Poplar Grove (39.095459, -76.102676)

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Poplar Grove, Queen Anne's County, Maryland

(39.095459, -76.102676)

Poplar Grove, the home of the Emorys, was an Eastern Shore plantation maintained by slave labor prior to 1864 and by mostly black hired help thereafter. Its agricultural products were sent to market in Baltimore. Members of the family migrated there to conduct the family business and to branch out on their own. One such enterprise undertaken by the Emory's about 1858 was the development of Laurel Cemetery in the likeness of Greenmount but exclusively for the more affluent of the Free Black community. Situated across from Clifton, the spatial grounds and summer home of Johns Hopkins who hoped that after his death it would become the site of a great university, Laurel from 1852 until well after the Civil War, became the last resting place of those who saved enough money to buy a plot as they transported goods, washed the clothes, served the meals of the white elite, cared for their children, and cleaned out the night soil from the cesspools and privies for deposit long the banks of Bear Creek. It would not be until 1911 after the great fire that the first sewer of the city was connected to the Back River sewage plant.

In 2008 the mass of family papers at Poplar Grove, in mouse infested heaps on the floors of the rooms on the second floor and in the rooms and attic of an outbuilding, were subjected to an unfulfilled experiment of processing and imaging. A significant portion of the papers did make it on line where they were intended to be inventoried and abstracted by volunteers working remotely. What is on line in the ebook format developed by the State Archivist is drawn from the 24 series into which the collection was divided:

Series 1: Ann Marie Hemsley Emory Papers, 1800-1813 see: transcripts by Olivia Wood
Series 2:William H. Emory Papers, 1827/1870
Series 3: Frederick Emory Papers, 1838/1848
Series 4: Thomas Emory Papers, 1786/1842
Series 5: John Register Emory Papers, 1836/1879
Series 6: Robert Emory Papers, 1833/1843
Series 7: Land Records relating to the Emory, Tilghman, Hemsley, families, 1664/1884
Series 8: Albert T. Emory Papers, 1834/1865
Series 9: John Tilghman Papers, 1794/1863
Series 10: John Tilghman Receipts, 1800/1870s
Series 11: Records relating to Farm and Plantation Administration, 1803/1960
Series 12: Lloyd Tilghman Papers, 1832/1875
Series 13: Appraisal sample from the Papers at Poplar Grove for Collection Appraisal and Organization, 1665/1984
Series 14: Correspondence of William Stevens, Ezekiel Chambers, Thomas Seegar, Turbutt Button, and Lloyd Tilghman, 1805/1947
Series 15: Bibles and Books from Poplar Grove, 1722/192 (not scanned, see inventory)
Series 16: Unprocessed
Series 17: Edward B. Emory Papers, 1860/1910
Series 18: Photographs and Lithographs, 1847/1976
Series 19: William Hemsley Collection: Fugitive and Loaned Items Returned to Collection, 1699/1867
Will of William Hemsley, April 1699
Deed to Conveyance from William Davis to Henry Hemsley, dated 29 June 1867
Series 20: Mary Wood Collection: My Darling Alice, 1837/1935
Series 21: Mary Wood Collection: Alice Emory Wilmer Correspondence, 1895/1919
Series 22: Wood Collection: mss journal of Edward G. Bourke
Series 23: Lloyd T. Emory Papers, 1945/1948 (Folder entitled "Queen Anne's Soil Conservation District, Centreville, Maryland, Agreement #: 263, Acres: 250, Owner: Mrs. Lloyd T. Emory, Agreement by Mrs. Lloyd T. Emory and Fred Meredith to establish soil conservation methods documented in the farm plan and certified by Queen Anne's County Soil Conservation District Chairman, J. Grant Yates, signed March 16, 1948. Includes Farm Plan, soil conservation reports, land surveys, aerial photograph, and agricultural notes. Not scanned).

