Behind the Stones

RESEARCH EXPLORES AND UNCOVERS OVERLOOKED LIVES IN CEMETERY

By Lisa Gregory

Photography By Turner Photography Studio

Robert Downing isn’t a name most people would know today. But back in the late 1800s, the actor was quite something, sort of a Brad Pitt of his time. “He was well-known and revered,” says Chris Haugh, historian and preservation manager for Mount Olivet Cemetery.

Downing travelled the country during the 19th century, performing Shakespearean parts and his signature role of Spartacus, the gladiator. “People paid their hard-earned money to see him perform,” Haugh says of Downing, who died in 1944 at his Middletown home. He is now one of 40,000 buried at Mount Olivet. “He has this small stone, but he lived this big life. People walk by his grave every day and have no clue who he was.”

Until now. 

Chris Haugh

Through his Stories in Stone blog (www.mountolivethistory.com/stories-in-stone-blog), Haugh tells the stories of those buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery. While there are the famous, such as Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star-Spangled Banner, and fabled Civil War heroine Barbara Fritchie, there are countless others with lives lived and stories to tell. “Each of our lives matter,” says Haugh.

“WHO IS THIS MEDORA?”

Walking through the cemetery, Haugh points out gravestones as if greeting old friends. He pauses momentarily at a large and impressive monument. He explains this is the final resting place of Florence Trail, who along with her sister, Bertha Trail, were active in the local suffragette movement before the 19th Amendment was ratified. “Here are two individuals, two witnesses to history and two people who helped make history,” says Haugh. 

Later, as Haugh observes volunteers work on repairing a headstone, he becomes intrigued by the first name on a gravestone nearby. “What an interesting name,” he says more to himself than to those around him. “Who was this Medora?” No doubt he will be finding out soon, as will those who read his blog. 

The Stories in Stone process requires research and digging deep and looking far and wide for information—old newspaper clippings, documents, and photographs—with the help of the internet. Haugh has told nearly 200 stories on his blog, including those of Downing and the Trail sisters. Stories in Stone is part of the nonprofit Mount Olivet Cemetery Preservation and Enhancement Fund and its effort to clean and repair gravestones and monuments as well as researching and preserving historic cemetery records. 

“I get to learn more and more about the place where I live, Frederick, or I learn more about the country or state where I live,” says Haugh. “Some of these people have connections to state and national history as well as local history.”

PERSONAL TOUCH

Haugh is intrigued by each person’s individual experience during historic events. “What did they feel when they heard that Pearl Harbor was bombed? What was going through their minds? What did they do during the war? And did they have family members who participated? Did they themselves participate in the war?” 

Charlotte Berry Winters participated in a war, but an earlier one. At the time of her death in 2007, she was 109 and the oldest-living Navy veteran and final living female veteran of World War I. Winters was responsible for helping to open the door for women to enter the military. 

According to Haugh, Winters’ father was friends with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy at the time. “This relationship likely gave an opportunity for Charlotte to have a meeting with Josephus Daniels, who was secretary of the Navy,” says Haugh.

While meeting with Daniels, Winters inquired why women could not serve their country as well as men. “This conversation, which occurred in 1916, successfully helped persuade the secretary to allow women to join the cause,” says Haugh. Daniels investigated and found there was no prohibition against women serving in the Navy. “Charlotte, along with her younger sister, Sophie, immediately enlisted after the U.S. entered into the war in April 1917,” he says. “Thousands of other women would follow her lead.”

Other stories are not about war or heroics but just simple, joyful, nonetheless significant remembrances. At the cemetery is a tombstone for Herbert and Nettie Hartley with an inscription on the back that says, “Scratch My Back” in large, bold letters. Haugh was intrigued.

“I asked our superintendent about it,” Haugh says of Ron Pearcey, who has worked at the cemetery for nearly 60 years. Pearcey, despite his wealth of knowledge regarding burials at the cemetery, wasn’t sure about the inscription and the person who had sold the stone no longer worked there. 

