Rod Cofield Talks about London Town October 24, 2020

Rod Cofield is the executive director of Historic London Town and Gardens to the South of Annapolis, Maryland I had asked if he would talk about London Town and how it fit into the early traffic network of the Chesapeake Bay and also to tell some stories to help better understand what happened here. Below is the 17 minute video.

Below is the transcription (by Shana Henry, check her Fiverr page) of the above video:

Hi, my name is Rod Cofield. I’m the executive director here at Historic London Town and Gardens. We are a public history museum and a public garden located in Anne Arundel County, right on the South River. The reason we exist today is because of the colonial town that used to exist here. It was here from the late 1600s through the 1700s and the very early 1800s. The South River, where we are did not have a bridge built across it until the 1870s. So the only way you dealt with the river was by a ferry crossing. One of the main ferry crossings for the river was right here at London Town. There was a spot right behind me on my right where travelers would come down the road, load onto a ferry, go across the river as if they are going to Annapolis or other points north. So because of the location on the South River and its connection to trade, transportation, tobacco and travelers, the town was a town, but it disappeared. 

And then today what we do is we try to bring the town alive or talk about the town and all of its components to the public today. Our 10 acres of gardens are also connected to the river and that they were designed with the river in mind, high. It’s a four season year-round garden mixture of natives and non-natives. The idea is that you go through the gardens, you see glimpses of the river, or you can get close up to the river and just see how the landscape is designed with the river in mind. 

Behind me is the William Brown House. It’s the big brick building. It was built originally around 1760 by a guy named William Brown. It was a tavern and then eventually it became the county’s almshouse or poor house from about the 1820s to the 1960s. And then today it is a living history museum or a house museum that you can go into. In the colonial period, because of its location in London Town on the main road, going north and south and in a port town, it would see quite a few people throughout the year, people of different social statuses, people of different economic levels, people from pretty much maybe all over the world because of the fact that London Town was a port. If you can imagine when there was the tobacco fleet in the area, you could see plantation owners and merchants and masters of ships meeting in the William Brown House, talking about the price of tobacco and how much that would cost to ship from Maryland back to England and other places. 

You could also imagine that there were merchants and other masters of ships in the building as well, talking with locals about things that were for sale and how much those would cost. We would be getting things from all over the world here. We would be getting manufactured goods from England and Europe, spices from the Western Indies, from the East Indies, tea from Asia, enslaved Africans too, of course, from Africa, convict servants, just stuff from all over the world. So the William Brown House in London Town represented a spot here in Anne Arundel county on the South River where people and cultures just all came together and mingled. 

Sometimes you can have a pretty rowdy scene when all these people are together, and other times when everyone is out growing tobacco or it’s the dead of winter or the heat of summer, it could be kind of a slightly sleepy town, but again, because we are on the South River and there are people going up and down the coast all the time, there is almost always someone traveling across this river right here. So there is almost always a need for someone to be in the tavern getting a drink or maybe waiting for the ferry to cross the river. 

Hi, again, you are looking north on the other side of the South River, towards Annapolis and Baltimore, Boston, New York, all those places. You can see kind of often the distance there, this square-ish, rectangular house; that’s where the ferry would land in the colonial period. So essentially, you are going to get on the ferry boat over here in London Town, you are going to take the trip across the South River, you are going to land over there and then you have about three to five miles until you get to Annapolis Proper. The ferries here were either wind or powered. There was no chain or rope or anything else across the South river. You could be a public ferry keeper on the South River, just like William Brown was. What that meant was the county government would give you a specific amount of money each year to operate the public ferry. In return, you were expected to have always at least one ferry boat on each side of the river and on a busy day, maybe church day or market day, or the local courts were in session, a third boat available as well. 

That meant that ideally, if you were traveling across the river, you wouldn’t have too long of a wait for your trip across the river. Every so often we would, you get some newspaper items about some of these ferry crossings that didn’t go very well. One that sticks in my mind is from August, I think the 1760s and the newspaper item is about the fact that there are some races going on in Annapolis, horse races, because that was a big thing. There were people here at London Town, very excited to get to the horse race, but a summer storm was coming through and they decided that they didn’t want to wait for the storm to pass. So they got on the boat, they got out into the river, and unfortunately the thunderstorm came up, capsized the boat and a few people and horses drowned. Some of those unfortunate things did happen here on the river, but that’s kind of, I guess, to be expected when you are trying to race a summer thunderstorm in the Chesapeake. 

These ferry boats were generally flat bottom boats and they could be anywhere from 12 or 16 feet wide to 16 or even 32 feet long. We don’t have too many surviving records of the exact number of people going back and forth across the river. William Brown does have a journal that is at the Baltimore Historical Society, I think from 1775, 1776, some of the pages cover that. It’s mostly all about the ferry crossing, but we don’t have any other surviving records or at least I’m not aware of any other surviving records that will give us more details about the ferry that was here and the number of people that would cross. 
There are a few travel records of people from their diaries or travel journals that mentioned coming through London Town. The first record we have of the ferry is from the 1670s when someone was traveling from that side of the river down to St Mary’s City, which was the capital at the time. The last time that we have records of the ferry crossing here at what we think of as London Town, I believe was the 1840s, 1850s. Another ferry was operating farther up river. If you look at a map today of modern Maryland, where the River Road bridge is, that is where another ferry started to operate and became more popular amongst travelers than the London Town ferry here. By the time you get to the 1850s or so, this particular fairy crossing doesn’t exist as much anymore, and the main travel patterns had shifted farther inland or farther up river. The first bridge as I may have said earlier was the 1870s built across the river. 

