Edge Effects: The Border-Name Places

By Robert D. Temple

Theres something fascinating about border towns. Who hasnt crossed the line into another state to buy fireworks, gamble, or even to get married? Here are border towns with names as unique as the places themselves, names that bridge the boundaries.

Robert D. Temple brings you a quirky, fascinating, and wholly entertaining look at more than eighty North American border towns in Edge Effects. With an adventurers heart and a historians keen eye, Temple explores life on the edge and how these places have made their place in history. Theres big-city Mexicali and empty-quarter Idavada, idyllic Vir-Mar Beach and whiskey-soaked Mondak. Then theres prairie-bleak Alsask, mountain-high Wyocolo, and palmy Florala. And who could forget Texarkana?

Along with finding these towns in the first place comes adventure in exploring them, by highway, four-wheel-drive, boots, and kayak, and in encountering memorable locals: historians, farmers, waitresses, cops, forest rangers, railroaders, and neer-do-wells. But even more, these places lead us to investigate concepts of borders, boundaries, frontiers, margins, and marginality, as well as survey lines, battle lines, picket lines, and color lines.

Edge Effects brilliantly examines how frontiers enrich cultures and boundaries define them. But more importantly, it reveals how edges shape local historyand our lives.

A revised edition of Edge Effects was published July 10, 2009.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9781440101465

Robert D. Temple

Robert D. Temple, Ph.D., brings a strong background in history, languages, and scientific research. He explored the back roads and archives of North America for ten years to write this book. When not traveling, Temple lives with his wife, Sue Auerbach, in Ohio, Virginia, and Yucatán.

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Copyright © 2008 by Robert D. Temple

Second Edition © 2009

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iUniverse rev. date: 7/2/2009

Contents

The Border

The East

Vershire

Delmar

Mardela Springs

Marydel

Sylmar

Pen Mar

Nypenn

The South

Virgilina

Alaga

Florala

Alaflora

Flomaton

Missala, Alabama

Missala, Mississippi

Texla

Appalachia

Penowa

Kentenia

Kenvir

Kensee

Tennelina

Carotenn

Tennga

Shores

Carova Beach

Vir-Mar Beach

Michiana and Michiana Shores

Dakomin

Big Rivers

Kenova

North Kenova

Mondak

Illmo

Tennemo

Tall Grass

Illiana, Edgar County

Illiana, Vermilion County

Illiana Heights

Mokan

The Delta

Arkla and Laark

Armorel

Arkmo

Moark, Missouri

Moark, Arkansas

South by Southwest

Latex

Arkana

Texarkana

Artex

Arkinda

Arkoma

Panhandles

Texola

Texico

Texhoma

Mexhoma

Oklarado

Great Plains

Colokan and Kanco

Kanorado

Dakoming

Monota

Alsask

The Rockies

Colmex

Wyocolo

Monida

Idmon

Basins and Ranges

Wyuta

Utida

Ucolo and Urado

Uvada, Utah

Uvada, Nevada

Idavada

Calvada

Calneva

Calor, Orcal, and Calor

Deserts

Calvada Springs

Calada

Cal-Nev-Ari

Calzona

La Frontera

Naco

Calexico

Mexicali

Author’s Notes

Thanks

Exerpts from the following sources are reprinted by permission:

A. R. Ammons, Corsons Inlet, from Collected Poems 1951-1971. Copyright © 1963 by A. R. Ammons. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals. Copyright © 2002 by Charles Bowden. North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC.

Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Copyright © 1963 by Harry M. Caudill. Jesse Stuart Foundation.

Lucille Clifton, entering the south, from The Terrible Stories. Copyright © 1996 by Lucille Clifton. BOA Editions, Ltd.

Robert Hass, Maps, from Field Guide. Copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass. Yale University Press.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning. Copyright © 1978 by Claude Lévi-Strauss. University of Toronto Press.

Marya Mannes, Gaza Strip, from Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times. Copyright © 1959 by Marya Mannes. George Braziller, Inc.

Oscar J. Martínez, Troublesome Border. Copyright © 1988 by the Arizona Board of Regents. University of Arizona Press.

Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts. Copyright © 1978 by Gary Snyder. New Directions Publishing Corporation.

James Still, The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life. Copyright © 1991 by James Still. University Press of Kentucky.

Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. Copyright © 2003 by Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

The author has made reasonable efforts to trace copyright holders of material quoted in this book, believes those not cited above are used within rights granted by the fair use doctrine, and will endeavor to rectify the position in the event that any uncredited copyright holders make contact after publication.

Maps by Karen L. Anderson, Wren Design, Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Border

Power … resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841)

Solitary Traveler, in a barren land, plots a course for tomorrow’s journey. Across days and borders, he has come north with spring, toward home. Tomorrow will be mostly Texas—San Antonio, Austin, Waco, the Dallas beltway, a wide curving route to the east towards Memphis. A possible objective for tomorrow night, Memphis, a stretching goal, past Texarkana first, and Little Rock, across Arkansas. Texarkana.

Tex- for Texas, -ark- for Arkansas, inconveniently divided by the border. Mexicali comes to mind, and maybe a gambling place called Cal-Neva, near Lake Tahoe. In an idle evening of paging through the atlas, fine print around the edges reveals some twenty more.

On such moments do our futures turn, on a single crux move, on a knife-edge of change.

After plundering place-name literature, post office histories, railroad timetables, Geological Survey records, state archives, historical societies, a hundred libraries, uncounted maps, and the backroads of the continent, the list of such places contains more than eighty—North American places at the boundaries of states, provinces, or nations, with names spliced together from the names of the two (or sometimes three) entities bounded. Call them Border-Name Places.

From this eccentric but essentially harmless obsession came explorations of physical and conceptual borders, edges, boundaries, frontiers, margins; inquiries into place names and their confection; discoveries about local histories and how borders have affected them; and experiences of travel to places untouristed and even vanished from living memory.

The East

No one knows when man came, or who gave the first names. Perhaps the streams still ran high from the melting ice-cap, and strange beasts roamed the forest. And since names—corrupted, transferred, re-made—outlive men and nations and languages, it may even be that we still speak daily some name which first meant Saber-tooth Cave or Where-we-killed-the-ground-sloth.

– George R. Stewart, Names on the Land, 1954.

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.

– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911.

east.jpg

Vershire

All over, again: The dying and reviving village

New England is an edgy place, a place of edges, 1,800 miles of state and national boundaries and 4,800 miles of tidal seacoast in an area only half the size of one of those big squarish states in the West. Crossing one of New England’s boundaries today takes me toward a small, strangely named town over on the eastern edge of Vermont.