Related Newspapers transferred from the Library of Congress

Centreville Times & Eastern Shore Advertiser, October 1826
Centreville Times-oration of Edward G. Bourke on July 4, 1826
Series 24: Administrative Files

The use of a spreadsheet to readily organize each series and to link series for indexing purposes was not done as contemplated. Funds for staffing this final phase of the project were not forthcoming, nor was a cadre of volunteers organized. Users of the ebooks can make their own on their Google Drives and share them with this wiki by attaching the spreadsheets to an email and send them to transcribedoc@gmail.com.

Salvaging the Remains of a Family Archive



The introduction to the collection of historical records at Poplar Grove Plantation in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, came with a call from Adam Goodheart, Director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. He told me that a few years ago in the course of a fascinating archaelogical field study of a Queen Anne's county plantation slave cabin, family papers had been discovered in the plantation house. At the time an effort was made to assess the content of the collection, but time and resources were limited, and not much progress was made. Since then the owner, James Wood, had become increasingly concerned about the collection, and welcomed advice on what to do. Adam asked if I could spare a day to visit the collection and offer some suggestions.

The then State Archivist met Adam Goodheart and James Wood at Poplar Grove on a beautiful day in May, 2008. It was clear from what there was time to sample that the surviving records were a treasure trove relating largely to the antebellum history of Maryland and the Nation, as well as to the economic history of the region throughout much of the 19th century. In one out building there was an extensive collection of records kept by one member of the family who prospected for minerals in Guiana in the first half of the 20th century. The records were not in the best of shape and called for immediate attention to prevent any further loss and deterioration.

The State Archivist suggested a plan to James and Adam. If the Starr Center could come up with matching funds for four summer interns and recruit the interns from Washington College and the family, he would devise a salvage and management plan, provide a place to process and house the collection, and supply half the money for the interns from the Archives of Maryland fund of the Maryland State Archives.

We were exceptionally fortunate in the selection of the Poplar Grove Project staff. Washington College supplied Albin Kowalewski, who was chosen to coordinate and manage the project under the State Archivist's supervision, James Schelberg, who was drawn to the collection because of the significant amount of material relating to a Civil War general, and Jeremy Rothwell, who knows everyone in Queen Anne's County and the surrounding area, as well as having a deep appreciation of agricultural history. We were doubly fortunate in the family's suggestion for the internship in Olivia Wood. She not only brought a high level of enthusiasm and family knowledge to the team, but also her close relationship with her grandmother, author of an excellent book, My Darling Alice, inspired by correspondence her grandmother found in the collection, helped us all to better appreciate the cultural and literary value of what we were finding.

In all the internship was satisfying on all fronts. The interns presented their findings at a well-attended conference at Washington College on November 24, 2008. They moved the audience with the high quality of their reports, as did James Wood with his closing reflections on serendipity and entropy as it related to his unexpected inheritance of Poplar Grove and its contents.

The Poplar Grove project gave the State Archivist the opportunity to put into action ideas that he had formulated over many years about how to most effectively process and make rapidly accessible a large collection of family papers quickly and economically. Because the collection was in such disarray and presented a wide range of conservation issues including mold, mouse droppings, and even the presence of a decomposing dead dog, it was clearly a worst case scenario fraught with a wide range of challenges, perhaps only exciting to an Archivist, but definitely worth the effort, especially as a model for the future of collection management.

The first stage of processing was to flatten, folder, and box the collection as quickly as possible, removing the papers from the peach baskets, lard tins, attic trunks, out building attics, and second floor heaps in which they were found.

This first stage was a simple, not a terribly pleasant one, yet one filled with the 'aha's' of discovery that kept us going through several days of the very hottest weather of the summer. Thanks to James Wood, the owner, who installed an air conditioner in the kitchen of the plantation house where we worked, it was bearable. For the most part, we kept the papers in the disorder they were found, placing them in highly absorbant (cheap) folders, with as many as 6-10 flattened documents per folder, and placing the folders in a standard, one cubic foot, record center box, lined with a clear plastic garbage bag. As we foldered and boxed, a limited number of selected items that helped explain the character and extent of the collection were pulled and placed in a separate series for appraisal purposes. These would be among the first items in the collection to be addressed in the second stage of processing, and among the first to be scanned and placed on line..