We are now inside the William Brown House. You saw it earlier when we were down at the dock, again, built around 1760 as a tavern. Since it was a tavern here in London Town, you can very easily imagine that it would see quite a few folks from around the area and from other parts of the world. There is a painting that’s at the St. Louis Art Museum called Sea Captains of Surinam. I would suggest you look it up. It shows quite a few captains in a tavern, carousing, getting drunk, but also maybe talking about their business. You can imagine that was occurring here in William Brown House, in the Tavern or in other taverns in and around the county. 

London Town was the home of quite a few different sea captains and masters of ships. One I want to tell you about is Captain Alexander Scougall. He was active in the middle part of the 1700s. He was both a coastal trader. He would trade up and down the North American coast and he would also go across the Atlantic. Some newspaper items really indicate how dangerous sometimes being a captain or a master of a ship was. If I’m remembering the date correctly, October of 1745, there was an item in the Maryland Gazette, the local newspaper that talked about school being captured by French pirates or privateers on a trip down to Barbados. He was eventually freed. We don’t know exactly how, but that was within the next two years or so. 

In the late 1750s, there is another item in the Maryland Gazette, again about Captain Alexander Scougall that mentioned that on another trip he had to abandon the ship. Not exactly certain why, I can’t remember why, but maybe it had sprung a leak or it was just too dangerous to continue to sail; again, something that would just happen if you were sailing in the colonial period, and today, of course, ships do break down and they have to be abandoned. Scougall was a person who lived in London Town. His family was here in London town, but he was deeply connected to the sea and he was gone out at sea for her many, many days, weeks, maybe even months out of any given year. He is just one representative person of quite a few of the different captains that were here in London Town. 

Another one, Captain Strachan, I don’t remember as much about him, but the thing is that his wife and I think his daughter have portraits that still survive today. One of them I think is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The other one I think is at the Boston Fine Art Museum, or maybe the Metropolitan. I can’t quite remember. The whole point of that though, is that sea captains could become fairly wealthy individuals. Even though there was a lot of danger, like I mentioned with Scougall, it could also come with quite a bit of wealth. One way that you would show your wealth in the colonial period was to have a portrait commissioned for you and or your family members. So it is definitely interesting that for London Town, there aren’t a lot of known portraits of the inhabitants of London Town, but the ones that do exist, a good many of them are either of seed captains or masters of ships and their immediate family members. Strachan, S T R A C H A N, he was a captain that seemed to have made it from a wealth perspective and there are a few of his family members done in portrait that are hanging in art museums today. 

Something else that you would see happening when ships came into port was not only the captains and masters coming to taverns to talk about business, conduct business, and just regale each other with stories, but the common sailors would also disembark. Sometimes of course, get a little rowdy, but every so often, well actually maybe semi-regularly you would get sailors running away. If you can imagine the life on board a ship or a common sailor, there is not always a lot of room for advancement. It’s a dangerous job. You are not getting as much wealth as the masters and officers. So a lot of times, particularly here in the new world or what we would think of as the new world, a lot of times you would have common sailors taking advantage of being in a place where not a lot of people knew them to jump ship and try to run away. 

You very often see in the local newspapers, ships’ masters and captains putting notices in talking about the common sailors that are running away. Here in London Town, we definitely have our share with them. One that is always in my mind or the one I can talk about most easily, there is a guy named John Flack. I can’t remember the newspaper item word for word, but the reason it sticks in my mind is because of the newspaper item. It talks about the fact that this guy named John Flack has his name tattooed on his hands. So that’s not a good way to run away if your name is branded on you. That was just something that you would see in quite a few of these newspaper items, particularly since sailors would get tattoos or have identifying marks. It would be at least in my opinion, relatively hard for them to blend in without being noticed. But again, they must have been thinking that since this was a new place, if they were back from England or other parts, that not as many people would know them and ideally it could be easier for them to run away and start a new life somehow or some way. That’s just something that happened. You of course, get other runaways too. A lot of folks are familiar with runaway slaves, runaway servants, but sailors, yeah, they tried to run away. Sometimes they were caught and sometimes they were successful. I do not know off the top of my head whatever happened to John Flack, but I can only imagine he gave it his all. I just don’t know what happened to him. 

London Town today is a history museum and a public garden. We welcome visitors throughout the year. We have quite a few school tour programs that take place both on the historic side and on the garden side. What we want to do is on the history side in particular, tell people about the different stories here in London town. We want to talk about all levels of society because they came together for better and for worse to create a place called London Town. Our plans for the next few years are to continue our different types of programming, living history programs, lectures, workshops, things of that nature, and do some capacity expansion. The doc, where I was talking to you earlier, that’s quite an old dock right now, and we want to make it bigger. We want to rejuvenate it in some way so that we can actually welcome back and tall ships to the property. These wooden vessels that were so important to the colonial period and the establishment and character of the town, we can’t bring them to the site. One of our main goals in the next few years is to figure out a way for that dock to be redone so that we could welcome tall ships such as the Sultana, the Pride of Baltimore or others in the area.

It was also important, I think for locals to have a better connection to the water. It’s so easy today for people to get in their car and take the road system and the bridge system, and pretty much never, ever interact with the water other than to look at it from your car. But in the colonial period, and honestly, through the vast majority of the 20th century I would say, when you wanted to deal with the water here, you had to take a boat in some way. It’s relatively recent that these bridges and everything else were built. So I think we’ve lost a bit of a touch or a bit of an understanding of how all the waterways in the Chesapeake region affected all aspects of your life. So that dock is a way for us to kind of help introduce or reintroduce people to the water and its importance to their lives here in the Chesapeake.

You can also read more about and see photos of this place by clicking here!