Memories of Winters in old Chesapeake City, part 2

Part of the Chesapeake City Basin iced over, circa 1950. Note South Side ferry slip pilings. Area at far left is now site of the Chesapeake Inn.

Close-up of the Gotham ferry, circa 1946. The room on the top level had the smoke stack where riders huddled for warmth.

So, do you think it’s been a cold winter so far? Well, let me tell you what many of the older residents of Chesapeake City told me about the cold winters of years ago. Dick Titter starts it off with his recollection of the coldest day ever in our canal town. “I remember when the old Clayton house burned down. That's on Bohemia Avenue, where Birdy Battersby used to live. At that time that house was outstanding in Chesapeake City—a premier house so to speak; I was thirteen, and that night in1936 was the coldest on record for Chesapeake City; it was 16 degrees below zero. The weather had been bitter cold for quite a while, the canal jammed with ice and everything frozen solid. And I can remember going down there to see the house on fire.

“I was all bundled up and ready to see what was going on. Well, I was standing in front of Groom Steele's house—where Frank Ellwood used to live—watching the firemen with their hoses trying to do something with that fire. Well, Mr. Steele was out there with a bottle of whiskey, and he was giving shots to the firemen because it was so very cold. I was standing right next to them and I recall how their raincoats and boots were frozen stiff from the ice all over them.

“Johnny Walter, Albert Beiswanger, and Dick Borger were there, as I recall, and Johnny Walter had to go down to the basin there, by the town wharf, and cut a hole in the ice to get water for the fire engine. And Johnny told me that he took an ax and measured the thickness of the ice with the handle. He stuck the ax head down the hole and it just cleared the bottom of the ice. So that ice was three-and-a-half to four feet thick. But, anyway, that was a famous fire, because it burned down the nicest house in town.” Dick Titter

“I recall how cold the winters were in those days. The ferry would have to fight its way through the ice in the canal. To get warm, everybody in the upstairs room would huddle together up against the wall where the smoke stack was.” Gary Tatman

 “May Briscoe Kane used to talk about walking on the ice. She said that she got out on a piece of ice and it floated on out with the current. I don't know how she got back to shore.” Earl Schrader.

“We used to really have some ice in the canal when I was a kid. There used to be enormous chunks of ice floating in the canal, and I remember how Walter Basalyga used to ride those icebergs up and down the canal. He would jump on one down where he lived, near Basalyga's Wharf on the South Side—past the Chesapeake Boat company—and ride it up to school. And then, at night, if the tide was running the other way, he'd catch one and ride it home. I have a clear memory of seeing him out on an iceberg. He jumped from iceberg to iceberg.” Joe Hotra

“Daddy (Capt. Ed Sheridan) used to talk about when he was on the tugboats. He told me about one severely cold winter when they were frozen in the ice. It was so bad that they had to get the fuel to the tug by rolling barrels across the ice. They needed the fuel oil to keep the tugboat running and to keep them warm.” Jeanette Miklas

“One time, when the ice was bad, one of the pilots lost control of the big ferry. My father said that the boat ended up way up there by the government plant. In fact, he had to grab one of the Losten boys to keep him from jumping overboard. He was going to jump off on the ice and walk to shore.” Ted Lake

“I think the biggest thing was being late for school in the winter because the ice would take the ferry down past Schaefer's. All of us kids would get excited. We'd say, "Oh boy, we’re going to be late for school!" Becky May

“I recall the bad winters we had in the forties on our farm near North Chesapeake City. As a boy I used to cross over the lift bridge by hanging on to the back bumpers of cars in a sled when there was snow and ice on the road. We kids did all of those bad things. I also remember something special that happened on our farm in March of 1941. My mother was at the end of her third trimester, and went into labor during a blizzard. Until the snow drifted across the lane, my father figured we could easily negotiate it with our three-year-old '37 Chevy and get to the hospital six miles away at Elkton with time to spare.

