The Queen City
Pillars of Salt, Post Twenty
Driving through town, you’ll notice that Cumberland is sometimes or at one time was called the “Queen City.” This is because it was the second largest city in Maryland, after Baltimore, until after the Second World War. As the rest of the country moved into post-war prosperity, Cumberland began a long, slow decline for which the immediate peacetime boom was but a flicker before a dying light.
Fort Cumberland was built in 1754 at the confluence of Will’s Creek and the Potomac River, just on the Maryland-side of the border with present-day West Virginia. Nearby, Thomas Cresap had managed a trading post in collaboration with Nemacolin, a hereditary chief of the Fish clan of the Turtle tribe from the Delaware Nation, from which the pair, along with Nemacolin’s two sons, set out to widen the existing Native American trail through the Allegheny Mountains and into the Ohio Valley. The path would lead through the Cumberland Narrows, where the National Road now passes, eventually to the mouth of the Redstone Creek, now Brownsville, Pennsylvania on the Monongahela River. For a time, this was Nemacolin’s Path, laid over a system of indigenous trails that criss-crossed the region.
Cresap and Nemacolin were working on behalf of land speculators at the Ohio Company of Virginia, who had a land grant from Britain that conflicted with similar claims held by the French. These competing colonial claims are part of the story behind the French and Indian War, which broke out in 1754. Cresap was a founding member of the Company, following a mandate and investment from Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor of the Virginia Colony who endorsed the Company after its formation by Thomas Lee and the brothers Lawrence and Augustine Washington.
Lawrence and Augustine were the older half-brothers of George Washington and it is Robert Dinwiddie who is often given credit for launching the first President’s military career.
In the winter of 1753-54, Dinwiddie sent Washington at the head of an eight-man expedition to deliver an ultimatum to the French commandant Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre at Fort Le Beouf off French Creek, south of Lake Eerie. Washington was only 21-years-old at the time and could not convince the French veteran to retreat.
Once fortified, Cumberland became the westernmost outpost of the British Empire. From there, General Edward Braddock struck out for Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburgh, on the doomed expedition known widely as “Braddock’s Defeat.”
The site of the old Fort Cumberland is now occupied by Emmanuel Episcopal Church. The original fort remains only in the form of tunnels underneath the church. A small recreation of George Washington’s headquarters — a tiny, log-cabin-style room — exists down the hill from the church, close to the Potomac and the bridge across it into West Virginia.
So, Cumberland was an important place. Its historical significance was directly related to the business interests of the colonial leaders of the time. It is a place bound up in the colonial foundation of the country, the urstadt and origin of the founding fathers themselves, military cradle of George Washington.
Before Cumberland was Caiuctucuc, a large village at the same confluence as the Fort, when the Potomac was called Cohongarota and Will’s Creek was Caiuctucuc itself. The Will of Will’s Creek was Shawnee who claimed large swaths of land and allegedly sold it to settlers as they came. Caiuctucuc was abandoned to trappers and fur traders as they encroached on the region. It is said that “Indian Will,” as he was called by the settlers, was respected, though people would often give him trifles in exchange for the land he claimed rights to and sold. It was this quasi-legendary figure for whom both Will’s Creek and Will’s Mountain take their present names. Indian Will died sometime around the end of the Revolutionary War.
There is a strong forgetfulness about this part of the story. Most people recall the glory of Washington and the so-called “Revolution” and that’s as far back as we care to go. The rest is the muddy geopolitics of colonial exploitation, expropriation of indigenous lands through questionable-at-best means, and constant reminders that this country was founded on the interests of capital and not romantic notions of freedom for all.
This same narrative is found in the histories of West Virginia — that indigenous populations had moved on, were moving on, or were transient enough that settlers could dig in during their absence. But there are also the Nemacolins, the Wills living in the mountain, by the rocks called the Devil’s Ladder. Those who persisted idiosyncratically, the ones who blended or passed, assimilation by choice or force.
The layers, sedimentation of people from France, England, and Germany. The well-known Scots-Irish. Black laborers and freed people and families coming north. The enclaves and mixtures of these populations are like the mountains themselves, coming together from separate ancient continents, 400 million years old. Piled together and strewn variously around folds, dug deep into the place. They are driven and moved about by roads and railways. By canals, raised and lowered through the locks and pulled by mules.
