The House at Royal Oak Read Online Free Page A

furniture and antiques, a gone-out-of-business church and parsonage, and a modern brick post office, all huddled together at the head of Oak Creek. That’s the village of Royal Oak itself. Newer development dots the road on either side and spreads down innumerable fingers of land surrounded by water. The occasional unimposing gravel lane leads to a grand old plantation house at the water’s edge. Something like this village might be found almost anywhere a confluence of geography and tradition has slowed the advance of mainstream development and culture. This particular village, two hundred miles south of New York City and ninety miles east of Washington, D.C., lies on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that is, not on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean but on the Chesapeake Bay, sixty miles to the west of the Atlantic beaches. It’s clear if you’ve been there; clear as mud if not.
    Royal Oak first attracted visitors about a hundred years ago to its inn, the Pasadena, which became a popular summer escape for residents of Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The new railroad and steamship service made it an easy trip. Then in the 1920s Gary Cooper and the entire film cast stayed at the Pasadena while making
The First Kiss,
one of his first starring roles, with Fay Wray. It was among the last of the lavish silent films, costing $200,000. Cooper played an oyster dredger who becomes a pirate to put his brothers through school and along the way falls in love with a wealthy tourist. The area’s whole oyster dredging fleet—twenty-five skipjacks and bugeyes—was put under contract for the filming, which lasted six weeks. Another innhad refused to put up the film stars, fearing immorality, but at the Pasadena the stars earned respect for their hard work and quiet ways. For years afterward, young women came as summer visitors to the Pasadena, hoping to sleep in Gary Cooper’s bed. According to one account, the wily innkeepers assured visitors that whatever bed happened to be available was the very one Cooper had slept in.
    The village also began to enjoy a reputation for some of the best fried chicken around, and people were drawn by the aroma, it was said, from half a mile and more away.
    Before all that came Indians, then trappers, followed by white land speculators and settlers. On vast plantations tobacco—sotweed—was grown and later, corn, wheat, and other grains. Slaves and indentured servants worked the land. Here, isolated from the mainland by water, insular ways thrived and persisted, for better, in the tightly knit communities of hardworking people, and for worse, in harsh racial divides. The fight for civil rights was especially bitter.
    Although the international legal trade of slaves ended at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Maryland, along with Virginia, continued slave trading until the Civil War. As would be expected in a border state, Maryland harbored strong sentiments both for and against Emancipation. When the first Northern troops to respond to the call to arms arrived in Baltimore on the way to Washington, riots broke out. The governor of Maryland wired President Abraham Lincoln, saying, “The excitement is fearful . . . send no more troops here.” Authorities then burned the railroad bridges linking Baltimore to the Northern cities.
    The Eastern Shore was also home to two great abolitionists. Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass spent his childhood in Talbot County and started his work life as a slave at an estate near the town of St. Michaels. Judged to have an arrogant attitude, he was sent to the infamous “slave breaker,” Edward Covey. Bearing permanent scars from whippings, Douglass escaped to the North to continue his lifelong pursuit of racial equality.
    Harriet Tubman, born in the next county south, led many slaves north on foot, on the Underground Railroad, which passed through the region’s woods, swamps, creeks, and rivers. After her