Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 5
The Italianate building at 101 West Church Street in Frederick, Maryland, had by 1861 become a house divided. The patriarch of the Baers, the family who lived there, was staunchly pro-Union, while his son had married a Southerner and taken up her cause. Tensions built up so much between the two factions that the elder Mr. Baer devised a plan: His son’s family would live on the first floor and the Northern sympathizers on the second; the dining room and foyer would be neutral territory, with no political talk allowed.
Baer devised the sort of compromise Maryland, as a border state, adopted as general policy. It had long straddled the widening schism over slavery, its industrial ports siding with the North, its rural areas with the South. Frederick County, in the center of the state, distilled Maryland’s tradition of contradiction and compromise. While Civil War-era demand for grain kept many area slaves in the fields, the National Road, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had each snaked through the county in the early 180Os, encouraging less slave-reliant ventures. But when the time finally came in 1861 for Maryland to jump off the fence, it was in Frederick City’s Kemp Hall that the legislature voted to stay with the Union.
Civil War aficionados today crisscross the county all the time on their way to nearby Harpers Ferry, Antietam, or Gettysburg. But how many stop to consider the import of the places they pass? Frederick City, with its stately brick townhouses and churches and perilously rippling brick sidewalks, is the county seat. The other towns, dotted among the greens hills made calico by cornfields, are scaled-down variations on Frederick, with cat’s cradles of power lines weaving over their narrow streets.
Settlers first arrived in what was then Frederick Town in 1745. Twenty years later, Fredericktonians committed the colonies’ first act of rebellion against the British, burning the tax collector in effigy to protest the Stamp Act. But it wasn’t until 1814 that Frederick’s most famous son had a vision of bombs and rockets that would eventually bedevil tin-eared sports fans across the country.
Francis Scott Key was born in 1779 in what was then part of Frederick County. He had just negotiated the release of a prisoner of war when he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the attack on Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. He is now buried in Frederick’s Mount Olivet Cemetery under an ornate memorial erected in 1898. Atop a huge marble pillar ringed with metal stars, a bronze Key stretches out his arms while statues representing patriotism, war, and music stand below; a plaque affixed to the monument shows three bars of the national anthem, and another lists all the verses. Shrubs in front of the statue spell out KEY .
Tourists can also visit the less-assuming, little brick law office he shared in 1801-02 with his brother-in-law, the man who perhaps