Up from the Mohawk Valley, I have driven on along the unambitious Adirondack foothills this warm gray overcast July morning. Near Glens Falls, New York, I crossed the natural edge that divides water flowing south to the Hudson River from water that goes north into Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence. And now into New England, across the state line that lies here at the midpoint of the simple bridge bearing U.S. Route 4 over Poultney Stream. For fourteen years, this imaginary line was an international boundary, the frontier between the United States of America and the independent Republic of Vermont.

The British governments of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts all claimed the land that became Vermont. After extinguishing earlier and better-founded claims by the Abenaki people and the Louis of France, they pressed their cases with varying degrees of vigor and justification. From the time the first backwoodsmen moved in, Vermonters found themselves between jurisdictions, on the margins. By the 1760s the settlers here, most of them New Hampshiremen encouraged by land grants from Benning Wentworth, governor of their province, found themselves beset by a confusion of court battles, mustered militias, arrests, and protestations to King George.

Marginality is a condition that often nourishes creativity. On January 15, 1777, men of the New Hampshire Grant country, now calling themselves the Green Mountain Boys and clearly tired of being pushed around, declared that they were citizens of independent New Connecticut. Six months later another name replaced that one, a made-up name inspired by the French vert plus mont, intended to mean green mountain, a triumph of creativity over grammar. A corrupted remnant of the correct French name, les monts verts, survives in the name of a stream in west-central Vermont, the Lemon Fair River. If anything, Vermont must mean something like worm-mountain, but let us allow for artistic license.

The Vermonters wrote a constitution, the first one to prohibit slavery; elected Thomas Chittenden their president; ran up the national flag, green with white stars in a blue canton; minted coins marked Republic of the Green Mountains; appointed foreign ambassadors; and threatened to annex border towns. When delegates from New York and New Hampshire blocked their petition to join the struggling United States, they debated the option of linking to British Québec.

The new U.S. Congress had a long agenda, and inventing the world’s first elected democracy was heavy going. When they finally got down to the Vermont matter, more states opposed the admission or the very existence of the Green Mountain Republic. Separatist movements abounded on the western frontier, and Vermont’s success might encourage them. Not until 1791 did the political stars align. The states gave up their claims to frontier lands, New York accepted a $30,000 payoff, and the international boundary at Poultney Stream became the state line between New York and the new fourteenth state.

Although passport-control and customs inspectors are absent here today, the line still demarcates notable differences. Some are subtle and indefinable, like the difference between noise and music. Somehow, New York towns seem unable to produce the cute-enough-to-kiss attractiveness that brings people out of their eastern cities and up to Vermont, thirsting for quaint. Vermont has no billboards. Vermont is relentlessly small-town, proud that it has the smallest largest city of any U.S. state (although Prince Edward Island, the three Canadian territories, and Tlaxcala come in lower on the continental scale).

East on Route 4 toward Rutland, the country is second-growth forest and sugarbush. Orange daylilies populate the ditchbanks and candles of purple loosestrife the marshy places. There will be rain, and I hope the rain will lighten the air by afternoon. Mountains rise ahead, surprisingly rugged, more gray than green in the visible humidity.

These Green Mountains are part of an ancient blade of stone that lies all along the eastern edge of the continent. From Alabama and Georgia the Appalachians cut northeastward to New England and on to Newfoundland, a heritage of violence. The hazy hills around me are the crumpled fender from a spectacular low-speed collision, the damage left when Europe and Africa crashed into North America at the speed of two inches a year some 375 million years ago. When the Atlantic opened and separated the continents again, it left the Connecticut River Valley as a stretch mark and bore away the northernmost Appalachians to exile in far off Scotland and Norway.

The name of the great range comes from that of the Apalachee Indians, who lived in the Big Bend country of Florida, far from the mountains. European mapmakers erroneously assumed their territory extended far to the north.

I cross the Appalachian Trail at the Pico ski resort—condos, tourist shops, clear-cut pistes like avalanche chutes on the mountainside—and turn north on Vermont Route 100, a winding two-lane road through firs, spruce, pines, birches, maples, its route controlled by the mountains’ will. The air tastes of balsam fir, and the haze thickens to rain. A road sign states that frost heaves. Then Route 107 runs on through evergreens along the right bank of the White River, wide as the pavement and not much deeper, more stones than water.

Past Randolph, Vermont 66 is two-lane asphalt frostbroken by many a pitiless winter. For miles I am unable to pass a slow green pickup truck trailing a red manure spreader and a fragrance even the rain cannot suppress. We travel together through dense woods and past fields where brown-and-white cows stand head-down and soggy in the downpour. As the road gains elevation, the manure at last turns onto a gravel sideroad. The rain eases, the road accomplishes the ridge, and I descend into the watershed of the Connecticut River, into a misty valley green as a salad. Green hills, hay fields, white farmhouses, wildflowers. Canada thistle, wild carrot, knapweed, red clover, yellow hawkweed.

Chelsea, Vermont looks like a model-railroad town. The Greek Revival courthouse has a steeple and gold dome and stands on the common with a white church and a toy bridge. I would say Chelsea is the county seat of Orange County, but Vermonters call it a shire town, and a town is a political subdivision within a county, what Midwesterners call a township. The clump of buildings that people elsewhere call a town is in New England a village within a town, which is to say within a township. It gets confusing for flatlanders from away.

Vermont Route 113 heads up the valley of Jail Brook and across the modest range east of Chelsea. vershire 7. My topo map shows villages called Vershire, Vershire Center, Vershire Heights, and South Vershire within the town of Vershire. The name is a confection of the two states’ names, Ver- for Vermont, -shire for New Hampshire. Of all the Border-Name Places, Vershire was the first, dating from 1781 and the Green Mountain Republic.

Place-naming has gone through several changes of fashion in North America during the past five hundred years. The first new arrivals most frequently copied familiar place names from Europe, or used the names of rulers or land-grant holders. These conventions provided names for ten of the original thirteen U.S. states. Some Europeans attempted to preserve the names used by people they found already living in the land, though their efforts rarely had much accuracy. Niagara was probably something like Ungniaahra in one of the Iroquoian languages; Potomac came from the variously spelled Patawoneke people who lived on its banks; researchers have uncovered 132 different spelling for New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, perhaps originally an Abenaki word for lake with islands. Folk etymology changed the Lenape words navasink and chiskhoki to Neversink and Cheesequake and the Piscataway potopaco to Port Tobacco. Inquiries sometimes elicited evasive, joking, or even obscene answers from Native Americans, equivalents of I can’t understand you or Go to hell. Some accounts say Yucatán is mangled Mayan for What did you say?

