‘Historian Schlosnagle Revisits Garrett History’

BY LEN SHINDEL

In Nov. 2021, I submitted this interview to The Glades Star, the journal of the Garrett County Historical society. The board of the society declined to publish the interview. My hope is that constructive and civil dialogue over this and other new perspectives our county’s history will leave us better prepared to build a brighter future.

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1975. 

The nation seeks normalcy after the Vietnam War and Watergate. The administration of President Gerald Ford begins planning the nation’s bicentennial commemoration. 

Garrett County native Stephen Schlosnagle, who grew up on a 100-acre dairy farm outside of Accident, graduates from the University of Maryland with a degree in history. Former Maryland State Del. B.O. Aiken, a retired school principal from Accident, chairs the Garrett County’s Bicentennial Commission. The commission hires Schlosnagle to write a history of Garrett County.

“It took me about a year to compile Garrett County-A History of Maryland’s Tableland, recalls Schlosnagle, a fourth-generation descendant of German immigrants to the Accident community.

“I relied upon the Glades Star, multiple published and unpublished sources at the Ruth Enlow Library and consultation with many county residents,” said Schlosnagle. “My work was overseen by a book review committee with input from local history advocates such as Raymond McCullough, Robert B. Garrett, Bruce Jenkins and Walter Price,” added Schlosnagle

For the next 45 years, visitors to the Garrett County Historical Museum and the Ruth Enlow Library have relied upon Garrett County to inform our understanding of the county and its roots.

2021. 

Garrett County prepares for its sesquicentennial commemoration on Nov. 4, 2022. The nation is even more sharply divided than in the decade preceding the nation’s bicentennial. 

And, Stephen Schlosnagle, whose interest in history was first whetted by his fourth grade teacher, Mary Strauss, author of The Flowery Vale, a history of the Accident community, says his understanding of the county’s history has changed, too, a product of tumultuous times.

“The bicentennial history I wrote followed the standard American narrative,” said Schlosnagle. “I saw Garrett County history as American history in microcosm and followed the thinking that, if you want to understand the American experience, look at local history.”

The standard narrative, claims Schlosnagle, didn’t lead to a factual historical account of the state’s westernmost county.

“I’ve come since to see that history is in many ways a fiction. It is a fiction that we create about things past that we never experienced, people we never knew, based on what was written and said about them. And history is also informed by what is happening in the present.“ 

History is about drawing lessons for the present, says Schlosnagle. But along with a growing cohort of historians, he has concluded that some of the deepest lessons come as much from “what has been left out of traditional histories as what is left in.” And the story of “continual progress,” he says, has left some deep holes. 

For instance, he notes, “there was a time, when African-Americans comprised a significant proportion of Garrett County’s population.” And “amateur white male historians,” whose accounts comprise more than 90 percent of the source material for his work, “frequently recorded that Black county residents—whether free or enslaved—were, for the most part, happy and contented.” 

But, he points to an 1892 article by May Yost of Oakland, subsequently published in the Glades Star, that “documented chains of slaves being driven with horse whips across western Maryland roadways on their way to Kentucky for auction,” Those accounts, he says, are confirmed in the more recent scholarly work of contemporary historians, like Allegany College of Maryland professor Lynn Bowman. “How happy could they have been?” he asks.

In the late 1980s, Schlosnagle worked with the Town of Accident and the Maryland Historical Trust on the restoration of the James Drane house, celebrated as the oldest standing structure in the county. 

“It’s probable the house was built by slave labor,” he says, “but that likelihood seems to have evaded the historical narrative.” He recalls a local farmer, friend of his father, pointing to a field beyond the house and saying, “That’s where they buried the n—gers.” Though he was a young boy at the time, Schlosnagle noted both the racial slur and the absence of any grave markers. 

“The nearby grave of James Drane,” he observes, “was commemorated with a field stone bearing Drane’s initials and a more recently erected historical marker. But memories of enslaved people are obliterated.  “The memories of Black people, women, native Americans, immigrants, and working poor people are too frequently relegated to footnote status in popular accounts of history,” he states.

“I’ll offer another example of selective memory,” says Schlosnagle. “Much is made of the glamor and glitz of flourishing resort communities such as Deer Park at the end of the nineteenth century—the gilded age of railroad barons and captains of industry. But we also find another account buried in the literature.” The early 1890s, he says is often referred to as the “Gay Nineties.” “But I did not find much gayety in [research on] Garrett County,” says Schlosnagle. A local writer said the county was “young and backward and debt-ridden.” That, he says, is a perspective “given scant notice by most local historians.” 

“If we’re honest with history, we can grow and nurture a more productive and equitable future for all of us,” Schlosnagle says. That means incorporating the perspectives of more minorities, including women, whose contributions, like those of Black people and the working poor have traditionally been marginalized.  

“If ninety percent of the historic narrative had been written by women or the descendants of slaves, we would have a completely different narrative—and possibly a very different state of current affairs,” says Schlosnagle. “I’m not certain the actual story of the American experience is one of continual progress. I think it was the poet Carl Sandburg who said, ‘I don’t know who my ancestors were—but we’ve been descending for a long time,” he adds. 

Schlosnagle doesn’t spare the role of the county’s legendary pioneer, Mesach Browning, from examination. After a brief mention of Mary Browning, Schlosnagle says his book focused on the exploits of her husband for the next 12 pages. 

“If I were to write that section today,” says Schlosnagle, I might say, “Mesach Browning was the husband of a pioneer woman—a woman who educated her children, tended the garden, kept the family together, went to the mill, spun the wool and sewed the clothes, tended the babies, churned the butter and milked the cow, while her husband spent his time out in the woods because he enjoyed hunting.”

“Mesach Browning is held up as an example of a very self-reliant man,” says Schlosnagle. “But Browning was self-reliant in an environment where many resources were free for the taking—a pristine ecosystem with few established boundary lines or protections. He benefitted from the resources of this environment, and he enjoyed his freedom to exploit them.” 

Today, says Schlosnagle, “as we consider more carefully how we interact with our environment, we can celebrate Browning’s self-reliance—or we can question it.” He says it’s interesting to note that “Browning himself lamented the degradation of the county’s natural plant and animal life,” when writing his memoir at the end of his career.

Schlosnagle anticipates that some readers will see his current perspective as one that represents “cancel culture,” an attempt to erase the contributions of the county’s white majority. That, he says, is not his intent: 

“The way I look at history, it never cancels culture. We are continually in the process of creating our current and future culture as we go along. That’s what we do as human beings.” 

While the bicentennials and sesquicentennials are typically celebrations, and “rightfully so,” says Schlosnagle, “We have to be very wary of denial, faulty mythologies, perpetuation of blind spots and taking the concept of continual progress for granted.” Alternative perspectives are important. With today’s changing global climate, they’re essential. 

Schlosnagle says he’s grateful the county’s past 45 years have seen the development of “new research, more fully formed accounts, attention to environmental issues, and alternative perspectives on slavery, women’s suffrage, workers’ struggles, and other hidden history.”

In his retirement in the mountains of North Carolina, he’s re-visited the lyrics of singer Joni Mitchell in her celebrated song, “Both Sides Now.” Her words, he says, have framed for him a more nuanced understanding of American history, of Garrett County and places far beyond: “Something’s lost but something’s gained in living.” 

“It’s appropriate to celebrate our gains, he suggests, “but we ignore and deny our losses and collective delusions at our own peril and to the detriment of future generations and the world we bequeath. That’s history.”