Being the devoted residents you are, I am sure all of you can without thinking instantly name the official bird, flower, and tree of Caroline County. For the rest of the reading audience, we acknowledge the Eastern bluebird, the field daisy, and the sweet gum as iconically local and representative of what is naturally abundant here.

Additionally, there is an official county seal that adorns our current flag. This, however, is where the story gets murky. In 1978, a contest was held to design the first-ever official flag of Caroline County. Yet the winning entry is not what is seen flying atop county buildings, on the sides of public works vehicles, and displayed on the letterhead of government stationery today. For whatever reason, and there are myriad persistent rumors, the flag accompanying this article was never adopted. Instead, the Caroline County Commissioners, during the Maryland 350th anniversary celebration year of 1984, opted to hoist a far less creative version: they simply slapped the county seal on a green background and called it a day. That pedestrian banner has been regretfully used as our flag ever since. Boring.

While I would love to see the 1978 design take its rightful place among the other official symbols of Caroline, and I may have to seek elected office to make that happen or at least stage a one-man protest on the courthouse green until the wrong has been righted, in the meantime I should proffer county residents move in a different direction. Let’s have some fun with the idea and Cloward-Piven the system with a litany of legislative requests. To wit:

The last time I checked, Maryland has designated a total of 25 official symbols. Some of them are immediately recognizable as celebrating what makes us special or at least different: the Baltimore Oriole as the state bird, the blue crab as the state crustacean, and the Chesapeake Bay retriever as the state dog make ubiquitous sense to be so codified. The same goes for the rockfish as the state fish, the Black-eyed Susan as the state flower, and the skipjack as the state boat. Others, such as the state dinosaur (astrodon), are the result of overzealous legislators acting on behalf of school children put up to “lobbying” the General Assembly for the designation as a civics lesson and are largely a waste of taxpayer dollars.

There is a middle ground and that’s where my continued emphasis on promoting and marketing Caroline County as a tourism destination comes to call this month. Smith Island in Somerset County understands how the game is played. While their eponymous cake has been a waterman’s delight there for over a century at least according to local lore, the staple sweet only became official as the state dessert in 2008. Suddenly everyone had to take a boat out to Smith Island to try the cake or at least sample some when available in regional supermarkets and bakeries. One could argue that such a demand was artificially generated, or astroturfed, if you will, for Smith Island Cake — it was virtually impossible to find on the mainland well into the 1990s. Because of the strategic branding of the dessert starting with the aforementioned legislation over a decade ago, the cake continues to enjoy increasing, even national visibility, as celebrities such as Mindy Kaling (of The Office fame) tweet out their enjoyment of the multi-layered treat.

Why did Smith Islanders decide to consciously elevate something that locals there had always just accepted as a part of everyday life? The number of watermen declining as that way of life becomes increasingly difficult due to a variety of bureaucratic and environmental reasons was the primary catalyst. Rather than waxing nostalgically, put bluntly, island residents needed a new way to make money and their cake was a viable solution; tourists soon flocked to that Somerset County outpost like a confectionary Field of Dreams to experience authentic Maryland cuisine just as natives quickly realized they could bake and ship the product around the country. Smith Island subsequently began to enjoy an influx of revenue without changing its traditional culture one bit.

We need the same type of can-do spirit in Caroline County. Considered the poorest jurisdiction in the state according to several statistical formulas, locals need to think outside the box to bring tourists and tourism dollars here. What is tourism? I can tell you what it is not: if we continue sleepwalking through the same old annual events and advertise the same old businesses on the same old platforms to the same old groups of locals — that’s not tourism. That may be the proper role of a chamber of commerce or an economic development office in any region, but what tourism is in actuality is the enticement of outsiders to visit here and more importantly, to spend their disposable income so we don’t have to.

So here’s my suggestion that I offer free of charge to the relevant Caroline County powers that be: I have simply listed below all of the official Maryland state symbols for which our county equivalents do not yet exist. Let’s see what the readers of this column nominate so that we may formalize the status of each symbol as it relates to Caroline County starting with next month’s edition of the Caroline Review. Who knows — we may soon benefit from a financial windfall initiated by a certain native tourism-savvy writer and some serendipitous Hollywood exposure.
Cat
Crustacean
Dinosaur
Dog
Fish
Horse
Insect
Reptile
Fossil
Gem
Boat
Dessert
Drink
Exercise
Folk Dance
Song
Sport
Team Sport

Suggest your ideas for each or for that matter other official symbol categories by emailing charlesdean3vzw@gmail.com.