Weird Western Maryland

  A pet crow supposedly had learned to talk. However, when Ora Ernst showed up at Stafford Hall in Clear Spring to take Jim’s photo for the Hagerstown Daily Mail, the bird had nothing to say. But he did produce human-sounding remarks like ‘ah’ and ‘uh-huh’ when offered candy by his adopted mother, Mrs. V.L. Ebersole. The crow was discovered in a nest nine years ago by Bernie Williams, a brother-in-law of the Ebersoles*, who raised him for seven years and taught him a vocabulary which includes “How are you?”, “Hell-looo”, and “Hello” minus the last syllable. I bet Ora Ernst said “Hello” minus the last syllable, and other things besides, when she got back to the office. Based on my four years as a general-assignment reporter at a daily newspaper, I have a great deal of sympathy for Ernst, who clearly drew the short straw in the newsroom that day, but I also wish she had pointed out in print that “Jim Crow” was a remarkably tasteless name for a pet on a former slave plantation...

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...