My childhood home was Cross Manor House, built by Sir Thomas Cornwallys, Solicitor for Lord Baltimore's Maryland Colony, on the Banks of St. Inigoes Creek, an inlet from the St. Mary’s River near its junction with the Potomac.
The manor house stands on a high bank overlooking the creek and river. About 100 yards northwest the bank slopes down to an acre or more of low, flat, sandy land Projecting into the creek.
One of my earliest recollections is of a huge pair of timber wheels drawn by a team of oxen which brought, one by one, long, underslung pine logs and left them at the water’s edge on the low point of land. They were for the coaling station wharf of the Potomac Flotilla, that site having been elected for its base of operations early in 1864.
For the next few months I watched the section of coal bins, blacksmith shop, carpenter shop, storehouses, and a magazine, and the building of a substantial wharf and a boat landing jetty. What appeared to me to be beautiful boats but which I now know to have been condemned cutters, whaleboats, and dinghies taken from concerted vessels were laid like a barricade along the water’s edge inside a wall of small piling and filled with sand to form a sort of sea wall around the station.
Then came gunboats of all descriptions. To me they were genuine naval vessels, but nearly all of them were converted yachts, ferryboats, lighthouse tenders, side-wheel steamboats, and tugs. They were sights which thrilled and impressed me. I can see many of them now as distinctly as I can see the Saratoga or Pennsylvania. One of them, a ferryboat called the Wyandank, stripped of her boilers and engines, was moored close to the shore in a cove farther up the creek as a station ship.
Then one day I accompanied my parents to an afternoon tea on board the Don, flag boat of Commander Foxhall A. Parker. As I recollect her she must have been a converted yacht, and I was fascinated by her spotless decks, her natty sailors, and her brass railings and guns, and by “Commodore” Parker himself, who showed us around. Though only a commander, he was called commodore, as I have since learned, because he commanded a flotilla. How I wished that day that I was a grown man and a naval officer! Little did I dream, as Commodore Parker led me about his ship, that I would be a naval cadet under him at the Naval Academy during the last month of his life, with one of his sons as a classmate.
My delight was divided between the coming and going of the gunboats, with their swanky uniformed officers, and the work going on in the buildings on shore. The accompanying diagram indicating their arrangement is from memory. My greatest pal was the head blacksmith in charge of the blacksmith shop. His name was Thiers, and I spent hours watching him weld and shape the red-hot iron, or listening to his stories during the noon hours.
A vast change came over the social life around me. Residences were separated by large farm areas, and before those days we would go months at a time without seeing anyone except our negro slaves, unless we drove six miles to church. With the coming of the flotilla, however, the neighborhood teemed with officers and enlisted men, and social intercourse by ships’ boats between homes near the water became frequent. A number of officers sought lodging for their families in the homes which could be so reached, as was done at Yorktown during the World War. Cross Manor House was large enough to take in the family of Lieutenant Commander Thomas H. Eastman, who seemed to be Commodore Parker’s chief executive. Mrs. Eastman was a charming woman, and her eldest child, Nannie, and I became great playmates. I remember our distress when our pet cat died, and how we buried it under a cherry tree in the garden with military honors directed by a strange officer who chanced upon us.
Mrs. Eastman and my mother wrote very legible hands, and made either the original copy or copies of supplementary notes of Commodore Parker’s fleet tactics. It was Lieutenant Commander Eastman who first tried them out, in the Potomac River, when returning from an expedition into Virginia waters. His report on it was as follows:
United States Steamer Yankee, April 14, 1864
... I exercised this division in forming line and column, in accordance with the teachings of Parker’s Squadron Tactics under Steam, and I was struck with the simplicity and ease with which a squadron may be manoeuvered, and also am glad to be able to say that I have the honor to be the first officer of the United States Navy to record an experience in the use of that work.
Respectfully,
T. H. Eastman
The flotilla families brought me some playmates. The station vessel Wyandank was commanded by a Captain Nicholson. I have never been able since to identify him with any of the Nicholsons in the service after the war. He had two sons, Harry and “Allie.” Allie was about my age, but Harry was older. My early isolated environment had made me rather a shrinking and timid boy, and they proceeded to take that out of me by many risky escapades. One nearly cost us our lives when, in a punt, we were driven by rough seas under the guards of the Wyandank, but Harry extricated us with much coolness.
The Nicholson family lived on the Wyandank. Mrs. Nicholson was a young and very beautiful woman and her beauty, vivacity, and bonhommie, and her popularity with the male sex, got her in wrong with the straight-laced young country Women of St. Mary’s. My mother was influenced against her. She was, however, Very fond of children and I spent many a surreptitious hour in her cabin.
