Weird Western Maryland

  One of my favorite place names is that of Dung Hill Road, which runs east-west between Foxtown Road and Bittinger Road, south of I-68 in Garrett County. I don’t know whose dunghill the name commemorates, but I know a surprising amount about dunghills in general. A dunghill was common on old-time farms. Before the advent of store-bought fertilizers, the livestock made the fertilizer, in the time-honored way of ingestion, digestion and excretion. Hence, the economic value of a dunghill. Whoever was tasked with replenishing the dunghill was also a good indicator of where that person stood in the farm’s hierarchy that day. Of course, like the words “sty” and “pigpen,” the word “dunghill” centuries ago left the farm to become a popular metaphor for anything “repulsive or degraded” (Merriam-Webster), “repugnantly filthy” (Dictionary.com), “vile” (YourDictionary.com) or “foul” (American Heritage Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary). As the folks at New Testament Baptist Chu...

  Claims that giant skeletons from prehistory had been dug up and delivered to scientific institutions are not hard to unearth in 19 th -century U.S. newspapers. Such tall tales were popular in part because they underscored White prejudices that Native Americans were an exotic inhuman species, their extermination worthy of no more human sympathy that, say, the fate of the passenger pigeon; and because believers in a literal, inerrant Bible could claim these ancient behemoths as evidence for the multiple Old Testament references to giants, most famously the demigods of Genesis 6:4: There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. (KJV via BibleGateway.com) Sometimes, however, the bones of long-dead people of unusual heights (anomalously tall or short) are indeed found – unsurprisingly, given the remarkable, everyda...

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...