Weird Western Maryland

In 1976, the Hagerstown Daily Mail profiled a ruined historic house, originally an 18 th century stone tavern, in the Washington County community of Huyett (pronounced "Hewitt"), a.k.a. Huyetts Crossroads. The most interesting thing about the property – “disclosed with much secrecy,” the reporter coyly noted – was mentioned only in the last sentence of the article: The amputated hand of one of the past residents lies buried in the family graveyard. That’s all I know; the rest is speculation. I don’t even know whether the house still exists, on the north side of Alternate U.S. 40 just west of Maryland Route 63. Its family graveyard is listed, however, on the Find a Grave website, which documents 16 burials there.   Of the adults buried in the cemetery, only one, Jacob H. Myers (1828-1909), would have been of fighting age during the Civil War. If Jacob lost a hand on the battlefield, preserving it for home burial would have been odd but not unheard-of, as any Civil War...

The Allegany County community of Bier, population 173, is notable for its mournful name. As every undertaker knows, a bier is " a stand on which a corpse or coffin is placed" or " a coffin together with its stand," per Merriam-Webster. Funeral bier, temporarily unoccupied. Most likely, the place name Bier comes from the German surname Bier. The current county phone book, however, lists no Biers, only three Biermans. Even better, perhaps, bier is the German word for beer, so whenever I drive through Bier -- on U.S. 220 midway between Cumberland and the Germanically-named Keyser -- I think of the song "I Love Louisa," from The Band Wagon : How I love a glass of beer. (More beer!) Beer goes very good with beer. (More beer!) Alas, Hamill Kenny's otherwise invaluable The Place Names of Maryland is no help with Bier, which appears neither in the index nor in the alphabetical main text. Page 42 goes straight from Bew (Beau) Plains in Prince George's Cou...