The whole region teems with traditions of Washington. Down in Northumberland County, the lovely little harbor of Lodge is named from the fact that here stood the Masonic lodge that Washington used to attend. The British destroyed the house during the Revolutionary War, but the cornerstone was found and opened not many years ago, and some of its treasures of old English money were placed in the cornerstone of the Masonic lodge at Kinsale, another charming little Virginia harbor. It is at Lodge that the maker of canceling dies for the Post Office Department, exiled from Washington because of the climate, has for nearly twenty years carried on his business with the aid of country youths trained for the purpose.
If the shore is much what it was in Washington’s infancy, the river and its tributaries are even more so. Those who know the Potomac at Washington or amid the mountains that hem it in further west and north, may well have no suspicion of the vast flood which it becomes in the lower part of its course. Fifty miles below Washington the river is from four to six miles wide. Sixty miles below the capital it has spread to a width of ten miles, and in the lower forty miles of its course it is from ten to eighteen miles wide, a great estuary of the Chesapeake, with tributaries, almost nameless on the map, that fairly dwarf the Hudson. The busy steamers plying these waters to carry the produce of the plantations to the markets of Baltimore and Washington leave the Potomac from time to time to lose themselves in its tortuous tributaries. Cape on cape recedes to unfold new and unexpected depths of loveliness; little harbors sit low on the tidal waters backed by wooded bluffs, behind which lie the rich plantations of Northumberland and Westmoreland. A soft-spoken race of easy-going Virginians haunts the landing-places. Fishermen, still pursuing the traditional methods of the eighteenth century, fetch in sea trout and striped bass and pike to sell them at absurdly low prices, and for nine months of the year oystermen are busy. Every planter who will can maintain his pound net in the shallows of the Potomac or one of its tributaries, and all along the lower course of the stream the planter may secure his own oysters almost without leaving the shore. The dainties that filled colonial larders in Washington’s youth are still the food of the region—oysters and clams, soft-shell crabs, wild duck, geese, and swan in winter, and a bewildering variety of fish.
Just across the Potomac from Washington’s birthplace is old Catholic Maryland of the Calvert Palatinate, settled almost exactly a century before his birth, and still rich in the names and traditions of that earlier time. The great width of the separating flood makes one shore invisible from the other, and the only means of communication are either the local sailing craft or the steamers that weave from side to side of the river and lengthen the voyage from Baltimore to Washington to a matter of thirty hours. Communication between Maryland and Virginia was almost as easy in Washington’s day, for the steamboats have an annoying habit of neglecting many miles of one shore or the other, and there are days when no steamer crosses the stream. A man living in one of the little harbors of the Northern Neck, being in a hurry to travel northward, found his most expeditious mode of travel to be a drive of seventy miles to a railway at Richmond. Shut in thus, the people of the Northern Neck have nursed their traditions and held hard by their old family names, so that the visiting stranger, if he have any touch of historic instinct, finds himself singularly moved with a sense of his nearness in time to George Washington and his contemporaries. The telephone, indeed, has brought these people into tenuous communication with the modern world, but he that looks out upon the sea-like flood of the Potomac from the mouth of one of its many navigable tributaries in the Northern Neck can hardly persuade himself that the capital of 80,000,000 people lies less than a hundred miles up stream. Washington the man seems vastly more real and present than Washington the city.
E. N. Vallandigham.
Evening Post, N. Y.
FANCIES AT NAVESINK
(The original manuscript of this unpublished poem by Walt Whitman, was sold in New York recently. Apparently it was never finished; which is to be regretted, as its few lines are in Whitman’s best manner. The scene is on the hill by the twin lighthouses at Navesink, N. J., near the entrance to New York harbor.—Ed.)
FANCIES AT NAVESINK—THE PILOT IN THE MIST
(Steaming the Northern Rapids—an old St. Lawrence Reminiscence.)
A sudden memory-flash comes back, I know not why,