At the time Vershire came into being, the former British colonies were declaring independence in naming as well as governing. The mountain men of the Republic of Vermont had already shown their penchant for creative name-splicing with vert + mont, and when the government of the Republic chartered this town and granted land to sixty-five prospective settlers, they called it Vershire.

Vershire is only six miles from the state boundary, though two other towns (townships), Fairlee and West Fairlee, intervene. The -shire probably recognizes proximity to New Hampshire, although it might commemorate the settlers’ home state, or perhaps the first view of New Hampshire when traveling from the west. A Border-Name Place it clearly is, though naming details remain obscure.

The state archives reveal that Lenox Titus moved to the place in 1779 and found Irenus Knight already living there as a squatter. Mr. Knight apparently was persuaded to move on, because his name is not on the list of grants given two years later. The Tituses stayed. Freman Titus served in the 9th Regiment, Vermont Volunteer Infantry in the War of Southern Rebellion; Graham Titus served in the 8th Regiment and died in service. There are still plenty of Tituses in Orange County, in Chelsea and Fairlee and Strafford.

A local man named Joseph Smith, born during the second decade of statehood in Sharon village, a dozen miles from Vershire, went on to achieve considerable fame. After moving to upstate New York, Mr. Smith unearthed a set of golden tablets engraved with hieroglyphics, which he translated and published in 1830 as The Book of Mormon.

Through its history, Vershire has experienced a remarkable series of boom-and-bust cycles, all of which it has managed to survive.

At first crops grew well, though the newly cleared land was steep and stony, and the population quickly rose to over a thousand. Farming went into steep decline as soils became depleted and better land opened up in the Northwest Territory. Raising sheep amid the plow-turned stones proved surprisingly successful and brought the population to its historic high of about two thousand people in 1840, but a fall in wool prices put an end to that. The California gold rush and the Civil War each took away a quarter of the male population.

Discovery of copper ore sparked a third wave of growth. In 1880, Vershire produced three-fifths of the Nation’s copper and changed its name to Ely in honor of the mining company’s president. The mine suddenly failed in 1883, the miners went unpaid, rioting broke out, the governor called in the state militia, the miners moved on, and the locals restored the town’s original name.

By 1970 the population had fallen to 236, but since then it has recovered considerably. The 2000 census counted 627 people in Vershire’s 05079 ZIP code, including two Blacks, two Asians, two Hispanics, and one Native American. Today Vershire is one of the smallest and poorest towns in Vermont. With this history, though, it should probably be dead.

I follow Route 113 over the divide and into the valley of the Ompompanoosuc River, a narrow, steep valley carved two hundred centuries ago by meltwater from the last glacier, before even the Abenaki lived here. Past the Vershire Volunteer Fire Department and Ward’s Garage, the rough asphalt highway drops on down through dark deciduous woods. Gravel roads on both sides lead away to houses—expensive-looking vacation places, mobile homes, small vegetable farms. Cute names on decorated signs announce the availability of country crafts for purchase—beeswax candles, homespun yarns, organic bread, fudge, Vermont Hard Cyder, Maple Products. Brown Road is on the right, then Durkin Hill Road left, Vershire Center Road right, North Road left, and a sign announces the village of Vershire.

I stop to shop for conversation at the Vershire General Store, which appears to be the only business in town. Signs on its weathered front recommend Budweiser beer and Hershey ice cream to my attention. The place offers the essentials—milk, soda, beer, cheese and meat vaguely seen behind fogged glass, videotapes for rent. A young family is camped behind the counter, mom, dad, two grade-school kids, all looking very well fed, waiting solemnly as though in a dentist’s office. They are The Johnsons if the sign above the front door is to be believed. I select a bottled soda—Polar Birch Beer, Olde New England Flavor—and Mr. Johnson rises to accept payment. He is glad to have my business but seems puzzled by questions about living here at the edge of the state. How far is it to New Hampshire, honey? The sentence contains no r-sounds. He gives me careful instructions on how to reach the bridge at White River Junction. I move on.

The Polar Birch Beer tastes hauntingly familiar, but I cannot quite recall how it connects to memory. The synapses spark as I examine a bulletin board advertising grass cutting, snow shoveling, roto-tilling, day care. A Proustian click: The Olde New England Flavor is exactly like that white paste we used to eat in first grade.

A traveler continuing to White River Junction and crossing the Connecticut River would find many things different in New Hampshire from in Vermont. As one small but telling example, Vermont law requires all motorcycle riders to wear a helmet, while riders in the Live Free or Die state face no such freedom-robbing regulations.

The village street is devoid of people or any kind of activity. I walk by the town offices, which occupy a one-story brick building, houses, most with white weatherboarding, some with tasteful yellow, red, or green trim, a gray house with red and white barn attached, a large old brick manse, the Vershire Bible Church, but meet no one. A sign announces Vershire Day, sponsored by the Historical Society and Fire Department, featuring chicken barbecue, a dance, an auction, and fireworks. The rain begins anew, and I find shelter in the post office.

Vershire got its first post office on July 31, 1827. The current building is newer, a two-story gray frame house. Betty, a friendly plump dark haired young woman, is having a slow day behind the counter and is glad to talk. She has no idea why the place is called Vershire, but invites me to come back on Saturday for the big fundraiser. This is a very civic-minded community, she says, and they do a lot of fundraising, mostly to benefit the children. Last year for example, they bought snowshoes for all the elementary school children. She is an outsider, really, originally from way over in Thetford (twelve miles away), and so is not really an expert on Vershire. She corrects my pronunciation—it rhymes with her beer—and sells me a sheet of her finest flower stamps before we are interrupted by a real customer.

The town school is across the street and up a steep gravel driveway. A brown two-story clapboard building, it replaced the old frame school that burned in 1981. It has perhaps six classrooms, two additional temporary ones parked on the gravel parking lot, some playground equipment in front, the verges yellow with birdfoot trefoil. Above the school, on the north side of the valley, a steep mountainside hangs like a petrified wave: Eagle Ledge. Slate, schist, and quartzite above glacial till. The whaleback ridge to the south is less steep, its north-facing side worn away and rounded by the great ice sheet that ground southward across New England and pushed up Long Island as its terminal moraine. Winters were even longer then.

