Maryland's Vanishing Lives

For over two years, the author roamed throughout Maryland looking for people whose work or way of life recalled the state's rich and varied traditions. This is his account of the people he met on those journeys. It outlines the lives of Marylanders who hang on to traditional values and skills.

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On Weems Creek in Annapolis, a grandmother operates one of Maryland's last swing bridges from her office tucked under the span. In his Baltimore workshop, a member of the Boulmetis family keeps the tradition of hat-making alive in a city that was one of the hat-making capitals of America. Corny and Wilbur Messick of Bivalve will likely be the last of their family to make the graceful wooden tongs that watermen use to harvest oysters. The Day Basket Company in North East makes baskets the way it has since 1876, with local flitch-cut white oak softened in a wood-fired steam box. The state's only working one-room schoolhouse survives in the lower Chesapeake Bay - on an island that is slowly disappearing. And Baltimore's "Arabbers", reminders of a vanished horse-and-wagon era, still sing chants in a few old neighbourhoods. For more than two years, John Sherwood roamed Maryland's small towns and city neighbourhoods, travelled Appalachian back roads, and sailed the Chesapeake looking for people whose work or way of life recalled the state's rich and varied traditions. "Maryland's Vanishing Lives" is Sherwood's account of the people he met on those journeys.
In this collection of 66 short profiles, illustrated with photographs by Edwin Remsberg, Sherwood preserves for posterity the lives of Marylanders who hang on to values and skills that are quickly disappearing. Working in a country store or an old-time movie house, on a small tobacco farm or a weathered skipjack, Sherwood's subjects interest us as people, as stubborn survivors who have watched - sometimes defiantly, sometimes wistfully - as the world moved on. They invite us to reflect on how dramatically life has changed over the past 50, or even 20, years. They remind us of the human costs of consolidation and modernization. Theirs are often poignant stories of what happens to family businesses and ordinary folk in the face of new technology, suburban sprawl, franchise outlets, and changing tastes. But "Maryland's Vanishing Lives" is also a celebration of pride and craft, of the will to survive, and of a certain kind of luck - that the highway never came too close, that the family didn't sell the business, that, sometimes, living and making a living can be the same thing.