Plantation

Twenty years ago, Kevin Kelly ended his paid tour of Houmas House by tossing a quarter into a wishing well fashioned from a huge, sugar-cane syrup kettle. "I wished that one day I'd own a plantation," Kelly recalled. Wishes do come true. Kelly, a 48-year-old bachelor from New Orleans, has done well in shipping and real estate. Last May, he returned to Houmas House and bought the 21-room Greek Revival mansion in Darrow, La. Another of the grand old houses of the Deep South was saved.

With the re-election of President Barack Obama and the passage of expanded gambling here in Maryland, I see the poor being further enslaved in the near-term. With each expansion of the Nanny State, all people become more and more dependent on the government and less of an individual - and thus less human (and less humane, I think). The institutionalization of dependency on what is now a permanent underclass in the U.S. is the biggest moral issue of the last 40 years in this country. This enslavement of generations is immoral.

The Southern District of the Maryland Federation of Women's Clubs will donate $1,500 toward the upkeep of historic Sotterley Plantation at its semiannual meeting tomorrow at the Bay Ridge Inn in Annapolis.The business meeting at 10 a.m. will be followed by a luncheon. The speaker, Gladys Vocci, president of the Baltimore Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, will discuss "Dolls Through Antiquity."The federation comprises women's community service clubs and has about 5,000 individual members, including business and professional women, and a junior division for college-age women.

Mary D. Tilghman, who spent the past two decades preserving Talbot County's historic Wye House plantation, which has been occupied by her family since 1659, died there Friday of heart failure. She was 93. "She was quite a lady and the great steward of Wye House. It is a seven-part Georgian-period house that was built in 1782 and is an extraordinary one," said Walter G. Schamu, a partner in the firm of Schamu, Machowski, Grego Architects, who designed several projects at the house.

Mary D. Tilghman, who spent the past two decades preserving Talbot County's historic Wye House plantation, which has been occupied by her family since 1659, died there Friday of heart failure. She was 93. "She was quite a lady and the great steward of Wye House. It is a seven-part Georgian-period house that was built in 1782 and is an extraordinary one," said Walter G. Schamu, a partner in the firm of Schamu, Machowski, Grego Architects, who designed several projects at the house.

The idea began casually enough three years ago at the annual St. Mary's County Fair. Lorraine Greenleaf, who was there representing St. Mary's Animal Welfare League Inc., recalls the chance conversation she had with the people from the Patuxent Tidewater Land Trust. Greenleaf had noticed that the old Summerseat plantation, a historic, 127-acre estate in Oakville, had a "For Sale" sign on it. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a cluster of organizations like theirs bought it and dedicated it to multiple purposes?

Thursday, Sept. 16, 1619, was cold and blustery in London when the Margaret sailed for Virginia with 39 men from the area around Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. After a rough, 2 1/2 -month crossing, they sailed up the James River, the major highway west in those days, and disembarked on the land they'd been granted by the Virginia Company. They called it Berkeley. So began the story of one of the numerous early plantations that still line the James River in a 20-mile strip between Richmond and Williamsburg.

SOTTERLEY Plantation, a nonprofit museum in St. Mary's County that was forced to cut back its visiting hours for lack of funds, has been named one of "America's 11 most endangered historic places."The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which included the property on its annual list of sites considered "at risk" of disappearing, says the attraction cannot survive if it doesn't raise funds for much-needed repairs."The descendant of a slave and the descendant of the man who owned that slave are working together to preserve the site and keep it open to the public," said trust President Richard Moe. "But without new sources of ongoing financial support, this national treasure may no longer be able to teach important lessons."

EASTON -- In his vaunted autobiography, abolitionist and diplomat Frederick Douglass vividly describes life as a slave on a prominent Eastern Shore plantation, with a "great house" he recalled as an "elaborate exhibition of wealth, power and beauty." The imposing estate, by the waters of the Wye River near this Talbot County seat, still stands and is still home to the family who owned it when a young Douglass kept fireplaces stocked with wood. Listed as a national historic landmark, the Wye House, built in the late 1700s, has been studied for its clues to 18th- and 19th-century America.

ST. INIGOES - After nearly 20 years of searching along a riverside here, archaeologists say they have found one of the oldest English footholds in Maryland - a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigoes House. Historians say the Jesuits arrived with the first settlers in 1634, aboard the Ark and the Dove, and built their first chapel in St. Mary's City. By 1638, they were also harvesting tobacco and corn at St. Inigoes to finance their mission to convert and educate Indians and colonists. Yesterday, at the U.S. Navy's Webster Field where the discoveries were made, archaeologists displayed fragments of Indian tobacco pipes, trade beads, lead shot, gun flint and European domestic refuse.