The rain finishes. The day is very warm, and thinning clouds release sunlight. The air is hazy, sticky, viscous, visible. It smells like a wet meadow, like crushed vegetation, like the meaning of summer. Concluding my sumptuous bread-and-cheese lunch, I realize how I must look here—an old guy hanging around a schoolyard, even if it is vacation time—and move on.

In 2000, some years after my visit, this school closed. Voters created the new Rivendell Interstate School District, merging the schools of Vershire, Fairlee, and West Fairlee towns in Vermont and Orford in New Hampshire. Rivendell, named for the peaceful home of the elves in Lord of the Rings, claims erroneously to be the only interstate school district in the country. Elementary students from Vershire now attend a new school in West Fairlee, and older students travel sixteen miles to Rivendell Academy, across the river in Orford. Declining enrollment and deteriorating facilities probably made the merger inevitable for little Vershire, but loss of its school is often the death knell for a town. Death, or another revival?

The town offices are still closed. A hurried and dressed-for-success woman, her face faintly visible behind makeup, is trying to get in, holding an envelope, peering in the windows. She is wearing one of those gold circle pins the girls used to wear when I was in high school, the kind that meant she was a virgin if it was on one side, and if on the other side, not, but I never knew which was which. Hers is on the left. She finally gives up on the envelope—property tax, water bill, letter to her selectman, or whatever—and speeds away in a minivan.

Across the highway on the south side of the Ompompanoosuc, the Vershire Community Center stands apart, steepled white clapboard, flag and tombstone-like war memorial in front, ballfield, picnic tables, and portable toilets in back. This building was a Methodist church, built in 1871 by Cornish miners who had come to Vershire to work the coppermine. They left when the mine failed, and their church fell into disuse until the Historical Society bought it and moved it here in 1978. The only other legacy from the copper boom is the poisoned land at the old smelter site near South Vershire, three miles away. The place is on the Superfund clean-up list, and even today not a weed will grow in its toxic scoria.

Vershire village has only the one real street, the state highway, since the valley is too narrow for more. Having completed the tour, I head back up toward the fire station, where the topo shows another of the town’s villages, Vershire Heights. Whitehouse Pond is there, and a gravel road where the map shows Vershire School. As soon as I enter the road I realize it is a private drive leading to large two-story houses, probably cabins-in-the-woods for affluent weekenders. I crunch to a stop on the gravel and turn around to retreat. A man comes out of the largest building, the one the map labels as the school, and ambles past on the way to his Lincoln, giving me a sharp lookover. I get out and ask him about Vershire School, and he tells me guardedly that it went out of business after the scandal back in the ’80s. The building houses a riding school now, sort of a daycamp that operates in the summer. He is tall and graying, with pressed khakis, repp tie, and cellphone, and does not look as though he spends much time riding the range. He regards me narrowly, trying to decide if I am one of those who caused the scandal, and I scram.

Eastbound back on the highway, I turn right onto Brown Road toward the village of Vershire Center. The well-graded gravel road rises along the shoulder of Patterson Mountain, past overgrown pastureland, a few grazing Holsteins, some untended apple trees. A white clapboard house has a large kitchen garden overflowing with plants that look very much like—tobacco? At a stop sign Vershire Center Road comes in and continues uphill past Mud Lane and Reed Road. Pastures alternate with dense woods, pale with paper birch. Red barn, red-brick house with chimney at each end, small pond, bracken in the ditches.

The high point of land that is the center of Vershire Center is occupied by The Mountain School, a group of perhaps a dozen barny-looking board buildings painted red, a large house with green wood siding and metal roof, an old multistory barn, a pond, a volleyball net. I drive in to investigate but the place seems deserted. Much later I will learn that The Mountain School is an expensive prep school where city kids can learn rural values and sustainable agriculture. Plus maybe some other stuff, I guess. Not much else is here in Vershire Center, a few older houses, unmarked gravel sideroads, tall poles beside the main road to guide the plows in deep snow.

So Vershire’s fourth period of growth, this post-rural, post-industrial cycle, after farming, sheep herding, and copper mining, is based on rustication—country vacations, recreational learning, arts and crafts, hobby farms. It offers a sanitized version of life when we were a Vermont-like nation of small towns, which still existed only a few lifetimes ago in the original nasty-brutish-and-short version. Then: Plowing steep stony fields, tending sick sheep in deep snow, breaking rock in pre-OSHA din, heat, and stench. Now: Making cider and blackberry jam and handwoven scarves for tourists, learning rural values on an allowance, writing in a room of one’s own by a sunny window. Preserving some of the best things from Then is good, but Now is better, and I find little justification for nostalgia.

Today it is writing that has brought a kind of obscure fame to Vershire. Edna Annie Proulx came here in 1975, to a house on North Road, where she lived for twenty years. Ms. Proulx must have known the ragged edge of an existence in Vershire, getting over two terrible marriages, she has said in interviews, supporting herself and her three sons by writing whatever would pay, magazine articles, how-to books, a self-published newspaper called Vershire Behind the Times. In a first collection of stories and a novel, she wrote about what she knew from Vershire, rural New England poverty, people dispossessed of their heritage and alienated by neorural newcomers. Success came with The Shipping News, which in 1994 won a Pulitzer and just about every other literary prize. Proulx moved even farther to the edge of the world with that book, to Newfoundland, at the farthest rim of the continent, to tell about an unattractive, inarticulate outsider who finds a kind of redemption amid unrelenting rock and terrible weather. Later books tell readers about the hard luck and isolation of deracinated immigrants and modern frontiersmen in Wyoming and hardscrabble Texas. This place at the border of the state, on the edge of the nation, in the margin of history clearly shaped the life and writing of Annie Proulx.

Eastward, downhill, out of town, across the Ompompanoosuc, past a woman and two children walking beside the road, slick as otters and giggling from a swim in the river, past a Husqvarna chainsaw dealership, closed, and a trailer house with an immense satellite antenna in front. Sign: 100 acres for sale. White sweetclover, oxeye daisies. And I head on down the road and out of Vershire, Vermont, the air thick with summer, saturated and oversaturated and supersaturated, moisture visible and thick enough to obscure the passage of time, streamers of fog rising out of meadows and drifting between trees in the forest, patches of dense mist, like clouds caught in branches, and I disappear into it.

_______________

Delmar

Peace across the vista line

When you cross a state line, you can be pretty sure the number of the highway will change. For this road, though, Delaware and Maryland agreed both would call it Route 54. It would be inconvenient to have different numbers for the eastbound and westbound lanes of Delmar’s main street.

the little town too big to be in one state is what it says on the historical marker in Delmar, Delaware/Maryland. It stands beside the main east-west street, State Street, which is Delaware/Maryland Route 54. The sign is on the north side of the street, which is to say in Sussex County, Delaware. The high school is in Delaware, the elementary school across the line in Maryland’s Wicomico County. The liquor store is on the north side of the street, in Delaware; the bank (Bank of Delmarva) is in Maryland. The town hall is in Maryland, the post office in Delaware.

