Maryland's Vanishing Lives Book

Maryland, like the rest of the United States of America, is ever-changing. In The Republic, Plato wrote that "Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder," and one sees all the variety and disorder of American democracy in the history and culture of any state of the U.S.A. The 1990's, the decade in which the Internet and the World Wide Web made their way into the American consciousness, were a particularly vivid time of change; and therefore it is fortunate that it was during that time that John Sherwood assembled 66 stories of Marylanders living through rapidly changing times - stories collected here under the title of Maryland's Vanishing Lives.

Sherwood, a senior editor at Chesapeake Bay Magazine, brings his thoroughgoing knowledge of Chesapeake-area life to these accounts of Marylanders whose jobs, hobbies, or ways of life were, by the time of this book's publication in 1994, living on beyond their time, in a world that had, by and large, passed them by.

Many of these stories provide a strong sense of the regional particularities of Maryland life - as when the story of Aado Vaigro of Baltimore, who installs the Formstone stucco so strongly associated with the Baltimore cityscape, provides Sherwood with an opportunity to reflect on how "Formstone swept through Baltimore's working-class, row house neighborhoods in the 1950s and '60s like some sort of architectural plague. Covering up the city's classic brick fronts with a cement-like mortar, it was hand-sculpted and pastel-tinted to resemble quarried stone" (p. 89). Many Baltimoreans of a certain age might read that description with a certain wistfulness, knowing that the time of maximum demand for Formstone in Baltimore is long, long gone.

The passage of time is inevitable, but in Maryland's Vanishing Lives it is sometimes a difficult thing to consider. Several of the sketches dealing with Chesapeake Bay focus upon the way in which pollution in the early 1990's devastated the oyster harvest in a region that was once renowned for the abundance of its oysters. A story titled "The Disappearing Skipjack, Tilghman and Deal Islands" considers how "During the disastrous 1992-93 season, many skipjacks went dredging north of the Bay bridges for the first time, because most of the disease-stricken oysters south of the bridges were dead" (pp. 147-48). Any Marylander who knows the story of the skipjacks, the last fleet of working sail in America, or has seen the grace with which a skipjack under sail cuts through the water, knows what a tragedy it would be if the skipjacks became nothing more than tour boats because the oysters were extinct.

The better you know Maryland history and culture, the more you will enjoy Maryland's Vanishing Lives. Sherwood takes the reader back and forth across the Old Line State. We see the last of the Elkton wedding chapels that used to provide "quickie" weddings to young couple fleeing the stricter laws of neighboring states - "the one-room chapel smells of mildew and is still a bit on the tacky side", with "an arched window painted to look like stained glass, and six two-person plywood 'pews'" (p. 159). Sherwood looks back at the importance of tobacco in colonial Maryland's economy and then considers the situation of one of Maryland's few remaining tobacco farmers, in a Southern Maryland town called Port Tobacco, who laments that "I'm afraid tobacco is a crop of the past….The state is discouraging the growth of tobacco anyway" (p. 61).

One of the "A-rabbers" who for decades have been selling fruit from horse-drawn carts in the streets of Baltimore observes how stable space for the horses is being eaten up by gentrification and remarks, "It's a dying trade, being replaced by trucks. See them while you can, young man, because they'll soon be gone" (p. 211). And author Sherwood witnessed the bankruptcy-induced closing of Hagerstown's Möller pipe organ factory - once the largest factory of its kind on earth - and the auctioning off of its effects in early 1993. Reflecting that one can still hear the grandeur of Möller pipe organs at sites across the country and around the world, Sherwood reflects solemnly that "There is, of course, no way that a Möller pipe organ can ever be put together again in the old Möller way. Those days are gone" (p. 164).

It is appropriate that this train of recollections of Maryland's vanishing lives concludes with what always used to come at the end of a train: a caboose - more precisely, Maryland's last working railroad caboose. Even back in 1994, it was clear enough that all the information ever held in all the file boxes on all the cabooses of all the trains in all of the world's railroad history could be stored on a single home computer; it makes sense, therefore, that cabooses no longer serve a practical purpose in the modern world. Yet their disappearance does mark a melancholy passage for those of us who are old enough to remember when every passing train had a caboose on the end, an odd little red car that always looked, to my young eyes, like a snug little home on wheels, inviting one to climb on board and be conveyed away to grand adventures.

As Sherwood chronicled it, this last caboose - formerly the property of the old and now-defunct Western Maryland Railroad - was still puttering through the CSX railroad company's freight yards in Curtis Bay, Baltimore, pending its replacement by a high-tech EOT (end of train) device. Sherwood concludes his book with an image of the EOT, "a twenty-five-pound striped box with an automatic, microelectronic monitor and a red lamp, waiting to replace Western Maryland caboose number 901803, to signal the end of the line for the end of the freight train caboose in Baltimore" (p. 218).

Sherwood's thoughtful, wistful looks at these Marylanders and their "vanishing" ways of life are well complemented by Edwin Remsberg's black-and-white photographs; the melancholy texture and sharp focus of these pictures may remind some readers of the work of the great Baltimore Sun photographer Aubrey Bodine, or even of Walker Evans's photographs that accompanied James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Published as part of the Johns Hopkins University Press's series of Chesapeake Bay Region works, Maryland's Vanishing Lives provides a very fine, locally focused look at the ever-changing nature of American life.