The war was to me a thing vague and afar off. My father was lame and a non-combatant and my grandfather too old to participate. My mother’s brother was a Captain of cavalry under McClellan in Virginia and sometimes came home for brief Visits. Whenever he appeared, in uniform ou his white horse, I would eagerly ask him Questions, but he was a taciturn man and always answered “Poodroo, poodroo! (whatever that meant) Fighting is not a good thing to tell little boys about.” I finally got to know this speech by heart.
Sometimes nearly all the vessels of the flotilla would disappear for days, and then return with horses, cattle, and other contraband of war. I now know that they were patrolling the Potomac and its Virginia tributaries to cut off supplies from the Confederate armies operating in Virginia. On one occasion Commodore Parker presented my grandfather with a very handsome mare, and on another with a beautiful set of old china which was found in a devastated home on the Rappahannock River. Once they brought in some Confederate submarine mines and exploded one under water near the station to test it. I sat on the bank and watched the test, and was thrilled by the great geyser of water thrown up. I have recently chanced upon Lieutenant Commander Eastman’s report on it contained in the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy for 1864. After describing the torpedo, as he calls it, he continues:
Having attached a sinking weight to the two handles, which are on the sides, I pulled with a small boat into the channel, and then ran my line ashore, and after this was done I carefully removed the tin cap and lowered the torpedo in three fathoms of water.
The boat was then pulled ashore, and the line pulled from about fifty yards back in the bushes, when, without any noise, a column of water sixty feet high and five feet in diameter was thrown up, and, covering the woods with sprays, fell, sending a circular wave, about one foot high, to the surrounding shores.
With the information gained, I feel confident to use the remaining torpedoes against the rebels.
One of the establishments most interesting to me was the sutler’s store, on the bank above the coaling station and about fifty yards from our house. It was patronized not only by the flotilla but by the residents of the surrounding country. My curiosity was aroused by the enormous sale of Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters. The whole top shelf completely around the store was filled with the log cabin shaped bitters bottles. I asked my father why so much was sold and he said it was to keep off malaria. When I reverted to this long after the war my father laughed and said they were full of whiskey bottled from barrels of it kept in our cellar with the tacit knowledge of the flotilla authorities; both our home and the sutler’s store being outside the station limits. For some reason the store was finally removed to the opposite side of the creek and I was cut off from a frequent hand-out of candy and ginger cakes.
One of the activities which I watched with interest was the hoisting of a brass howitzer out of a gunboat on to a lighter, or vice versa, when the tackle broke and it splashed to the bottom of the creek, where it still remains. My father, who also witnessed it, quickly got a range on the spot and often searched for it afterward but, having no cross range, he never found it.
One of my favorite officers was Acting Assistant Paymaster J. Porter Loomis, stationed, I think, on the Wyandank. He spent much time in our house and was frequently a guest at meals. He fascinated me because he parted his hair in the middle, something which I had never before known a man to do. Another paymaster who impressed himself upon me, chiefly through his rather startling eccentricities of manner and conduct, was named Rodney. He was with us only a short time, on a converted ferryboat, and seemed to be shunned by the other officers. My mother and he had a bond in common. They both wrote poetry. So they became fast friends and he was much at our house. My mother asked him for a photograph when he was leaving and he brusquely said no photograph of himself had been or ever would be taken. She was persistent, however, and at last he said “All right. I’ll send you one and I hope it will satisfy you.” When it came it proved to be a photograph of the top of his head as he sat with his face on his arms at a table. I remember the sensation it caused among us all and my mother telling how she got it. In looking up his record recently I find that he was then just recuperating from a terrible yellow fever illness and experience on the U.S.S. J. S. Chambers, where for a long time he was the only well man on the ship, acting as sole watch officer, chaplain, doctor, nurse, and undertaker to the others.