The historical marker says that Delmar, a town bisected by the state line, has a unique geographical situation. One questions the word unique on remembering other bisected Border-Name Places—Marydel, Maryland/Delaware, only fifty miles away; Texarkana, Texas/Arkansas; and Texhoma, Texas/Oklahoma. And then we have Kansas City, Kansas/Missouri, Lloydminster, Saskatchewan/Alberta, and… but let us not pettifog. It really is one town, two states.

The people of Delmar have worked through some tricky political issues amazingly well. There are two mayors and two town councils, but they share the same office building, in Maryland, and the office staff works for both governments. The town office has two telephone numbers, a 302 area code for Delaware and a 410 code for Maryland. The councils alternate having separate and joint meetings. They jointly oversee a unified utilities commission. One volunteer fire department serves both towns, as does a single police force, the officers commissioned by both states. There are two ZIP codes but only one post office, in Delaware. The single school district accepts students from both states and decides later how to settle up the crosscharges.

A three-hundred-year history of borderline disputes did not set a promising precedent for achieving such cooperation. One of the subjects of dispute lies across the middle of Delmar—State Street, the Transpeninsular Line.

William Penn and his descendants controlled the three counties that make up the present state of Delaware, following earlier periods of ownership by the Leni-Lenape people, the Dutch West India Company, the Kingdom of Sweden, the City of Amsterdam, and the English proprietor of the colony of New York. The Calvert family over in Maryland also claimed the land along the Delaware River as part of the grant made to them in 1632 by King Charles I. The Calverts’ grant included all the land from the Potomac River north to the 40th parallel, or possibly to the 39th parallel, depending on how one chooses to interpret the language of the charter. Penn, on the other hand, had done a deal with the Duke of York in 1682 and got a 10,000-year lease on the peninsula between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays south to Cape Henlopen. The good Duke’s title to the land was questionable, but its validity improved significantly when he became King James II. It seems that no one realized at the time that the place then called Cape Henlopen is a good hundred miles south of the 40th parallel, solidly within territory the Calverts had owned for fifty years. This resulted in a certain amount of testiness between the two families, and an extended battle over property lines ensued. Decrees by Charles II and James II mostly favored the Penns but left boundary definitions that were still vague, and the arguments continued through generations of Penns and Calverts.

Finally, as the result of a fifteen-year case in the British courts, the disputants appointed surveyors representing both parties to determine a definitive boundary line running from Cape Henlopen westward across the peninsular. The troubles were far from over, however, because the actual location of Cape Henlopen was shrouded in confusion. The present Cape Henlopen was then called Cape Cornelius; Penn decreed that the original Cape Henlopen was to be called Cape James. The map given the surveyors in 1750 deepened the confusion by somehow marking Cape Henlopen at a place rightfully called Fenwick or False Cape, far south of what should have been the correct starting point. The map’s origins are shrouded in mystery, but one has to suspect the Penn clan of skullduggery.

At the alleged Cape Henlopen the two surveyors found an old stake on the beach, took it to be an early landmark, and decided to start running the line there. It turns out that the old stake probably was nothing more than an old stake, perhaps set up by fishermen to hold a setline for catching drum. The surveyors placed their number-one monument stone by the stake (vandals attempted to steal it in the 1970s), hired a crew of woodsmen, and proceeded to clear a west-running vista or sightline eight yards wide through the pine forest. They went almost all the way across to the Chesapeake before breaking off their work in further controversy. Because of the limited accuracy of eighteenth-century survey methods and outright errors by the surveyors, the line does not run straight and true. It wiggles a good deal, and about twenty miles along, it angles distinctly toward the north, putting the southwest corner of Delaware too far north by 1,073 yards. At five-mile intervals along the line, the surveyors set monuments made from native stone, and for all their inaccuracy those original stones still define the legal boundary between the states.

Thus was the Transpeninsular Line established, the line that now bisects Delmar. If the work had been done correctly, the current location of Delmar would be well inside Maryland (based on the likely correct location of Cape Henlopen) or about a third of a mile inside Delaware (if the line ran due west from Fenwick).

The other major axis defining Delmar is the railroad. The Delaware Railroad extended south from Philadelphia and reached the Maryland state line in 1859. Elijah Freeny built a house there, and it still stands at corner of Railroad Avenue and Elizabeth Street in Delmar, on the Maryland side. The Civil War interrupted plans to extend the tracks farther south, and a busy railyard grew at the end of the line.

It must have seemed obvious to the first inhabitants that the Transpeninsular Line, a fine clear-cut path through the dense pine forest, was the place for the new town’s main street. People built along it with little regard for the problems that might result from living on the dividing line.

They named the new town Delmar, an amalgam of the first syllables of the names of the two states. During the eight decades since independence, place naming in United States had taken several new directions. Citizens of the new nation felt the urge to be part of world history, and they named many settlements with classic-sounding names from Latin and Greek (Aurora, Seneca, Athens, Carthage, Utica, Troy). The name of any exotic foreign city seemed to work, regardless of provenance (Memphis, Odessa, Toledo). They used the names of prominent Americans as alternatives to earlier British sources, filling the maps with names of politicians, war heroes, and prominent citizens. Today we have 145 Washingtons and 112 Jeffersons. French allies received Louisvilles and Lafayettes in thanks. Names based on nature showed creativity at first (Cold Spring, Elkton, Buffalo) but quickly became overused. Vaguely poetic literary names became popular (Auburn, Avalon, Waverly, Melrose, Darien). Indian words continued to lend inspiration, especially those considered poetic sounding (Cayuga, Oneida, Osceola); fully half of the fifty United States have names derived from Native American words.

