Profiles and Interviews: John Filsinger

(John Filsinger and Alice Friend Filsinger, 1988)

On April 8, 1958, the Board of County Commissioners, comprised of A.C. Brenneman, H.D. Swartzentruber and E.A. Roth, met in special session with eleven representatives of the Garrett County Road Employee’s Association and their attorney, C.C. Nathan from Cumberland.

John Filsinger served on the association’s executive committee. Born in 1926, he was one of ten children of German immigrants who settled in the George’s Creek region of Allegany County in 1902. After a brief time working in coal mines, his father Phillip Filsinger moved with his wife, Mary, to Garrett county and bought a 100-acre farm on Sand Flat Rd., selling eggs, repairing equipment for other farmers and making a little moonshine.

In 1955, the Garrett County Roads Department went looking for a welder and hired John Filsinger, who had built a reputation as a good mechanic since leaving school after eighth grade to help his father on the farm while his brothers went to war.

“My father could fix anything,” said John Filsinger’s son, Ed, who started working for the county roads department in 1978. His father, he said, built his own boat with a 1935 flathead Ford V-8 engine in the middle, a frame of pipe and sheet metal on the top, painted iridescent green. “The boat could pull a skier [on Deep Creek Lake] and was a great fishing boat, too,“ said Filsinger. “John Filsinger would make gears rather than going out and buying them,” said Tom Holler, a retired roads worker.

Asked what motivated her father to be part of the association, John Filsinger’s daughter, Deb Wine Frantz, said: “My daddy was always about being fair, about fair pay. Those boys [roads workers] worked hard.”