George Washington’s time in the area before and after the French and Indian War fixed in him the idea that the Cumberland Narrows where a key pathway through the mountains and into the interior of the North American continent, where settlers believed they could have land for almost nothing and speculators were knocking each other over for access to territories west.
It was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, that Grand Old Ditch, that solidified Cumberland’s prominence in the region when the city was designated to be the western terminal in 1828, though the canal would not actually reach Cumberland until 1850. The National Road, passing through the Cumberland Narrows, was already a prominent connection between the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, by 1811, when it took over Braddock’s Road running between Fort Cumberland and Fort Duquesne. The canal would connect with the National Road and bring barges laden with coal out of the mountains. In 1842, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad completed a segment to Cumberland from the junction at Patterson’s Creek in Virginia, ultimately reaching the Ohio River at Moundsville and at Wheeling in 1852 and 1853 respectively.
All major modes of freight transportation passed through Cumberland by 1850. Other industries involved with and tangential to these transportation corridors had begun to spring up, such as the Mount Savage Railroad, a fourteen mile stretch of track operated by the Maryland and New York Coal and Iron Company from 1845 to 1854, when it was acquired by the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad Company, charted by the Maryland General Assembly, highlighting Mount Savage’s significance for the production of locomotives and iron rail. It is said that the iron of the Mount Savage Railroad was the first in the country to be laid entirely using iron produced in the United States. It was the foundry at Mount Savage that had rolled the first iron rails in the country in 1844.
In 1820, the Big Vein had been opened — a fourteen-foot-thick seam bituminous coal in the Georges Creek Valley. By 1850, somewhere around thirty different coal operations had sprung up in towns around the valley like Barton, Westernport, Lonaconing, Frostburg, and Midland. Between 1854 and 1891, over 60 million tons of coal were hauled from deep mines in the Georges Creek Valley alone. In 1853, the Georges Creek Coal and Iron Company began operating the Georges Creek Railroad in a failed attempt to connect their blast furnace in Lonaconing to Westernport or Piedmont. It ended up meeting the Cumberland and Pennsylvania at Frostburg.
Cumberland was the thoroughfare for all that coal. Goods could be transferred between railways at the Cumberland Narrows or to canal barges. The many smaller railways running like capillaries through the hollers and over the ridges of Appalachia carried deliveries of smithing coal to artisans and laborers throughout the region.
For instance, the Maryland Mining Company completed the Eckhart Railroad in 1846 to connect Eckhart Mines, where the Company was based just south of Frostburg, to Will’s Creek at the Eckhart Junction where freight could be transferred to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In 1850, the Maryland Mining Company finished construction on the Potomac Wharf Branch from the Eckhart junction at Wills Creek on into the city.
These railroads, and the coal companies that ran them, went through a series of mergers and consolidations. Essentially, the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railway went about buying all the small railroad lines from the local mine owners — the Mount Savage Railroad in 1854, the Georges Creek Railroad in 1863, and the Eckhart Branch Railroad in 1870. Ultimately, the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railway was owned and operated by the Consolidation Coal Company, formerly of Cumberland, now Consul Energy, based in Pittsburgh. In 1944, The Cumberland and Pennsylvania was purchased by Western Maryland Railway, which itself eventually became part of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1983, which came together with the Chesapeake and Ohio Rail to form the Chessie system in 1987, which is now CSX Transportation.
My grandfathers worked these railroads and my great-grandfathers. Both sides of the family. My great-aunt, all of them retired railroaders. My maternal grandfather, I have said, was a boilermaker. The coal and railroads. The mountains. Cumberland was the nexus, all the resources and wealth of the area flowing through it. Manufacturing came, in part, because the transportation services were here, because land rights were being snatched up by coal companies and speculators like they were throughout the region.
I think about these things, driving through town, coming back from my gradnfather’s. When I see the places falling into disrepair, or those being revitalized, attempts at bringing back what cannot be brought back. Or, maybe more rarely, attempts to make something new.
Cumberland is not a place frozen in time. Time moves on down the line. But it is a place of history, a place with many turns. If we have the fortitude, we might see how deep this seam goes.
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