Another strong and distinctive current in American English, which clearly contributed to naming Delmar and the other Border-Name Places, is the formation of new words by splicing together two existing ones. While English has a long history of compound words—backbite, with first recorded use around 1300; beehive, 1325; hillside, about 1400; bullfinch, 1570—this method of creating new words found great popularity in the New World. No one knows why. Perhaps subtle influences came from contacts with the famously agglutinative Native American languages (consider Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, the Nipmuck name for a lake near Webster, Massachusetts, and Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik, a lake in northern Manitoba, respectively the longest place names in the U.S. and Canada) or with immigrant speakers of the word-splicing Dutch and German languages (Dutch wapenstilstandsonderhandelingen, cease-fire negotiations, German Gesundheitversicherungsgesellschaft, health insurance company). The need to invent names for hundreds of plants and animals unknown in Europe seems to have been an early motivation. Thus we find catfish (from Newfoundland, 1620), rattlesnake (Virginia, 1630), hummingbird (1637), mockingbird (1676), bluebird (1688), blueberry (1709), bullfrog (1738), bluegrass (1751), canvasback (1782), copperhead (1823). The construction quickly gained currency, and hundreds of new Americanisms followed—timberland (1654), eggplant (1767), underbrush (1775), snowplow (1792), cookbook (1809), drugstore (1810), frostbite (1813), firecracker (1829), roughneck (1836), cloudburst (1869), lipstick (1880). The flood continues unabated into modern times—backtrack (1904), hangover (1912), breezeway (1931), jukebox (1939), knucklehead (1942), spaceship (1942), database (1967), and on and on.

In this fertile mix it was not a great departure for the railroadmen to hit upon Delaware + Maryland = Delmar. This selection turned out to be an historic one, though. Today there are no fewer than forty-four Border-Name Places named when a railroad crossed a state line. Delmar was among the first of these, founded at about the same time as Marydel, Maryland-Delaware and Illiana, in Vermilion County, Illinois.

Delmar came into official existence in 1863 with establishment of a post office, then as now on the Delaware side. A period of rapid growth came after 1884, when the New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk Railroad extended the line down the peninsula to Cape Charles. From there, ferries took passengers and freight across the Chesapeake to Norfolk. The town officially incorporated in 1888 with a population of 680. Major setbacks occurred in 1892 and 1901—the combination of wood-frame houses and locomotives trailing clouds of sparks had the predictable results, and fires nearly destroyed the town. The Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the entire line in 1918, and business declined thereafter because of competition from road transport.

Fruit growing became a local specialty, and in the early 1900s Delmar became known as the strawberry capital of the nation. Today the region is a poultry-raising center on a global scale, producing more than 600 million birds a year—and 1,500 million pounds of chicken manure, a serious environmental problem.

Approaching Delmar, long low chicken houses are everywhere in the flat countryside, with their supporting feed mills and processing plants, and a semitrailer load of birds leaves a trail of feathers like a long goodbye. I have come over to the Delmarva Peninsula from across the Chesapeake. In the April morning, I crossed the wide Choptank River at Cambridge and the marsh-edged Nanticoke on its humpbacked concrete bridge, past greening hayfields and acres of yellow rocket.

Route 54 curves a little and eases down onto the state line at the welcome to delmar sign. The VFW post is promoting a special dinner this Saturday night—oyster fritters. Two-story houses crowd shoulder to shoulder up close to old-time West State Street. I cross the railroad, now the Norfolk & Southern, but still active, and reach the center of town at Bi-State Boulevard. State Street Park is on the left, with its unique geographical situation marker. On eastward are pleasant houses with shady verandas and patches of grass, and then the bypass. Busy four-lane U.S. 13 is free enterprise unconstrained by history or aesthetics. Fast food, strip mall—on the Delaware side, to avoid Maryland’s sales tax—gas stations, a bank branch, motels. The Delmarva Convention Center, associated with the Delmarva Inn, welcome north point tabernacle. Heavy traffic.

Out east of town, beyond the bypass, State Street becomes Old Line Road, following the sightline opened by the surveyors 250 years ago. It runs straight for ten miles, and they say it was the longest stretch of straight road on the Eastern Shore for a century and a half. Because of the inaccuracies in the survey, the centerline of the road does not everywhere coincide with the state line. When traffic accidents occur, surveyors sometimes have to be called in to establish jurisdiction.

The center of Delmar has largely escaped contemporary clutter. The Junior-Senior High School is on the north edge of downtown, a brick two-story with several additions, football bleachers in back, home of the wildcats. The combined municipal government occupies a modern concrete-block building just south of State Street by the railroad track. Next door is a block of nineteenth-century row houses fronted with gingerbread porches, a fancy cast-iron cornice decorating the top. The Mason-Dixon Auction Barn, across the tracks, is directly on the state line, but it is not properly the Mason-Dixon Line here—the English surveyors started their work six miles farther west. Ornate old storefronts face the tracks in the next block, up in Delaware, and a feed mill, and a few blocks south, in Maryland, is the elementary school, the playground full of kids at recess.

In the municipal building, a young office worker—big brown eyes and hair—fills me in on the bi-state political arrangements. The path toward happy cooperation began in 1924, when the two halves of Delmar agreed to set up a joint sewer system. In 1947 the two town councils had a major fight over ownership of a pump. Reason eventually prevailed, the councils agreed to a common water system, the schools merged in 1950, the fire departments in 1955, the police in 1956. They hired a joint administrator and staff in 1964 to keep the books and collect taxes. These people should be giving lessons in Northern Ireland and Palestine.

As I stand in the center of town, at the intersection of State Street and Bi-State Boulevard in the bright spring sun, Delmar seems to be doing well as small towns go these days. Population increased by 15% in the 1990s, with the split between Maryland and Delaware about steady at 60/40. Chicken manure is a bigger problem than the boundary that divides and unites Delmar.

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Mardela Springs

The town that made rusty water famous

Beside Route 54 six miles west of Delmar, at the welcome to maryland sign, stands what looks like a small picnic shelter. Brick pillars support a shingled roof, the whole thing perhaps ten feet square. No picnic table is under the roof, though, nor is there any way to get into its shade, because all four sides of the structure are blocked with sturdy iron fencing from ground to roof. Within are three limestone monuments. The two larger ones bear eroded but legible carving; the third has weathered into silence. These stones mark the starting point of what is undoubtedly the best known survey line on the continent.

The British court gave the feuding Penns and Calverts a compromise settlement. In part, it required their property line to run approximately north-south up the middle of this peninsula. Uncertainty remained on the precise location the starting point from which to head north, specified as the midpoint of the east-west Transpeninsular Line. The Penns got their way on this one, and the midpoint was set right here, 69 miles from the Atlantic coast. The Calverts of Maryland had wanted the midpoint placed a mile and a half farther east and so lost about 135 square miles of property they believed rightly to be theirs. The surveyors set a post made of white oak here in 1760, and a witness-stone monument thirty-two inches north of it, where it still stands today within this shelter.

