History buffs' toil is a 'labor of love'

The Baltimore Sun

It's a labor of love," said Mary Calvert, referring to the 1962 founding and development of the Ann Arrundell County Historical Society. Today, the society includes the restored 1820s Benson-Hammond House and museum in Linthicum at the northeast corner of BWI Marshall Airport, the Kuethe Library on Crain Highway and the Browse & Buy Shops, one in Severna Park and the other at the Benson-Hammond House.

The main project of the society has been the once-abandoned old house, which belonged to a family that worked in the truck farming industry, a once-thriving business. About 300 truck farms, using immigrant labor from Baltimore, existed in northern Anne Arundel County between the 1860s and the 1930s. When refrigerated trucks began bringing up crops from the South, the industry faded.

The Benson-Hammond House became the focus of the Ann Arrundell County Historical Society after Mary Calvert, one of the founding secretaries of the society, spotted it on her way to her job at the airport. The house was built by Thomas Benson and sold to Rezin Howard Hammond in 1887. It became part of many acres of farm property purchased by Baltimore to build Friendship International Airport (now BWI).

Up to 500 volunteers make up the society today. They offer tours, tend to an indoor display of a truck farm picker's shanty and care for donated items of period furniture and a doll museum.

"That's the greatest thing about a historical society," said Mary Calvert. "You don't know how it's going to develop. You got a lot of faith, and, of course, those of us that started it put out a lot of expertise, and what extra money we had went into the historical society formation and from that beginning became something that's really outstanding. ... We've gotten a number of awards from the Maryland Preservation Trust, and we feel real good about that."

The group wants to add an outdoor brick walkway around the house and fix up the smokehouse and outhouse. It will sponsor a Strawberry Festival on June 9 at society headquarters, said Mark N. Schatz, who edits the Anne Arundel County History Notes newsletter. The newsletter features everything from the Civil War era in Anne Arundel County to "separate but not equal" education in the county after the Civil War.

Book sales also fund the society, says Schatz. Strawberries, Peas and Beans by Will Munford tells the history of truck farming and is for sale in the gift shop of the house. Also published by the society is Before BWI, by Isabel Shipley Cunningham. Schatz, who works in the monument business by day, has been the heart of the library since 1963 when he began volunteering.

Mary Calvert was the first secretary of the group in 1962, when she and her husband, Jim Calvert, met with other history lovers at the home of Jack and Charlotte Wich. Among the group was publicist and author Marie Angel Durner, and some members who have since died, including Gladys P. Nelker, Marshall Nelker, J. Reaney Kelly and Frances Kelly.

"They were friends and lived in Anne Arundel County, and they were all interested in the history of the county and the area that we lived in," said Mary Calvert. "We felt like we needed to get a historical society started, so our first meetings were held over at Jack Wich's place.

"Jack was a good president and had a construction company. It was through him as president of the society that we were able to take the building that we started in, which is now the Browse and Buy Shop [in Severna Park]. It [had been] a station of the Baltimore & Annapolis Railroad and was extensively remodeled," she said.

Mary Calvert had run a shop called Cracker Barrel in Pasadena in 1978. It wasn't long before she used the same talents and skills in consignment of antiques and gifts at the Browse and Buy Shop, where she and her husband still work a couple of days a week.

Through 68 years of marriage, the Calverts -- Mary, 87, and Jim, 90 -- have shared a love of history. Jim, born James Billingslea Calvert, discovered that he and his father, Charles Hancock Calvert, and his grandfather (all truck farmers on the land opposite the house where the couple lives in today) were direct descendants of Leonard Calvert, brother of Cecil Calvert. Cecil was the second Lord Baltimore. It was from his wife, Lady Baltimore -- or Lady Anne -- that the county got its name. Her portrait hangs in the restored house and is on the letterhead of the newsletter. She died in 1649 at age 34, and the next year, Cecil Calvert requested that the county in Maryland be named in her honor.

The history of the area mingles with family memories for Jim and Mary Calvert. They have enjoyed their home on Bodkin Creek in the Poplar Ridge community of Anne Arundel for more than six decades. The house sits across the water from Jim Calvert's birthplace and 72-acre truck farm where his mother raised him along with his four brothers and two sisters.

"They took the buggy and they went over to the steamboat which took them up to the foot of Broadway [Fells Point in Baltimore], where all the people did their trading. Right there at the foot of Broadway, they went to the grocery store, they went to the butcher's, they went to the photographer's and they went to the dentist," said Mary Calvert.

Mary Calvert, born Mary Elizabeth Moran, was 5 and living in Baltimore, the eldest of two girls and two boys, when her mother was widowed. In time, her mother remarried and moved with her new husband and family to a house at the corner of Fort Smallwood and Bayside roads, where "a little country store was operated out of their home," she said. When Mary was 18, she met Jim, 21. Soon afterward, they married.

Jim Calvert worked as an auto mechanic in Baltimore and Mary Calvert had a job in the aviation services industry. In their spare time, they remodeled the "little shore house" that Jim had acquired from Albert Corey, a Canadian who "knew the Calvert family and let Jim buy a few acres at this lovely point," Mary Calvert said.

One day, as she was driving past an abandoned house near Friendship Airport, she decided that the old building should be renovated.

She used her skills of persuasion, which she attributes to a public-speaking course, to round up interest in what later became known as the Benson-Hammond House. Mark Schatz recalled that there was a big hole in the back of the abandoned house, and the walls and woodwork were in bad condition. But work began, and volunteers helped to make the old house into a museum.

"It's blind faith," Mary Calvert said about the start of the restoration of the Benson-Hammond House, now a picture of rural life in 19th-century Anne Arundel County.

"We have to change the displays periodically. People are bringing in new things. ... And they are authenticated. ... It's done on a very high level," she said.

While Mary Calvert was president, Dorothy Ward, the late curator of the museum, willed her valuable doll collection to the society.

"They were all old, antique dolls, porcelain dolls that I knew had to have the proper display" in a controlled climate, she said. It took about two years to get the dolls ready for exhibit, including laundering the clothing and organizing the display. Ward's dolls date to the turn of the 20th century, and many were made in Germany. They were added to a collection of dolls from Linda Bielas.

Cases for the dolls were handmade by a craftsman on the Eastern Shore to exact specifications. "They're beautiful," said Mary Calvert, "as beautiful as those at the Maryland Historical Society."

The museum also houses the Ora Pumphrey Smith picker check collection. Picker checks were coins of different shapes containing symbols to indicate when a vegetable or fruit picker had amassed a bushel, said Schatz, the newsletter editor. Replicas are for sale in the gift shop. Sales at both gift shop locations support the society's projects.

Volunteers are needed to serve as docents and helpers in the gift shop at the house and the one in Severna Park. Volunteers are also welcome at the Kuethe Library, which contains genealogy and other records spanning centuries in cooperation with the Anne Arundel Genealogical Society.

The Benson-Hammond House at 7101 Aviation Blvd. in Linthicum is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and by appointment. Call 410-766-1758.

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