      “We all got up, dressed, and my father helped my mother to the car, wrapped her in blankets in the rear seat, started the car, and proceeded down the lane for about one car length. But the car came to a halt against the drifted snow and would go no farther. At this point, my father got the tractor out of the carriage house and we chained the car to it. While my father tried to drag the car down the lane, I jumped in to steer it. The rubber tires on the tractor spun down through the gravel and clay, which had just started to get soft, but the tractor stayed where it was.

“We were running out of time so Dad told me to harness our two best horses. We hitched the two horses to the car with a double tree and chain to the front bumper. Again, I steered the car while my father drove the team. The horses pulled that car across the top of the drift as if it were a sled, on out to the main road. My father then drove my mother on to the hospital, and just after midnight on the Eighth of March 1941, our brother David was born.” Paul Spear.

            The great town of Rising Sun sometimes had difficult winters also. Don Gifford recalls an especially big snowfall: “When I was five years old we had a snow drift that was as high as our barn. That was at about10 p.m. and by the morning the drift had blown off a bit but was still about 12 feet high. My brothers and sisters and I dug a bunch of tunnels all through that enormous drift.”

            Norman Astle, a nearby Rising Sun farmer, remembers hearing older folks talk about driving horses down the Susquehanna river from Port Deposit to Havre de Grace. “Sometimes,” he recalls, “after a bad blizzard we had to leave the farm by taking down the pasture fence and making a passage-way across the field with our tractor and loader. In fact, when we moved here in January of 1954, we had to use the tractor to pull the truckload of furnishings up to the farm house. Moving in and securing our small dairy herd was quite an order for a day or two.”

            I have a feeling that I’ve chilled you to the bone by having you read all this about those bitter-cold winters. And so, in contrast, I’d better tell you about the hottest summer we ever had when I was a boy on our farm. That summer it was hot. How hot was it? It was so hot one afternoon that both of my father’s fields of popcorn started popping and blowing up into the sky. And then, when it began falling back to earth, our poor chickens thought it was snow and froze in their tracks. It was bad. We had to take them into the kitchen to thaw them out. Well, impressionable reader, I sure hope that you’ve now heated up a bit and are warmly looking forward to my next week’s story on facebook.

Winter Memories in Chesapeake City

Memories of Winters gone by in Chesapeake City, part 1

The Lift Bridge with the canal filled with ice, circa 1940.

The clear ice of Bunker Hill Pond, with Liane Hazel Kropp in top skating form

In some ways it’s nice that our winters in the 21st Century are not nearly as cold as the ones I remember in the early and mid-20^th century. But in a way our warmer winters are not nearly as much fun. I recall how we used to wait impatiently for the temperature to drop so we could ice skate on the Back Creek mill pond and especially on the Bunker Hill pond. That was back in the 1940s through the 1970s. The Bunker Hill pond was a wonderful place to skate. It was about 50 yard wide and 300 yards long, with over-hanging trees and, at the far end, an array of cattails interspersed with muskrat houses.

We played ice hockey with old soda cans and tree branches. Our toes would be numb from the cold until we warmed them next to the inevitable bonfire. Some times, when we skated down towards the end, we’d be the first to arrive there, and the ice would be clear and smooth as glass. At times, when we least expected it, the ice would emit a prolonged crack, with an eerie, hollow, echoing sound. And I would think, “Wow! I hope it doesn’t break through.” There were also frozen side streams to explore, always with a stimulating sense of adventure. It’s so different now; instead of a pond we have to go to an indoor rink and skate around in circles.

Many of the senior citizens whom I talked to over the last ten years also remember those icy winters of long ago and have told me about them. One person talked about how her grandfather used to race his horse and sleigh on the frozen canal. Another told about playing “crack the whip” on the ice and the time her father drove his car out over a pond. Still another explained how his father had to shovel snow off the Chesapeake City lift bridge so it would rise to let a ship pass through the canal. The span was piled so high with snow that it wouldn’t lift.