Serendipity interviewed when the Hartleys’ adult children visited the cemetery while Haugh was conducting a candlelit walking tour. “Her daughter told me that her mother loved to have her back scratched,” says Haugh.

Nettie Hartley also had a keen sense of humor. When she died in 2005, the family thought it fitting to bury her with her Bible and back brush. When she visits her mother now, “instead of tears, I’m laughing along with my mom,” the daughter told Haugh. 

MARYLAND’S PRETTIEST GIRL

Of course, when humans are involved, stories of love affairs, scandals and even murder are bound to be found. Haugh tells those stories as well. 

In 1915, Frederick County native Clara McAbee won a contest declaring her “Maryland’s Prettiest Girl,” enabling her to compete for a national title in California. The competition was sponsored by the Universal Film Company, today known as Universal Studios. According to Haugh, she placed second and was offered a motion picture contract. However, “There isn’t much documentation on her foray into the film industry,” says Haugh.

He does know that once at home she was treated as a local celebrity. “She was even given a lifetime pass at a movie theater here,” says Haugh. “You wanted ‘Maryland’s Prettiest Girl’ to come to your movie theater because others would come.”

But that isn’t the end of her story. “I find out that she becomes involved in some kind of love quadrangle with this dentist [Albert Leon] who came from Washington, D.C.,” says Haugh. The dentist was married to a socialite and had a child. “He opened an office here in Frederick while his wife and son remained in Washington, D.C.,” says Haugh. The dentist had a relationship with McAbee and another local woman, as well.

“When this other woman discovers his relationship with Clara, she informs his wife about the affairs,” says Haugh. “There was of course a huge scandal in Washington, D.C., because he is cheating on his wife.” The couple divorced.

McAbee and the dentist married, and both are buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery along with, ironically enough, the other woman who tattled on the dentist to his wife. “She’s only like 150 yards away from Clara,” says Haugh.

MURDER IN THE FAMILY

Sometimes Haugh goes looking for the family tree but becomes intrigued by its branches. While researching McClintock Young Jr., a local inventor and a founder of the Palmetto Brush Company in Frederick, Haugh stumbled upon the story of Young’s daughter, Eloise, who murdered her husband. 

Eloise was greatly adored by her father, as Haugh explains. “She was the only daughter and her mother died when she was young,” he says. “You could say she was the apple of her father’s eye.”

Eloise would accompany her father to his rustic mountain house in the vicinity of Indian Springs, where he liked to hunt. Upon her father’s death, she inherited the retreat, the place of so many happy memories.

Eloise married Arthur English, a lawyer, and the couple had four children. English spent much of his professional life in New York and Washington, D.C., according to Haugh. Eloise, however, longed for her Frederick home and took herself and her children to the mountain residence.

Her husband went to the retreat from time to time and made such a visit in March 1916. Upon arriving, English put his two sons to work outside chopping wood, despite both boys being recently ill and the weather being poor. “Eloise begs her husband saying, ‘I don’t really like the boys out there,’” says Haugh. “He replied with something like, ‘You should know your place, woman.’”

She backs down, but not for long. “She’s really struggling because she could see her son Hugh was especially having difficulty and was really in pain,” says Haugh. Again, she pleaded with her husband to bring the boys inside and wait a day or two until they were healthier. 

“He did not like that at all,” says Haugh. “He started breaking dishes and chasing after her.” 

He then retrieves a gun from a nearby cabinet and aims it at her, saying. “I should just finish you right now,” says Haugh. But Eloise English had a gun of her own. “She pulls out a small pistol revolver that she had hidden in her dress and empties it into him,” killing her husband, says Haugh.

“They find right away that she’s innocent,” says Haugh, as neighbors, friends and relatives supported her story of her husband’s abuse.

The usually exuberant Haugh becomes briefly pensive. Through the many stories he has told, he finds a connection to people like Eloise English. “They say people die twice,” says Haugh, “when their physical body fails and then you die again when you are forgotten.” 

Haugh isn’t letting that happen and is eager to keep searching and keep writing. There are many more stories to tell. After all, he still has that nagging question: “Who is this Medora?”

So begins another journey of discovery and remembrance.