Cool Post From My Dad

As I mentioned in my letter of last week I finally managed to get a tour of the Gov. Warfield home of “Oakdale” and the other Warfield home called “Cherry Grove” adjacent to the Warfield Cemetery on Jennings Chapel Road only a few miles from Ma and Pa’s farm and “Oakdale” was only about a mile from “Cherry Grove”, ever since I was a kid I wanted to visit these two homes but was never able to do so, both places were always a mystery to me back then but I finally made it, attached are some photos I took. Hard to believe such an expensive bus tour would be a sellout but it was, there was at least 55 people on the tour and every seat in the bus was full, most of the folks onboard were in someway descended from the Warfield family including myself, I thought the tour was great.

Evidently “Oakdale” was last owned by a Warfield was in the early 60s, somebody took it over and pretty much ran it into the ground, it was even used in a Hollywood horror flick called “Species II”, finally the house went to auction in about 1982 and it was bought by an official of the CIA, how I knew he was in the CIA was all his awards and certificates in one of the rooms of the house plus he must have been a graduate of the VMI because lots of VMI photos and paintings were also hanging there. The couple was extremely nice to open up their place like that to have an army of people tramping through and using their bathrooms, we also ate our box lunches on their front porch which was one of those huge Victorian wraparound the house type porches. The present owner has dumped a load of money into the place trying to restore it and as he said it’s still a work in progress, in the far back he’s building a modern brick addition which his wife is not crazy about, he’s planning on using it for entertaining but personally I think the money would be better spent on the house, I noticed lots of work was still needed on peeling paint.

I didn’t send you a photo of Gov. Warfield, he was a very successful business man before he became governor, “Oakdale” was his summer home and he had another home on Linden Ave. on Bolton Hill in Baltimore (no longer there, it was torn down in some urban renewal project in the 60s), it’s at his Baltimore home where he died. Gov. Warfield owned a newspaper and a bank in Ellicott City, he also started and was the first president of the now huge Fidelity and Guarantee Company, about 1904 he decided to run on the Democratic ticket for governor and became the first Democratic governor of Maryland since the Civil War, he was governor from about 1904 to 1908, I think he died about 1920, he only served as governor for one term for some reason. To describe him you’ll have to think of Col. Saunders of the Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial, that’s what he looked like a Kentucky Colonel with white hair, mustache and goatee and he was on the heavy side and he did ride a white horse because I did remember seeing a photo of him on a white horse leading a mounted company of the Maryland National Guard in a Baltimore parade.

Gov. Warfield would have been about 17 when the Civil War ended, he had two brothers go to war with both serving in the Maryland Confederate cavalry, the oldest brother survived the war but the youngest brother was captured soon after he went south near Romney West Virginia, he was imprisoned at Camp Chase in Ohio where he became very sick, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the US and died, his body was brought back home and buried in the Warfield family graveyard at “Cherry Grove”, Gov. Warfield would have also gone south but his family enrolled him at St. Timothy’s school in Catonsville to keep him from leaving to join his brothers.

Gov. Warfield held one of the last reunions there of the 1st Maryland cavalry CSA in May, 1899, I have photos of the event, all those old veterans were lined up on the front porch for the last roll call, old Thad Crapster a friend of mind I used to love to talk to on a farm near Ma and Pa’s farm way back in my youth was 1st cousin to Gov. Warfield and was one of the buggy drivers who picked up the veterans from their special train in Woodbine that day and delivered them to the “Oakdale” about 5 miles away. Thad appears in the photos along with the vets, he’s one of the very young men periphery with all the rest in the photo being quite old. Evidently Thad’s father Mortimer gave John R. Kenly, a lad who lived on a nearby farm a horse to ride south on so he could join the Confederate army, Kenly was also at the reunion and he later became the president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

The history of nearby “Cherry Hill” is no less interesting, it’s the older structure and was the first Warfield home, it’s a telescoping building like many of the farms houses are in the area, the first part of the building dates to the early 1700s, the second part in the early 1800s, the third in the early 1900s and finally the forth recently but all four sections blend in perfectly and you can’t tell that the whole structure isn’t quite old. Gov. Warfield’s father would have been born there and “Oakdale” was once part of the “Cherry Hill” estate, the present estate still contains 350 acres which is amazing and another amazing thing is like “Oakdale” it’s not owned by a Warfield, it’s was purchased some years ago by another government bigwig who is a bachelor. He was most gracious when he also allowed a whole bus load of people to wonder though his house. As he also said his house is still a restoration work in progress, he said so much had to be replaced because of termite damage, he said whole walls had to come down because they had been eaten away and replacing them and find all the right wood wasn’t an easy task but I think all of them did an excellent job.

We visited three other Warfield home but none were exciting as these two, the home “Longwood” was most interesting because it had a small hospital and probably one of the first in the country. The Warfield that lived there was a doctor and pretty much the doctor for the whole area, he took care of both slaves and their owners plus anybody else who would come to him. The family that owned “Longwood”, also not Warfield, was must gracious also, they gave us the run of the house and we also visit the restored doctor’s office and hospital adjacent to the main house. I knew a number of folks on the bus tour, several people on the trip were friends of Butch which made it nice.

I was telling Butch about the Warfield homes and he was telling me that he knew Teddy Warfield back years ago and did have a chance to visit “Oakdale” where Teddy was living. He was saying that another Warfield was dating Kassie and he used to buzz the farm in his P-47 fighter to impress Kassie, Butch said he would fly so low it would shake the buildings. As a child I remember several big bombers passing over the farm. We got to writing about taking the tractor out on the highway, he remembers taking the tractor to Florence and I remember taking it to near Damascus for repairs, it was fun driving on the highway in the old Ford zooming along in fourth gear.