What follows are other memories by Chesapeake City folks who recall those harsh winters: “I remember how we used to bring our sleds to school and, after eating a quick lunch, we bundled up and took our sleds across the field as far away as we could. Our teacher, Miss Ferguson, had a large hand bell and she used to ring it at 12:50. Of course, we could never hear it! So she would bundle up and come across the field to get us. Several times, as I recall, we pulled her back to the schoolhouse on a sled.” Miriam Burris

“We used to ice skate on the Back Creek Mill Pond. Sometimes we'd skate right out here on the canal. When the locks were here the canal was all fresh water, and when it froze up the iceboats would come up and break up the ice so the barges could get through. Then, the next day, we'd go out and skate up and down where they had been. There were big chunks sticking out because of being broken up, but we'd skate around them. There were times when we'd skate down Back Creek almost as far as Welsh's Point.” Walter Cooling

“In the wintertime I would walk out on the ice. My father told me that years ago the ice would be so thick that you could walk to Baltimore.” Grason Stubbs. “I recall one time in the winter when the government had a big steam tug called the Deland, and they would come over and hook on to that ferry and tow her across the canal in the ice. The Deland would break up the ice as she went, drop the ferry off in close as it could to the slip, work her way around, and then push the ferry up into the slip.” Morrison Watson

 “I grew up in Port Herman and I can remember when the old steamers used to come up from Baltimore when the river froze over. One time a side wheeler came up as far as the Town Point wharf, and she would ride up on the ice until the weight of her would break through. Well, one day she rode up there and the ice didn’t break; she sat there for two weeks. They had to carry food out to the crew. My father used to say that he rode a team of horses across the ice there. Years ago, that’s how thick the ice got.” Frank Ulary

“I remember when the steamer, Annapolis, used to come up to break up the ice. It was an old side wheeler. I was just a teenager at the time, and in 1934, the year I graduated from high school, the canal was frozen over. We used to walk across the ice, right there from below the school to Schaefer’s.” Albert Clark. “Now, talking about ice, I remember when my brother pulled me up the canal on a sled, up to Schaefer’s from Hog Creek, which was down below the old Burnt House. That was back in 1934 when the canal was frozen over.” Pete Swyka. “One time we were late getting to school because the ferry had trouble getting through the ice in the canal, but when the ice got too bad it couldn't run at all. I remember taking pictures of the ships stuck in the ice. They brought ice-breakers up when it was that bad.” Merritt Collins, Sr.

“My grandfather Pyle had built an icehouse near Court House Point. He dug it into the North Bank, which kept ice solid for a long while. He walled it up with logs on top of one another. He then ran a long chute down the bank right out onto the frozen river. Then he took a long rope and a set of ice tongs and went out on the river and sawed a huge chunk of ice. He hooked the ice tongs into it, ran the other end of the rope through a hole in the back of the icehouse, and had a horse pull it all the way up into the icehouse.” Ralph Pyle

“I came to live in Chesapeake City in the winter of 1936, and there was so much ice that the canal was completely closed; no vessels could get through here. As a matter of fact, a tug sank in there trying to break the ice. I walked across the canal that winter.” Harold Lee. “The thing I recall best is how we used to ice skate on Mallory Toy’s fish pond. We'd walk or ride our bikes out there and skate all day. It was nice because you were protected from the wind in there because it was low and surrounded by trees. I also walked across the canal on the ice one winter. I started down there by the old lift bridge and walked straight across to Schaefer's. Winters were cold back then. I used to skate all around in the basin in those days.” Cliff Beck

        Oh yeah, it certainly was cold back in those days. I recall one of those bitter mornings when our cow was nearly frozen in her stall. When we milked her, instead of the milk tumbling into the pail it came down as icicles and we had to snap off the squirts. We had a devil of a time churning butter that evening. But it was especially hard on our laying hens. Why, every evening we’d have to place hot water bottles in their nests so we’d have eggs for breakfast instead of ice cubes. Well, anyway, I’m certainly sorry, imaginative reader, if I’ve made you shiver from reading these cold winter tales. But I know you’ll thaw out and get cozy when you curl up with my next week’s story on facebook.