Weird Western Maryland

Cumberland's Commandments. To promote his huge, and hugely expensive, 1956 epic The Ten Commandments -- at the time, the most expensive movie ever made -- veteran Paramount Pictures producer/director/showman Cecil B. DeMille partnered with the Fraternal Order of Eagles to erect granite Ten Commandments monuments nationwide.  This was great, low-cost publicity in every corner of the land, even if DeMille, Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner were not on hand for the unveilings (as they mostly were not). And the erections continued for many years, long after the movie's initial theatrical run. I don't know how many of these originally were erected in Maryland, but apparently only two remain, both in Western Maryland, and both erected after the movie's premiere 8 November 1956. One is in Memorial Park in Frederick, and was erected in 1958; the other, erected in 1957, is on the lawn of the Washington Street courthouse in Cumberland. Interestingly, the best current tally of these...

(Title in honor of Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963.) Cumberland's 1894 courthouse . On their enjoyable 21st-century ghost tours of Cumberland, Keith and Annie Potts stand on the Washington Street sidewalk, in the shadow of the 1894 courthouse, and tell a poignant story with roots almost 200 years old. According to the notes I jotted in the darkness one Saturday night, it goes something like this: Many years ago, a 5-year-old girl, Belle, while playing with her doll, fell down the well here -- but survived, only to die a year later in a carriage accident. The well long ago was filled in by construction, but could her doll still be down there? Some have reported seeing a phantom little girl sitting on the curb outside the courthouse, crying for her doll ... The child's fall was recalled 54 years later in Will Lowdermilk's classic History of Cumberland *: A remarkable accident occurred in the summer of 1824, the result of which was little less than miracul...