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Oxford Map and History
Oxford is one of the oldest towns in Maryland. Although already settled for perhaps 20 years, Oxford marks the year 1683 The Strand Tilghman as its official founding, for in that year Oxford was first named by the Maryland General Assembly as a seaport and was laid out as a town. In 1694, Oxford and a new town called Anne Arundel (now Annapolis) were selected the only ports of entry for the entire Maryland province. Until the American Revolution, Oxford enjoyed prominence as an international shipping center surrounded by wealthy tobacco plantations. Today, Oxford is a charming tree-lined and waterbound village with a population of just over 700 and is still important in boat building and yachting. It has a protected harbor for watermen who harvest oysters, crabs, clams and fish, and for sailors from all over the Bay.
For a walking tour and more history visit https://tidewatertimes. com/travel-tourism/oxford-maryland/.
St. Market St. High St. East
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Benoni Ave. Pleasant St. Robes Hbr. Ct. South Morris Street Bachelor Point Road Pier St. E. Pier St. Oxford Road
W. Division St. Caroline St.West St. Tred Avon Ave. First Street Jack’s Pt. Rd. Third Street Bonfield Ave. 2nd St.
Ave. Myrtle
Stewart Ave. Norton St. Mill St. Wilson St. Banks St.Factory St.Morris St. Oxford Park South Street Jefferson St. Sinclair St. Richardson St. Town Creek Rd.
Oxford Community Center
Oxford Bellevue Ferry
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When Pigs Fly northern point, overlooking Holland Straits. As the storm drove home to warn her grandmother that water surging from the south, the creek was extra-salty and a surge several families retreated to the would be coming with a rush. “I was captain’s house, where they were six years old and the water came up forced to climb higher and higher. in the house over my head. I was put Ralph Parks, the captain’s up on this old-fashioned buffet.” grandson, described his brother
In Dorchester County, storm- and cousins watching from the induced erosion had scattered attic as Bay water swept around the last Holland Islanders fifteen them: “Irving and Johnny ~ seven years before, but many still spent of them ~ were there in Grandfasummers at their old homes, the ther’s house in the storm….Waves men crabbing, wives and children shook the house, then felled three catching up with relations and for- poplars on its southern side, which mer neighbors. Among them that steadied and saved the structure…. August were descendants of the Well, you can just figure how high late Captain Bill Arthur and Mar- the tide was. The seas rolled right garet Parks, whose fine old house in the lower windows. had weathered many storms on the “It was the same night…Johnny
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said he saw some boats come by the house and he didn’t know why they didn’t hit the house, but they would go by one side or the other. They’d broke loose from down there ~ Crisfield or Smiths Island, somewhere…”
Above Hollands, Elliotts Island wasn’t prone to flooding, but every man’s boat was at hazard. Hyland Jones nearly lost his big bugeye/ buyboat, Annie E. Interviewed in his nineties, Lawson Ewell remembered her well: “Originally she was a two-masted boat. He’d put a motor in her before ’33, when she blew aground in the August Storm. That storm drove her [across Fishing Bay and] half a mile up on the marsh. He was gonna strip her and let her go, but they come from all over and dug her out, from Tyaskin and Wingate and Hurley’s Neck and all over. There were two tugboats and there must’ve been a hundred and fifty men digging and they got her back afloat.”
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Annie E. was a popular buyboat, and oystermen liked dealing with Captain Jones. As Ewell said, “Hyland used to buy oysters from all the tongers ’round here, even when they could get a little more money from somebody else.” Another islander remembered that Captain Jones’s old bugeye was loaded with summer freight: “All this time the watermelons were still aboard, and when they got her afloat, she sailed on up to Baltimore with them.”
Hauling produce lacked the glamour of a life in the theater, but glamour offered no protection from the storm. Before the ’33 summer season had opened, the barge holding the beloved James Adams Floating Theater had been towed to Baltimore for repairs and refurbishing. That August, the storm caught it tied up at Cricket Hill by Gwynn’s Island. On the evening of the 23rd, rising winds rocked the performers, distracting the audience and whistling louder and louder. After hasty curtain calls, men attending had to carry their ladies through advancing water to reach autos parked by the wharf.
Through the night, waves pounded the barge-borne auditorium and cast quarters against the wharf. Captain Seymoure risked jumping overboard to undo the lines so he could pull farther offshore before the heavy vessel suffered more dire damage. His tug Trouper broke loose and was blown out of the
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creek, but when the wind veered, Trouper was blown back in. Despite the “show must go on” tradition, the hurricane so damaged the theater and the cast’s psyche that performances had to be canceled for a week. One longtime cast member slept through the night’s storm, but less-seaworthy performers wasted no time in deserting. The 1933 storm surge reportedly hit Hoopers Island at 11 feet, enough force to knock out all bridges connecting the string of islands to each other and to the mainland. James Riggin and Grovener Cleveland Riggin tended the Narrows Bridge, which tied the three islands to the mainland. The Daily Banner reported, “The draw tender house which stood on a shell pile just off the upper island end of the Narrows Ferry Bridge was last seen more than a half mile from its customary place and the tender James Riggin and his assistant G. Cleveland Riggin had not been located yesterday morning.”
A two-day advance storm warning from the Weather Bureau undoubtedly reduced the overall death toll, placed at 47, including Grovener Cleveland Riggin, whose body was later recovered in Chesapeake Bay.
Forty-some years ago, A.M. Foley swapped the Washington, D.C., business scene for a writing life on Elliott Island, Maryland. Tidewater Times has kindly published portions of one upcoming work, Chesapeake Bay Island Hopping, along with other regional musings. Foley’s published works are described at www.HollandIslandBook.com.
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