We all know Charles Carroll, lone Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. History has overlooked his other role, as in-law buttinsky.
For one of Maryland's most famous sons, it wasn't enough to help birth a nation. He also had to direct his grandchildren's upbringing - and feeding.
"Give my love to Harriet," Carroll wrote July 26, 1801, to his son, Charles Jr., then living with his pregnant wife at Homewood. "If her health will permit, I hope she will suckle her child. I need not urge any reasons in support of this wish and advice because I am persuaded Harriet cannot be ignorant of them."
That's hardly the only time Carroll wrote to his son on the subject of nursing his grandchildren. In the course of assembling a new exhibit on pregnancy, childbirth and family in early Maryland, Homewood Museum curator Catherine Rogers Arthur came across letters that read like La Leche League pamphlets.
"He's fixated on breast-feeding," said Arthur, who is expecting her first child next month.
(And no, Arthur did not get in the family way just to bring the exhibit to life, even though she did bring a real canary, Apollo, to live at Homewood last year for an exhibit on pets in early America. If you must know, that didn't work out real well. "Poor Apollo must have read the publicity," Arthur said. "We closed [the exhibit] on a Sunday. On a Monday he was feet up in his cage." But I digress.)
In one letter, Carroll refers to a colicky grandchild and suggests that Harriet's milk disagrees with the baby. In another, Carroll congratulates the couple on the birth of a daughter, but says he wished it had been a boy.
"Take care not to bring the children up too tenderly," he advises another time.
The exhibit, which runs through March 20, examines the "practices, traditions and politics" of childbirth and child rearing in early 19th-century Maryland. Among the period items on display: medical books, forceps, silver baby bottle nipples - even ads for wet nurses, no doubt placed by somebody's fed-up daughter-in-law.
Forget the dicta; leave the cannoli
A bit of legal (and bathroom) humor in Baltimore Del. Sandy Rosenberg's legislative diary, on the dismissal of a Republican-backed lawsuit seeking to throw out special session taxes.
The judge kept the tax hikes in place but, Rosenberg wrote, "he could not resist calling the legislature's conduct `reprehensible.'
