Community, Culture, and Economic Development, Second Edition: Continuity and Change in Two Small Southern Towns

3. A History of Somerset County

23 3 A History of Somerset County This chapter does not purport to offer a complete or even a rounded history of Somerset County. Instead, it highlights events of a particular kind. It focuses on instigating events because of their structure-altering potential. The following pages provide a historical account of how a planter’s regime came into being in the northern part of Somerset County at the close of the seventeenth century and how a different regime evolved in the city of Crisfield and other maritime communities bordering the Chesapeake Bay. The narrative explains how particular cultures and social structures became like fixed frameworks during colonial times, thereafter shaping and reshaping the distinctive ways of life in these localities throughout three centuries. It also reports what occurred when those structures were threatened. From the American Revolution onward, the traditional way of life in Somerset was periodically buffeted by instigating events, including political challenges, legal attacks, state and federal intervention, ecological disasters, social movements, electoral uprisings, cultural invasion, global economic forces, and outright war. Keeping in mind that structures can be explained in terms of an interaction between the desirability of their consequences for different groups and the relative power of those groups, we will see that whether these disruptions were viewed as threats to be resisted and overcome or as harbingers of salutary change depended upon one’s place in the social order. The history of these events will make apparent who has benefited most (and who least) from the prevailing way of life in these communities. It will show how different elements in the community responded when their way of life was challenged and what kinds of resources they brought into the struggle. The examination of how the dominant regime in particular responded to instigating events and the adaptations that it made to contextual change will reveal how semper eadem (ever the same) became the chosen policy, as well as the official motto, in Somerset County. 24 / Community, Culture, and Economic Development One consequence of selecting events of this kind and then telescoping them into a single chapter is to dramatize some of the least savory aspects of Somerset’s history. While the overall picture may not therefore appear balanced, it nonetheless faithfully describes the historical processes that are germane to this inquiry. Social structures usually support established power, and power is rarely relinquished gracefully. A different research question might have produced a more celebratory account. The great political scientist V. O. Key, Jr., observed that “it is impossible to speculate on the nature of political behavior without attributing to events long past their profound influence in the establishment of current habits of action.”1 Thus the history of these events, the struggles precipitated by them, and their outcomes inform our understanding of the way of life in Princess Anne and Crisfield in the recent era. Bringing to light the social structures and social processes long at work in Somerset County sets the stage for the two case studies that follow. Harvesters of Land and Water Maryland’s Eastern Shore was colonized in the early seventeenth century, and in the beginning opportunity abounded for settlers from all walks of life. By 1637, tobacco had became such a booming export industry that the land surrounding the Chesapeake Bay was almost everywhere snatched up for tobacco cultivation by enterprising Englishmen. One exception was the remote and low-lying country later to be known as Somerset, where the land was the least productive in all of the vicinity. Of Somerset’s 611 square miles, 46 percent is under water, and much of the rest is beach and tidal marsh.2 Another large portion was heavily forested in colonial times. It is estimated that only a fifth of the county could ever have produced high yields of tobacco, and because the soil was a sandy loam, the crops were of the lowest and least remunerative grade.3 An early English tobacco factor described the land as full of “convicts, bugs, mosquitoes, worms of every sort both land and water, spiders, snakes, hornets, wasps, sea nettles, ticks, gnats, thunder and lightening, excessive heat, excessive cold, and other irregularities in abundance.”4 The above irregularities notwithstanding, Somerset was eventually settled by religious and political dissidents from Virginia, pirates, runaway servants, and escaping convicts and slaves.5 The dissidents were, by and large, persons of means who acquired arable land in the north of the county by grant, planted it in tobacco and other crops...