I have heard some whoppers in my day, but in my five-plus years of setting the local historical record straight via a one-man research mission, this takes the cake: I was informed that the reason the main street of Ridgely is so wide is because it was built to accommodate the shipbuilding industry of the town. I fell off my dinosaur when I heard this, got up, re-saddled my trusty stegosaurus steed, and fell off again when others then shared they “learned” this “fact” while attending the local public schools. I guess someone with an overactive imagination concocted this tale daydreaming while gazing out the classroom window at the banks of the mighty Ridgely River.
Come on, people. There were no sailing ships in Ridgely. There is no river. Heck, most local farmers surrounded by wilted corn and soybeans will readily confirm that most of the time it doesn’t even rain in that zip code. Anyone who can eat their weight in strawberries around here should know that Ridgely was a planned community but investors ran out of money well before their dreams of an epicurean Eastern Shore utopia could be realized; Central Avenue through the middle of town is a broad and lasting tribute to the long-faded optimism of the 1860s.
Why am I bringing up Ridgely? This is supposed to be a column about the far northwestern hinterlands of Caroline County. There is an eventual connection I guarantee, and it is not just that some students in the Bridgetown-Baltimore Corner megalopolis attend elementary school in the ironically-nicknamed Dream City. The segue I need to get this article finished revolves around railroads, actually. There are train tracks in Ridgely and have been since its incorporation; there used to be a village on the way to Greensboro where an intersection with Maryland Route 480 is today. It was called Boonsboro, but it lacked railroad access. So dwellers literally picked up structures they had built there and plopped them a few miles west at what was evolving into Victorian-era Ridgely. Score one for the maroon team.
The history of Bridgetown actually well-predates Ridgely but is not so, ahem, glamorous. If we ignore county lines for a moment, or acknowledge that the top third of Caroline used to be part of Queen Anne’s County (a fact that seems to be left out of every formal or public commemoration of Colonel William Richardson as our legislative founder), then we can gloss over the fact that the oldest building in Bridgetown is actually on the Ruthsburg side of the ditch. On that portion of Maryland Route 304 sits the Bridgetown Church. It dates back to at least 1773, with a congregation possibly meeting in the vicinity as early as 1640. Even though it is in QAC, it is still part of the Ridgely Charge, along with Thawley’s Chapel near Tuckahoe Neck.
So why the name Bridgetown? Verily verily, I say unto thee, there were bridges. Nine over the creeks and streams that flow into the Tuckahoe River to be exact. Up until 1841, the settlement was known as Nine Bridges as a result — which is when the one sturdy one you are likely familiar with was placed on the border as you cross into Queen Anne’s County, perhaps to attend a Christian service in an historical setting. The aforementioned church was at one point accompanied in the area by a tobacco warehouse, a cannery, a post office, and other commercial enterprises plus a neighborhood school building. So why didn’t Nine Bridges aka Bridgetown take off? For precisely the same reason why Ridgely made it as a town: witchcraft. Check that. Actually, in this case, it was not a Faustian pact with the devil in the style of Damn Yankees but an anticipated railroad never came through — so no boost in population or commerce as was seen by Ridgely in its glory days well over a century ago. They did have a community baseball team, though….and a rhyme. It is said that the people of Bridgetown:
Chew tobacco thin
Spit it on their chin
And lick it up again.
I have no clue how that originated, or if it was borrowed from something else, but I remember hearing that all the time growing up and especially at the village store that was still operational well into the 1980s.
I do, however, know how Baltimore Corner got its name. Don’t know where that is? It’s right down Maryland Route 312 from Bridgetown, as a matter of fact, and it too requires some fallacious Ridgely folklore to transition into a more fact-laden paragraph. About five years ago, several people in a county history group emphatically argued, despite having no skin in the game whatsoever, that the original name for Ridgely was intended to be some derivation of Baltimore. Not so; more 1950s schoolhouse marm fiction I presume. Ridgely was from the start named for local landowner Reverend Greenbury Ridgely, a former law partner of antebellum Congressional icon Henry Clay — the town was never meant to be known as Baltimore or named after Lord Baltimore in any way, shape, or form. At best, perhaps those who thought it to be true were recalling that it was the Maryland and Baltimore Land Association that parceled out town lots before the company went quickly bankrupt.
With that said, Baltimore Corner, or the name at least, does have, to an extent, a connection to Baltimore City. Until the Bay Bridge was built, there were two standard ways to get to the Western Shore from Caroline. One was by ferry, such as the service at Matapeake on Kent Island. The other was to go up to Cecil County and around the long way. Interestingly enough, many locals preferred the overland route because of hours-long lines to board the ferry. So eventually, travelers referenced the turn at Maryland Route 312 onto Route 313 as Baltimore Corner to note their progress or reason for taking that road.
There’s actually a bit more historical nomenclature to share, which is interesting considering no tangible town, village, or organized settlement has ever existed at that exact crossroads. While there was for a time a country store that Pizza Empire currently occupies and a mottling of generational farms nearby, the population is arguably zero if one applies the bureaucratically statistical definition of Census Designated Place. Yet that spot, despite its humble presence, has been popping up on Caroline County maps since colonial times. The general vicinity was called Forest of Choptank as settlers moved into it to clear property for agriculture. As that work progressed, locals well into the 1800s would have known the corner and adjacent lands as Hogpen Bridge.
I hope that more people will take an interest in this swath of oft-forgotten Caroline County frontier that graces our Queen Anne’s County border. Visitors may be surprised at the traces of what used to be there, what is there, and what hidden treasures exist waiting to be uncovered while toddling through. Bridgetown indeed warrants a closer look by the usual local authorities on such matters and recreational day trippers alike.
As a 10 year Bridgetown resident I applaud Chad Dean for his insightful history lessons!! I wish the Historical Society could see his knowledge of the area.