Happy Anniversary to Us!

Yesterday was our 28th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated by being still in Oxford. Actually, we had a nice day here. I hadn't posted since Wednesday because it was the same old, same old. The weather Thursday and Friday was gloomy, as was I. Luckily, the skies finally cleared and we awoke Saturday morning to bright blue skies. After breakfast, we climbed in our kayak to explore. The Tred Avon River was too choppy, so we decided to pursue the serpentine shore of Town Creek, paddling by mansions with expansive lawns and manicured gardens and into small patches of marsh that had not been landscaped. Swimming around were small terrapins. Above us, on man-made platforms and in trees were nests which pairs of osprey guarded, warning us to stay away with shrill, high-pitched cheereeks.

Osprey launching from perch

The Oxford Cemetery lies along the southeast shore of Town Creek. I was interested in seeing the grave of Tench Tilghman, so we found a place under some conifers to get ashore. Perhaps it wasn't the best choice. At first, as I stepped down on the gooey muck of the shallow water, it seemed fine, but suddenly one leg sunk in up to the knee, releasing a terrible stench. I was able to extricate my leg and foot and not lose my sandal. I clambored up under the low-lying limbs to the grassy expanse of the cemetery lawn. Peter, more prudently, crawled to the front of the kayak and alit on the roots of a tree. On the water, we had passed the Tilghman monument, a modest plinth and column with an urn atop, so we knew we would find it if we walked the path closest to the shore. 

Col. Tench Tilghman's grave

Tilghman's grave and memorial

Col. Tench Tilghman was an aide-de-camp to General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. He is famous for carrying the surrender papers signed by British General Charles Cornwallis from Yorktown, Virginia, to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Tench Tilghman's ancestors were among the first settlers of Talbot County (where Oxford is located). His greatgrandfather, Richard Tilghman, received a land grant from Lord Baltimore; Tilghman, a British Navy surgeon from Kent County, England, arrived in Talbot County in 1661, settling along the Tred Avon River. The Oxford Cemetery was originally created for Tilghman family burials (although Richard is buried at the Hermitage, his mansion in Queen Anne's County nearby). Col. Tench Tilghman himself was buried in the cemetery at Old St. Paul's in Baltimore when he died in 1986. His remains as well as his tombstone were moved to Oxford in 1971.

Water's Edge Museum

After our kayaking, we walked a block to the small Water's Edge Museum, an eclectic place entirely privately funded and run by Barbara Paca, who is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Paca is a fascinating woman with a multitude of interests. By profession, she is a landscape architect with a Ph.D. in art history from Princeton. She runs her firm (along with her husband Philip Logan, an architect), Preservation Green, out of New York City and Oxford, while also serving as a research professor in the anthropology department of the University of Maryland, College Park. Her passions are native plant utilization, environmental conservation, historic preservation, accessibility, and community building. Locally, she concentrates on preserving and documenting the legacies of early African American families. Her many interests are obvious at the Water's Edge Museum. The exhibition space includes large vibrant paintings of local black people and smaller lithographs and drawings based on African-American spirituals by Ruth Starr Rose.

Around the age of 20, in 1906, Ruth Starr Rose moved with her family from Wisconsin to nearby Hope House, which had been a plantation home for the Tilghman and other wealthy families in the area. The Starr family lived differently than their neighbors, in a racially integrated community where they socialized with their African American neighbors and friends. Rose focused her paintings on African American life on the Chesapeake Bay. Rose and her family had long supported civil rights for African American people and they were well connected with black artists and performers, including Paul Robeson, Lead Belly and Roland Hayes. Rose's subjects included local descendants of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ross Tubman as well as a professional sail maker, female crab pickers, and heroic WWII veterans. Paca has personally tracked down and acquired Rose's artwork, and it fills an entire room of the museum. 

Another part of the museum focuses on old maps and provides some insight into the trade in enslaved people. As a major port before the Revolutionary War, Oxford accepted the entry of over two dozen ships carrying people from Africa via the Caribbean and four arrived directly from West Africa between 1763 and 1772. Over the centuries, of course, the enslaved Africans and their descendants made possible the agricultural and maritime commercial development of the region, including the oyster and ship-building industries. After the Revolutionary War, Oxford remained a shippping and seafood center predominated by black watermen through the early 20th century. This section of the museum, complemented by the work of Ruth Starr Rose, reflects one of the primary missions of the River Edge's Museum, to celebrate how people on the Eastern Shore lived and how their lives mattered. (For this reason, it is part of UNESCO's Slave Route Project, which seeks to increase understanding of the human tragedy of the slave trade by making better known its deep-seated causes, its consequences for societies today and the cultural interactions born of this history.)

Also included in the museum are displays about sea level rise and, specifically, Antigua and Barbuda. Paca helped to revive the historic garden surrounding Government House in the capital of St. John's, has been serving as Maryland's Cultural Envoy to Antigua and Barbuda since 2016, and was the curator for Antigua and Barbuda’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, the theme of which was Environmental Justice as a Civil Right. The Pavilion also had exhibits on the historical roots of Antiguan carnival costumes and the artistic output of an underappreciated artist, Frank Walter (on whom Paca has authored a biography). The volunteer at the museum walked us around outside the museum, showing us the greenhouse, plantings and a new garden behind the building. That little museum was well worth a stop, and any day that includes new things to see and new things to learn is a pleasure.

Yesterday, after lunch, Peter went up the mast to clean the lower spreaders. As I type, he is on his third trip up the mast today. He has cleaned the second set of spreaders and is now inspecting and repairing sheaves at the very top, about 65 above the water.

Peter cleaning spreaders

View of part of Town Creek with three watermen's boat on the right

View from the top, with Sherri in a red swimsuit on the deck.

Peter and Sherri at Pope's Tavern in Oxford

I spent some time at the pool in the later part of the afternoon, and in the evening Peter and I went to Pope's Tavern for our anniversary. Our main meal was scrumptious, as expected. Afterwards,indulged in decadent desserts and enjoyed complimentary champagne. 

Although Peter said yesterday that we would probably be ready to leave today, I did not get too hopeful, and that is a good thing, because we are still here.