To get to the comfort of our processing office as quickly as possible, we worked at a fast pace. Adam joined us as much as he could and was forever encouraging us to look more closely at the scraps and nooks and crannies for more, when we were sure that we had salvaged all that could be kept from recycling. Generally he was right, but at last we did manage to take under our charge almost every salvagable scrap of record remaining at Poplar Grove. We were pleasantly interrupted a few times by the press which took a great interest in our work and gave the project national publicity, which the Starr Center in turn reflected in a very popular Project Blog to which we all, in some measure contributed articles.

In the end we moved over 80 record center boxes and oversize d containers to the Archives processing center (a commercial warehouse, the address for which we do not make publicly available for security reasons).

The rest of the 10 week summer internship was spent in the comfort of the warehouse office sorting, refoldering into acid neutral folders placed in archival storage boxes, and scanning the papers in their sort sequence. The collection was sorted into series that seemed, from the appraisal selection and our initial boxing experience, to make the most sense for the overall management of the collection. For Poplar Grove that generally meant sorting by principal recipient or person most likely to have been associated with keeping the records. We did not intend to spend a great deal of time doing more than making a best guess at series sorting and keeping the results in as good chronological order as possible. Little time was meant to be spent on refinement of sorting. The idea was to provide a simple, logical framework for the gross management of the collection, employing elementary conservation techniques as we went along. For example, the cheap folders for the initial boxing absorbed much of the unwanted moisture and helped flatten the papers. The sorting and refoldering was accompanied by elementary cleaning, and scanning of as much of the contents as the time of the ten week internship permitted. The work of refined cataloging, description, and indexing would be left to the virtual reality of the web based inventorying, transcribing, and editing programs which I had designed.

As part of the proof of product of the internship, Olivia Wood had the dual responsibility of testing our new approach to on-line transcription and editing of collections, the pilot for which worked well, but for which the programs are now lost. While the project staff did most of the scanning, the Archives staff (in the person of Erin Cacye, a former MSA intern) scanned the first series, a collection that was found very early on in the bottom of a nearly empty trunk in the bee infested attic of Poplar Grove.

Once all but the fragments of paper had been placed in archival acid free folders and boxes, the Assistant Director of Special Collections at the Maryland State Archives, Maria Day, labeled the boxes, counted the folders, and described the collection to the box or book level in the Special Collections cataloging system. Her cataloging work can be found on line at the Maryland State Archives web site as Special Collections MSA SC 5807, the James Wood Poplar Grove Collection. There it is linked to the ebooks of the papers themselves the State Archivist produced in the evenings and on weekends on his home computer as his personal contribution to getting the project on line.

In doing so, he intentionally used a very simple ebook approach written in Perl that had been devised for his own research notes and papers (see [1] his online gateway to). The Perl programs produce a static, as opposed to a dynamic, ebook. Dynamic ebooks are generally created on the fly utilizing database/table driven systems such as sql or Oracle and pose massively expensive future problems of management and deployment. He believes that this static ebook approach is all that an individual or struggling historical society can afford, and that it makes the product, the resulting html based ebook, as close to platform and operating system independent as possible in the rapidly changing and volatile world of electronic information.
In all what was accomplished in a few short weeks was remarkably cost efficient. As a rule of thumb in 2008 dollars, it cost about $250 an archival box (a legal sized acid neutral box approximately 5" by 15") to process, folder, scan and place its contents on line, and about a cent a page per year to maintain the images live on the web. Sadly the index to the collection was not completed for lack of funds, but the images, linked here by series, are on line and can be easily perused and user indexed according to what is found of to be of interest.