The surveyors began running a try-line northward, but the Calverts and the Penns became impatient with the slowness of their work and fired them. The proprietors decided they wanted the job done right and proceeded to hire the best, two English astronomers and mathematicians, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. In 1764 Mason and Dixon took the white-oak post as the true southwest corner of the Penn’s three lower counties, now the state of Delaware, and replaced it with a double crownstone, carved of limestone for this purpose in England. It is the largest of the monuments under the shelter, the arms of the Penn and Calvert families on its four faces.

From this crownstone began the survey that became a powerful historical metaphor, the Mason-Dixon Line.

The contentious boundaries of little Delaware illustrate several points about boundaries in North America and how they have come about. Arbitrary boundaries began with the English land grants, often based on lines of latitude, as with the southern state line of Delaware. This method of definition has the advantage of being unambiguously fixed by astronomy—as long as the specifications are clear—but is expensive to establish and subject to error in surveying and marking. Boundaries defined by latitude and longitude became especially popular as things moved west, with the 49th parallel becoming the longest. Another favorite definition is a mathematical line connecting two points. Delaware’s western boundary is one such, running from the midpoint of the Transpeninsular Line to a point tangent to the curved northern boundary. Other point-to-point boundaries abound, from New England to California. These can present serious surveying difficulties, and Delaware’s was especially challenging. A third way to define arbitrary boundaries is with reference to some existing feature, and again Delaware provides an example, with the northern boundary defined as a circular arc of twelve-mile radius centered on the cupola of the courthouse in New Castle. Of this type, the Alaska-Canada boundary—a line parallel to the windings of the coast which shall never exceed the distance of ten marine leagues therefrom—proved especially difficult to fix.

Natural boundaries avoid some of these problems, while introducing new ones of their own. Wide bodies of water are most clear and uncompromising, and Delaware’s boundaries on the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay qualify here. Historically, features such as mountains, deserts, swamps, and forests have been useful boundaries, but their precise limits are indeterminate, and technology has largely removed them as barriers. Rivers are convenient as boundaries, and seem natural and unmistakable, but they present many problems. Rivers, such as Delaware’s section of the Delaware River, can shift, they still require a line to be drawn, usually on one bank or in the center, and they present potential conflicts in use and withdrawal rights. Sometimes definition of the river’s main fork or precise source is controversial. Most important, rivers do not naturally separate their two banks, but rather connect them, and people on both banks usually share interests. Nevertheless, rivers define boundaries in a heavy majority of U.S. states.

The most logical and useful boundary definition is the water divide, the lines that define watersheds. These are unambiguous and sharply defined, and they often delimit compact regions where inhabitants share common interests. Except for some sections in the Appalachians and parts of the Idaho-Montana, Alberta-British Columbia, and still-disputed Québec-Labrador lines, they are little used.

Few North American boundaries have any inherent logic, they often dysfunctionally separate communities and natural features, and nearly all have been subject to change under political pressure. Usually no genuine heterogeneity existed between the bounded entities, though this sometimes seems to develop as the lines become fixed over time. And fixed they are, unlikely to change much despite the problems they create.

From the little shelter over Mason and Dixon’s stone, I head on west, continuing toward the next of my Border-Name Places. I drive slowly toward Mardela, coming past the single-story brick Middle and High School and down to U.S. 50, the April afternoon warm and pleasant over the weedy fields that edge the blacktop, breeze coming up from across the Nanticoke River, redolent of the marshes.

The Texaco station convenience store could offer a chance for conversation, but the young woman employed as storeclerk there has little interest in the likes of me, another anonymous traveler on the four-lane bypass. Reluctantly, she admits she has heard there is an old spring somewhere around here, but she does not know where it is and seems vaguely embarrassed to find herself in such a place as Mardela Springs, Maryland. Perhaps she does this work as an act of penance.

Mardela Springs is three miles from the Delaware line, from Mason and Dixon’s first crownstone. The town began as Russum at a date lost to history, then became Barren (maybe originally Baron or Barron) Creek Springs in the 1820s. There are stories of a great political rally held here to promote the candidacy of William Henry Harrison for president. The current name is a commercial creation, made up to hypo the sales of bottled medicinal water. The official Wicomico County history book says only that it was derived from the town’s nearness to the Delaware line.

Local folks had long used the smelly irony water from a local spring as a miracle cure for digestive ailments, kidney trouble, rheumatism, whatever, and by the 1870s the town had become a popular place to take the waters. A three-story Victorian resort hotel went up at the springs, and its thirty rooms stayed busy in the summers. Entrepreneurs began bottling the water around 1887 and reckoned that the Mardela Springs brand name would sell more of the stuff than The Healing Springs of the Nanticokes. The name of the post office changed from Barren Creek Springs to Mardela Springs in 1893, and the town officially incorporated under that name in 1906. The hotel burned in 1914, and demand for springwater cures has dwindled.

A Wicomico County sheriff car is parked in front of the convenience store, and in a few minutes a deputy emerges, orange soda in hand. Not much business is left here since the millwork factory closed, he says, only the clock factory now. Yes, the old spring is still there, two blocks away, across Route 50, beside Main Street.

I find an unmarked brick gazebo, of modern construction, octagonal, with open sides and a pointed roof. The road is narrow, and there is no place to park safely. An aluminum-sided pre-fab-looking house close to the gazebo has no-trespassing signs posted prominently, but a short dirt driveway passes the house and leads to an old church. I drive into it and park in front of the Barren Creek Springs Presbyterian Church, built in 1842 and restored by the West Side Historical Society. A small cemetery behind the church has dates from the 1850s and ’60s. The church stands in white-painted serenity under mature pine trees and beside a willow-shaded pond, a wide section of Barren Creek.

I walk back along the driveway, beside a strongly flowing stream of tea-colored water, back to the gazebo and its eponymous spring. The resort hotel must have stood there on the grassy rise beside the spring, toward the creek, at the edge of town where the three-story house is now. Springwater fills the floor of shelter, a shallow rusty liquid. A shimmering orange scum coats the surface, and I am disinclined to taste it, healing powers or no.

A long meadow dotted with dandelions runs unbroken down from the springhouse to the willows at the edge of the water. In the cool and tangible sunlight, three children are playing by the pond, mallards are splashing between floating spatterdock leaves, dogwood is blooming on islands. All around me is a wide field of grass in unmown green profusion. Observed closely, the grass is densely spangled with tiny wildflowers—small forget-me-nots, the flowers in uncoiling sprays, sky-blue and yellow-eyed; two species of violet-flowered speedwells; patches of some wild geranium, perhaps small-flowered cranesbill, the quarter-inch flowers magenta and five-petaled; deadnettle, its clusters of pink flowers like micro-sized orchids; the white stars of chickweed; shiny yellow Indian strawberry. The yard trees are in bloom by the house, pink and white dogwoods and flowering crab. Even untasted, the Healing Spring of the Nanticokes is curing what ails me.