Converted ferryboats, like the Wyandank and Rodney’s were known as “double enders,” their open decks at both ends serving remarkably well for battery emplacements. Their original names were sometimes retained and sometimes changed. I do not remember the government name of Rodney’s boat but I think she had been a New York ferryboat named the Stepping Stones.1
Although the operations of the flotilla on the Virginia side of the Potomac were hazardous and frequently carried out under fire with casualties, only one tragic event was impressed upon me. One of the gunboats was the Tulip, a converted lighthouse tender. She was in nearly all the flotilla activities in the early part of 1864, was under heavy fire in landing cavalry from Point Lookout to destroy a Confederate depot on the Rappahannock River, and had a naval engagement all her own with the Confederate tug Titan, but they lost each other in a fog. These are all mentioned in Commodore Parker’s reports, but I can find no mention of the final disaster which overtook her, perhaps because it was the government’s policy not to disclose the loss of vessels. However, although I have no knowledge of the date, my recollection of that tragic event is very vivid. One of her boilers had been condemned as unsafe and unfit for use and she was ordered to Washington for a new one. Her captain (I think his name was Smith) dined with us at our usual midday dinner the day of his departure, and expressed much chagrin that he had been directed not to use the defective boiler, saying that the slow speed under one boiler would make the Tulip easy prey to Confederate batteries on the Virginia side of the river, and that after he was out of signal distance he could use his own judgment and probably would put on the other boiler. My aunt, who was a great calamity seer, expostulated with him, and their eloquent argument balancing one possible disaster against the other fired my youthful imagination and filled me with apprehension.
The Tulip sailed about dark. I watched her from our upper portico and got so nervous over her that I was put to bed early, but I couldn’t sleep. At about nine o’clock, I should say, there was a dull, heavy explosion and I sat up in bed exclaiming “The Tulip!”
Next morning we knew it was the Tulip. The captain had ordered fires started in the defective boiler as she passed out of the St. Mary’s River and headed up the Potomac. She was somewhere near Piney Point when the engineer officer came to the officers’ messroom and reported to the captain that steam was forming on the defective boiler. All his officers were apprehensive, but the paymaster, or pay clerk, was so unstrung that he left the messroom and went to the extreme after end of the deck. From there he was blown unharmed into the Water when the Tulip blew up, and was almost the only survivor.
When I eagerly rushed down to the Nation that morning to hear all about it the paymaster had already arrived. I found him in the little equipment storehouse sitting on a coil of rope. I was bursting with questions but he looked so Pallid and seemed so dazed that I only followed him about with awe. I remember following him to the water’s edge, where he stood a long time gazing toward the Potomac River.
At that point my recollection fades and the next picture is of the digging of §raves in a locust grove on the creek bank bear the Wyandank’s berth, and the burial there of a number of the Tulip's dead. My impression is that there were eight graves, two rows of four each, and that there were no headmarkers. I don’t know how long after the catastrophe this occurred but it seems probable that the remains were beyond identification.
The vessel of the flotilla which thrilled me most was the Pawnee. She drew too much water to come to the station and, I now presume, operated in the lower Potomac, but she once anchored in the St. Mary’s River in front of our garden. I think she was a full-rigged steam sloop of war and to me she was the grandest sight I had ever seen in my life.
When the war ended the flotilla base became a white elephant on the government’s hands, and Commodore Parker finally disposed of it to my grandfather for $200. I doubt if there is any other record of a private citizen purchasing a naval base.
Finally, about the first week in August, 1865, the Potomac Flotilla weighed anchor, formed column, and steamed away, the last boat towing the Wyandank on which were the women and children. I stood with our family on our front portico waving farewell to them until they were out of sight, and we were left again in our pastoral loneliness with only a wharf, a lot of empty buildings, and eight unmarked graves behind a blackberry thicket in a locust grove to remind us of the days of the Potomac Flotilla.
Incidentally, dredging at the end of the wharf kept us supplied with anthracite coal for all household purposes for the next seven years, and we dug up nearly all the boats and repaired them, selling some and using others. The buildings were moved about to more convenient locations and became farmhouses and warehouses.
This should end my story, but I cannot refrain from a sequel. When, about thirteen years later, I went to the Naval Academy as a cadet engineer, the first vessel I saw, moored at the Santee Wharf, was the old Wyandank, and almost the first officer I met, when signing the pay rolls, was Paymaster J. Porter Loomis; and last but not least, when I went for my first practical lesson in the blacksmith shop my instructor took me by the shoulders and read the name across my jumper: “Is this little Johnnie Ellicott of St. Mary’s?”
“I guess it is,” I replied.
“Why” said he, “don’t you remember your old pal, Poppa Thiers?”
I almost wept with joy.
1. The greatest Beau Brummel of the flotilla was a tall, slender young officer who played frequently with me and whose immaculate uniform and elegant manner much impressed me. He was probably a staff officer, for staff officers, being free from watch duty and drills, had more time to visit ashore. I recently found his photograph in an old album but have no recollection of his name. I am offering the photograph with this article in the hope that it can be identified.