Category: Local Flavor

This past week, I had family visiting from Ohio. It’s always so much fun seeing things through other people’s perspectives. Especially if what you are looking at is your own hometown. I’ve lived in St. Mary’s County, Maryland my whole life. Sometimes it feels like I’ve become numb to some of the sights around me.

Even some of the more beautiful places in the county had become boring to me. They have added a lot more things to do around the more popular sights over the last few years. One of the coolest things I can definitely say about our county is that it is not short of learning moments. We have a lot of museums to keep a tourist busy for weeks, let alone the few days that we had to show my family around.

We tried to do as much as we could in the morning because Southern Maryland is the middle of a heat wave! It turns out we are having a long streak of 100 degree days here and it was dangerously hot outside. That didn’t stop us though, we pushed through and saw some great things. The first day we went to go see the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland. They have plenty of historic boats and artifacts having to do with marine life around Southern Maryland.

The second day we visited the brand new Patuxent River Naval Air Museum. This museum has actually been around longer than I have. They just moved into their brand new location though and it is gorgeous! One of my favorite highlights of the museum is the Cupola taken from the Cedar Point Lighthouse. The locals are all familiar with that lighthouse because it was offshore for a long time. The water ended up claiming the house, but they brought the cupola to the museum where it has been ever since. They also have plenty of aircraft to see. My father has been an aircraft mechanic since he was 20 years old and so this is a big deal to my family.

We spent the third day at Historic St. Mary’s City. Not only is it only a few minutes from my house but it is one of my favorite places around St. Mary’s County. Nestled right next to St. Mary’s College, this historic landmark has plenty of colonial building recreated. St. Mary’s City was America’s first capital city and they even have a recreated state house that you can walk through. It is also an active archaeological dig site, so there is always more being found and created here.

I’ve always loved to visit on The Dove. I don’t know if I have any Mayflower or Jamestown ancestors, but I’ve always wanted a Dove ancestor the most. I know that I don’t because my family isn’t from here but boy would it have been cool.

Do you have cool landmarks in your town that you have avoided?

Over the last few days I’ve been throwing myself into sorting through my ‘To Be Sorted’ folder. It’s only been years in the making. In fact I’m taking it a step further and cleaning out my whole second hard drive. I’m just starting with the ‘To Be Sorted’ folder. I have higher ambitions though. I want an organized computer and I won’t quit until I get it!

However, yesterday I took a break from the sorting, and I finally read a book I bought at a Cecil’s Country Store in town (I love that store!). You can read the St. Mary’s County Tourism blog’s press release on the book. I will admit that I don’t read many reference books. Most times I start getting lost in the technical jargon. However, that didn’t happen with this book. I don’t know if it’s because I took architecture classes in high school or if it’s the book, that doesn’t matter though! I haven’t read all of it yet, but I’m definitely going to make a concentrated effort over the next few weeks to read more bits of it.

While yes, the book is mostly about the architectural history of the county, it’s also an actual history of the county. I was very surprised by how much information is packed into this book.

There are tons of historical and newer photos littered throughout the book while the history of the county is given.

Remember my San Souci Shopping Cemetery post? Not only was the cemetery listed in the book, there are also many references to the Hammett family. The index is so easy to navigate that every time I thought of another place in the county, I was able to easily find it in the index and then from there go to the part of the book I needed. You’ll also notice the SM-489 that marks the cemetery’s entry in the book. Every historical site has a similar number. In addition to the regular index, there is also an index by SM-#.

Overall, I have to say I LOVE this book. I can’t believe it’s been sitting on my bookshelf since March and I hadn’t read it yet. I was even talking about it on Facebook yesterday and a lot of my local friends were inquisitive about it. So I told them where I got it and I hope they take the time to buy it because it’s such a great way to open our eyes up to the history around us in this area.

To be honest with you, I’m thinking about visiting a lot of the sites over the summer. A lot of the places I never knew they were even there and I definitely want to rectify that.

The great news is that picture was taken the day after Irene hit and as of today, that pole has been fixed! We had to take a ride around the county today to check out the school bus routes. My mother’s was fine, but we took backroads on the way home and it looks like a war zone back there!

I’m very fortunate to live on the highway, so I have power and internet again. However there are many in the area who are going to be without for a while yet. We’re loaning out our generator and helping all we can and I encourage anyone who lives in an affected area to do the same. You’d be surprised at how much a hot meal or a hot shower can help people who are displaced or without power still. We were even debating making a big pot of chili and taking it out to the work crews. It’s a mess out there and they have some long, dangerous hours ahead of them.

I’m going to get back into my daily grind in a bit, but I wanted to take some time out to let everyone know how we fared!

I love technology. I love learning new things. I love being frustrated with something only to conquer it after hours and hours of cursing it. I have a slight pet peeve of technology though. In this current technology boom, with as much as computers can do, they’re still slightly behind on one important fact. Sometimes “as the crow flies” isn’t exactly a great way to gage something that is “close” or “nearby”.

We start off innocently enough in the new iPhone app 1BGraves. However, I quickly realize that this app has the same problem for me that Find a Grave Volunteer Service does. Halfway down that list, you can see it gives a nearby cemetery of ‘Potomac Cemetery’ in Hague, Virginia. Oh. It says the cemetery is 17 and a half miles away.

As you can see, it’s not exactly “nearby”. If there was someway to go straight across the river, then sure! However there isn’t. I’m located at the blue dot, and in order for me to get to the green pin, I’d have to drive all the way up to the Route 301 Bridge and cross into Virginia and drive back down the coast again. To be honest with you, this is the reason I don’t get many Find-a-Grave requests filled. 70% of the requests come from that area of Virginia and the other 30% are from Point Lookout Confederate Cemetery. However, Point Lookout doesn’t exactly have tombstones, just plaques with names listed and a book with the names that don’t fit. So usually those requests are snatched up within a few minutes of being sent out.

It’s easy enough to just ignore the Virginia cemeteries and requests if I’m not in the mood to drive about 3 hours each way on the weekend, but I wonder why these software folks don’t use actually driving times from the home zip code instead of “as the crow flies” distance.