The
undersigned can only consider himself a native of the Maryland free State
through ancestry and adoption. But the impression of the fames and the domains,
the vistas and the glories of Maryland followed many a young man West after the
Civil War and my father was of that number. Much of my early childhood in
Minnesota was spent in asking him such questions as:
"—and how long did it take Early's column to pass Glenmary that day?" (That was a farm in Montgomery County.)
and:
"—what
would have happened if Jeb Stewart's cavalry had joined Lee instead of raiding
all the way to Rockville?"
and:
"—tell
me again about how you used to ride through the woods with a spy up behind you
on the horse."
or:
"Why
wouldn't they let Francis Scott Key off the British frigate?"
And
since so many legends of my family went west with father, memories of names
that go back before Braddock's disaster such as Caleb Godwin of
Hockley-in-ye-Hole, or Philip Key of Tudor Hall, or Pleasance Ridgeley—so there
must be hundreds and hundreds of families in such an old state whose ancestral
memories are richer and fuller than mine.
But
time obliterates people and memories and only the more fortunate landmarks
survive. In the case of this fine book, it is upon the home above all that Don
Swann has concentrated his talents and his painstaking research—the four walls
(or sixteen as it may be) of Baronial Maryland, or the artistic result of the
toil and sweat that some forever anonymous craftsman put into a balcony or a
parquet. And outside this general range, the etcher has also paused here and
there to jot down some detail of plainer houses that helps to make this a
permanent record of the history of the Free State.
His
work, naturally, will speak for itself, and, to allow it to do so, I cut short
this prelude with the expression of high hopes for this venture by one of the
State's adopted sons.
Francis
Scott Fitzgerald.