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Nellie Mae Cox 's Plantation remained undefeated, edging Reckless Runner and five other 3-year-olds to win the $70,000 Private Terms Stakes at Laurel Park on Saturday. Travis Dunkelberger rode Plantation, the second choice at post time, to his fourth victory in four races. Plantation won by a half-length and finished the one-mile race in 1 minute, 37.18 seconds. Reckless Runner relinquished his lead late in the race, and Regal Warrior finished third. "We just sat off the pace and hoped they'd run out there a little bit so we didn't get in a speed duel," Dunkelberger said of Plantation, who paid $5.40 and topped a $54.60 exacta and $179 trifecta.

T he British are coming! The British are coming!" the lady in the silk dress yells, arms flapping as she careens through the crowd. "This can't be happening! The British are coming!" It's hard to blame Rosalie Stier Calvert for panicking. She'd only fled her war-torn native land for Maryland a few years before, after all, and now enemy troops are massing outside the gates of her new home. It's Aug. 24, 1814, date of the Battle of Bladensburg - or so it seems to 200 or so eighth-graders at Ellicott Mills Middle School.

The Smithsonian Institution announced yesterday that it has purchased 575 acres of farmland in Anne Arundel County, including the ruins of a historic tobacco plantation, that will be turned into an archaeology research site the public can visit. The roughly 300-year-old Contee Farm off Route 468 on the Rhode River will become part of the adjacent Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, which has been conducting studies into Chesapeake Bay ecology and other subjects for 43 years, officials said.

In a piece on Politico the day before the Maryland primary, former U.S. Rep. Martin Frost of Texas predicted that Barack Obama would have a tough time in the state. His reason: Maryland is full of racists. "Though now considered a heavily Democratic state and a generally liberal enclave, Maryland has a long - but little-known - history of racial division that may cut into Obama's margin. It is not by accident that the Mason-Dixon Line (separating the North and the South) is the northern boundary of Maryland."

Under blue tents in Cockeysville, archeologists scrub shards of pottery with toothbrushes. Nearby, small flags jut from the grass and a hole reveals a stone foundation and steps. It might seem an unlikely place for an archaeological project, just a short distance from Interstate 83 and a light rail stop. But it's where a team of archaeologists working with the Maryland State Highway Administration is unearthing the remnants of a small plantation where slaves, free blacks and European immigrants once labored side by side, an arrangement historians say was more common in Maryland than in other slave states.

It was a warm, drizzly day as we stood in the garden of Sotterley Plantation, a former tobacco farm in St. Mary's County. At our feet, plants and flowers were pushing through the moist rows of dirt. In the distance, past green rolling fields, the Patuxent River meandered toward the Chesapeake Bay. But my 5-year-old daughter and I were not focused on the garden or the magnificent view. We were looking at a small brick building in front of us. Catherine Elder, executive director of the Sotterley Foundation, said it had once been used as a "necessary."

On the day I visited Ash Lawn-Highlands, once the plantation home of the fifth president of the United States, my path to the front door was blocked by an iridescent blue peacock that sported a spectacular tail. The bird's opulent color and showy plumage stood out in stark contrast against the simple yellow and white frame house that is located in rolling hills a few miles south of Charlottesville, Va. James and Elizabeth Monroe called the unpretentious place their "cabin castle."Eventually the magnificent fowl slowly and majestically vacated the porch, and I was free to enter the Plain Jane farmhouse.

HARBEL, Liberia -- They come in broad daylight, with guns, machetes, knives and buckets of acid. The invaders of Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire's rubber plantation in Liberia are hunting what they call "elephant meat": To them, the company is so big that anyone can take a hunk of flesh and no one will notice. Some people who stand in their way get hacked to death. Acid has been hurled on the faces and bodies of others. During 14 years of civil war in Liberia, the plundering of plantations and other assets became so common that the country was brought to its knees.

EVELYN LEE of Cutler Bay, FL died May 6, 2007. She was born in Baltimore, MD on Nov. 21, 1915. An avid sailor, world traveler, and naturalist. Along with her husband Forrest, they were founding members of the Miami Yacht Club. She was devoted to her husband until his death in 2001. She is survived by her sister in law Mildred Johnson of Laurel, MD, brother in law Mel Lee of Mountain Rest, SC; nephew, and niece Scott and Anne Lee of Plantation, FL. Evelyn will be interred next to her husband at Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, Florida on Tuesday May 15, 2007.