INTERVIEWER: Did you ever go to Public Landing?KATHERINE: Yes, indeed. We used to have Sunday School picnic, a couple of times. Just as we did at Red Hill and Ocean City.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of things. You just had a picnic there?
KATHERINE: Yes, we’d just bathe and eat. We had, oh I guess, supper. Anyway, we’d eat a meal and we used to crab. Catch crab.
INTERVIEWER: You had to get there by boat.
KATHERINE: The Pocomoke River. You have Pocomoke River there. Pocomoke River is a very treacherous river. You can wade in the Pocomoke River, maybe up to your knees, and the next step would be like you were stepping off a hedge top. I remember when we were children, and we used to have a place that we called the Little Winter Quarters. There wasn’t anything there but the river. Sometimes we would go there, take a lunch and go to the Little Winter Quarters and one boy, one of our brothers or somebody would go out find how far we could go and drive a stick, because they could swim. All the boys could swim in those days, but the girls couldn’t, because we didn’t have a swimming pool or anything like that. And they would drive a stick so that we wouldn’t go too far.
INTERVIEWER: And you would just wade in?
KATHERINE: We used to go to the Pocomoke River through Winter Quarters, through the woods out here. We used to get arbutus and teaberries. Teaberries are good to eat. You’ve heard of teaberry chewing gum.
INTERVIEWER: Um-huh.
KATHERINE: Well, same flavor. We used to collect teaberries and arbutus and then go on to the river and have our lunch and wade there at the river. The roads were so that it was hard to visit. Now I am talking about the very early times, probably when I was a child. And people lived on the river and used boats to visit back and forth. But the people inland generally rode horseback to visit.
INTERVIEWER: Do you know anything about Jake the alligator?
KATHERINE: No. Legends and superstitions. I told you about the fairgrounds, haven’t I?
INTERVIEWER: Yea, you told me about that. Do you remember any big storms or hurricanes?
KATHERINE: The windstorm in 1922, no that was fire. There was a storm that cut the inlet. I have forgotten the year that that storm took place.
INTERVIEWER: I think it was around ’30.
KATHERINE: I don’t know, but there used to be, there wasn’t any inlet at all down at Ocean City, from the ocean to the bay. There was land there. And they had a storm there one summer and it made that inlet.
INTERVIEWER: Just cut it in there?
KATHERINE: Yes. Do you know where I’m talking about in Ocean City? Where the bay and the ocean are connected?
INTERVIEWER: Yea. Did you ever go to Ocean City?
KATHERINE: Oh yea. We went to Ocean City. We used to spend the month of July in Ocean City when we were children. This is (unintelligible). They used to have an all-day Ocean City Excursion. The trains would put it on. And we’d get on the train at Pocomoke and change at Salisbury and go on to Ocean City. We’d leave in the morning quite early and return around nine o’clock. And this was how much it cost.
INTERVIEWER: A dollar?
KATHERINE: Yes, round trip. There’s the Excursion. And this was the old station on Clarke Avenue. And then that is the new one. That was a Saturday. Everybody used to come to Pocomoke on Saturday to shop. The farmer’s brought mostly their butter and eggs and their farm products. And then they would take them to the store and trade them for sugar and flour and things of that kind.
INTERVIEWER: They would come from all over?
KATHERINE: Yes, the surrounding country.
INTERVIEWER: Pocomoke has changed then.
KATHERINE: Oh my.
KATHERINE: The last fire was 1922. There was a man that was burning some trash in a trash container on Second Street. Right across from, well it was on the corner of Second and Willow Street. And he was burning some trash in the back of his store and it was very, very windy. And the wind took the fire down by the Peacock Hotel now, but it was the Parker House. It burned the whole block where the vacant store is on the corner and the bank and Scher’s. It burned that whole block. And then it went over across and burnt two blocks. And Front Street was completely destroyed, both sides of the street. People moved their furniture out into the street. And the fire even burned that. Every house on Front Street was burned. It went on down to the river. I think the reason it was such a big fire was because the water, there was something about pressure, the water pressure, it didn’t and then the wind was blowing. My father had a store. That wasn’t burned. That was right next to Vincent’s store. He had retail ice cream and that wasn’t burned. My brother at the time, and his wife lived above that and of course they expected that to burn. So, my oldest brother, Sidney, drove downtown to help this brother that lived there, but he didn’t get downtown. There was a Mrs. Lloyd that lived on Market Street opposite the Maryland National Bank, they lived there. And she called him, and he stopped, and he took her furniture out, we lived out to Hartley Hall, he took her furniture out to Hartley Hall. My sister said when she went out somewhere, she went out about the fire. And when she came back to Hartley Hall later on in the afternoon, it started in the morning. She said the porch and the yard was completely filled with furniture that people had moved out there trying to save from the fire. And she said they didn’t have any lights. They got some candles out and I think somebody made some yeast flour biscuits. My mother wasn’t home. She was visiting me in Washington.
INTERVIEWER: You weren’t here when it burned?
KATHERINE: No, I wasn’t here at the time. Rosemary said that she was invited to a bridge party that day. And the hostess gave the refreshments to the firemen. The firemen from other towns that came. They were going to have a dance that night and the refreshments that they planned to have for the dance they gave those refreshments to the firemen too.
(Series continues next Saturday with recollections of another long-time resident.)
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