oak Page 3