Upper Marlb’ro’ (Poem)
"Sunning in the nicotine"
From Tales of the Chesapeake by George Alfred Townsend:
Through a narrow, ravelled valley, wearing down the farmer’s soil,
The Patuxent flows inconstant, with a hue of clay and oil,
From the terraces of mill-dams and the temperate slopes of wheat,
To the bottoms of tobacco, watched by many a planter’s seat.
There the blackened drying-houses show the hanging shocks of green,
Smoking through the lifted shutters, sunning in the nicotine;
And around old steamboat-landings loiter mules and over-seers,
With the hogsheads of tobacco rolled together on the piers.
Inland from the river stranded in a cove between the hills,
Lies old Marlb’ro’ Court and village, acclimated to her chills;
And the white mists nightly rising from the swamps that trench her round,
Seem the sheeted ghosts of memories buried in that ancient ground.
Here in days when still Prince George’s of the province was the queen,
Great old judges ruled the gentry, gathering to the court-house green;
When the Ogles and the Tayloes matched their Arab steeds to race,
Judge Duval adjourned the sessions, Luther Martin quit his case.
Here young Roger Taney lingered, while the horn and hounds were loud,
To behold the pompous Pinkney scattering learning to the crowd;
And old men great Wirt remembered, while their minds he strove to win,
As a little German urchin drumming at his father’s inn.
When the ocean barks could moor them in the shadow of the town
Ere the channels filled and mouldered with the rich soil wafted down—
Here the Irish trader, Carroll, brought the bride of Darnell Hall,
And their Jesuit son was Bishop of the New World over all.
Here the troopers of Prince George’s, with their horse-tail helmets, won
Praise from valiant Eager Howard and from General Wilkinson;
And (the village doctor seeking from the British to restore)
Key, the poet, wrote his anthem in the light of Baltimore.
One by one the homes colonial disappear in Time’s decrees.
Though the apple orchards linger and the lanes of cherry-trees;
E’en the Woodyard* mansion kindles when the chimney-beam consumes,
And the tolerant Northern farmer ploughs around old Romish tombs.
By the high white gravelled turnpike trails the sunken, copse-grown route,
Where the troops of Ross and Cockburn marched to victory, and about,
Halting twice at Upper Marlb’ro’, where ’tis still tradition’s brag,
That ’twas Barney got the victory though the British got the swag.
But the Capital, rebuilded, counts ’mid towns rebellious this—
Standing in the old slave region ’twixt it and Annapolis;
And the cannons their embrasures on the Anacostia forts
Open tow’rd old ruined Marlb’ro’ and the dead Patuxent ports.
Still from Washington some traveller, tempted by the easy grades,
Through the Long Old Fields continues cantering in the evening shades,
Till he hears the frogs and crickets serenading something lost,
In the aguey mists of Marlb’ro’ banked before him like a frost.
Then the lights begin to twinkle, and he hears the negroes’ feet
Dancing in the old storehouses on the sandy business street,
And abandoned lawyers’ lodges underneath the long trees lurk,
Like the vaults around a graveyard where the court-house is the kirk.
He will see the sallow old men drinking juleps, grave and bleared—
But no more their household servants at the court-house auctioneered;
And the county clerk will prove it by the records on his shelves,
That the fathers of the province were no better than ourselves.
Note: ”The Woodyard,” the finest brick mansion on the western peninsula of Maryland, the seat of the Wests, twelve miles from Washington, burned down a few years ago by the unaccountable ignition of the great beam of wood over the big chimney-place, which had stood there for nearly 200 years. Either seasoned by the fire or fired by spooks, it caught in the night, and a heap of imported bricks stood next morning in place of The Woodyard.
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