The town of Mardela Springs is home to about 350 people now, the number little changed in recent decades. An office of the Peninsular Bank is still open, and several churches, but I can find no retail businesses except the convenience stores out on the bypass. A former gas station at the town center, the intersection of Bridge and Main Streets, has been closed for a long time, as have two or three unidentifiable vacant storefronts nearby on the north side of Main. A sign is still legible—sodas groceries beer—on a deserted building just south of the intersection, on Bridge Street. The houses are well painted and in good repair, though, two-story frame places with Victorian gingerbread, shady verandas and patches of grass along Main Street and Bridge Street and Railroad Avenue, and shutters bright in blue and red. The volunteer fire department is on Station Street, and a ballfield, and the locked-up town hall, a one-room cinder block structure by the ballfield, and unassuming one-story houses. Both railroad and station are long gone, and on this Thursday afternoon there is no traffic whatsoever.

The clock factory, Barren Creek Clocks, is on Railroad Avenue across from a new post office building and next to a park, the Adkins Historic and Museum Complex. Three small wooden buildings are here, decorated with flags, open only by appointment, according to the sign. One is marked dr. l. r. brattan,

1854-1857

and has several graves at the back, perhaps patients from Dr. Brattan’s short-lived practice.

Through town and out on Bridge Street is a grassy park and picnic tables beside Barren Creek, darkly flowing between its green-grown banks. South on Athol Road, houses thin out among wheatfields, chicken farms, and scrubby second-growth woods. Farther out, Hidden Acres Farm advertises a commercial poultry-catching service.

Completing my inventory of the town, west on Main Street, toward its junction with the U.S. 50 bypass, I find the Mardela Speedway, a small-scale dirt track, apparently for mini-cars. At the intersection is Scarborough Fair Country Home Decorators, dealing in furniture, crafts, gifts, doghouses, storage sheds, and lawn ornaments. Also, inexplicably, two ostriches and a llama, confined in a field behind the store. On the bypass are a truck dealership (big dump trucks and eighteen-wheeler tractors), Creighton’s Trailer Sales (vans, horse trailers, and suchwhat), and the Shore Paper Box Company. A sign announces the Mardela Springs Heritage Days Festival on May 6, and now I am back at the Amoco and Texaco convenience stores and the turnoff back to Delmar.

If you follow this road back east, then north ten miles or so, across the Nanticoke River, you come to the tiny community of Reliance, bisected by the Maryland-Delaware state line. This was the headquarters of the largest kidnapping ring in the history of the United States, the Cannon-Johnson Gang. In the early 1800s Patty Cannon, her husband Jesse, the brothers Joe and Ebeneezer Johnson, and other members of their extended families kidnapped some hundreds of free Black citizens and took them south for sale as slaves. The traffic in captives was widespread and has been called the Reverse Underground Railroad. In a sense, all the slaves in the South, perhaps four million at the time of emancipation, had been kidnapped, but there is something particularly outrageous about the work of the Cannon-Johnson Gang. Fugitive slave laws strongly favored slave owners, and free African-Americans had few defenses against abduction. The Cannons and Johnsons had the additional advantage of the state line, which they used to maximum advantage to avoid apprehension. What finally brought down the gang in the 1820s was not slaving but their fondness for murdering White people, at least two dozen of them, including Patty Cannon’s first husband and infant child. Residents changed the name of the town, formerly called Johnson’s Crossroads, to escape the gang’s notoriety.

Exploring west of Mardela, off Route 50 and onto Wallertown Road, I find a prize, the Mount Pleasant African Union Methodist Protestant Church. This is one of only thirty-six existing churches in the oldest incorporated Black denomination.

The church traces its history to Peter Spencer, who led a group of about forty Black Methodists out of the predominantly White church in 1805. Although the Methodists had been more accepting of Black members than most denominations, sometimes allowing them to participate in assemblies with Whites, this practice never implied equality. By the late 1700s, Blacks found themselves increasingly marginalized, restricted to separate areas during worship—balcony, back row, kitchen. Separate Black congregations began developing around lay preachers. Peter Spencer, born a slave in Kent County, Maryland, was freed on the death of his master in 1782, moved to Wilmington, Delaware about ten years later, and became a respected Methodist circuit preacher. His separate Black congregation made a complete break with the White church and incorporated under Delaware law in 1813 as the Union Church of African Members. Other Black denominations have roots going back into the 1780s and ’90s, but Spencer’s was the first to incorporate. Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church followed in Philadelphia in 1816, James Varick’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York in 1821, and at least six others during the same period.

The new group’s first meetinghouse was only a few blocks from Wilmington’s active slave market. Under Spencer’s leadership the congregation built strong traditions of lay involvement and mutual economic cooperation. The opportunity to control finances, be elected to office, exert authority, and speak freely must have been very powerful and welcome to members of the new church, people relegated to the edges of mainstream society. Influenced by local Quakers, the new church also stressed equal opportunities for women more strongly than did the other new Black sects.

After numerous name changes, mergers, and schisms, the Spencerians emerged after the Civil War as the African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church of the United States of America and Elsewhere, more conveniently known as the A.U.M.P. Church. The group remained essentially regional and, unlike the A.M.E. and A.M.E. Zion organizations, failed to recruit large numbers of members among newly freed Blacks. The denomination had its historic peak around 1900, with perhaps one hundred churches and small missions, concentrated in Delaware, Maryland, and neighboring parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with outlying missions as far away as Rhode Island, Michigan, and Ontario. Today there are about 3,500 members in the thirty-six A.U.M.P. congregations, including fourteen churches in Maryland, three here in Wicomico County.

The Mount Pleasant A.U.M.P. Church is a modern building of whitewashed Formstone blocks shaped to resemble rough-cut ashlars. In 1956 it replaced an original frame structure built in 1893. Its steeple rises among big oak trees in a neighborhood of modest houses. Consistent with the historical role of women, the pastor is Edith Grayson.

I drive on out Wallertown Road for a mile or so and notice that all the people here are Black. I saw no black faces elsewhere in Mardela Springs. Route 50 seems to be a significant dividing line.

These states were themselves on the dividing line in the great cleavage of the United States in 1861. Delaware and Maryland, with Virginia, Kentucky, and