Better Waverly

Excerpts from The York Road by Lizette Woodworth Reese published in 1931

From Boundary---now called North Avenue---and along a considerable distance up the York Road, stretched the Oak Hill estate. At the top of a height rose the mellowed, wide-spreading Kennedy house. Down the shadowy slope in mid-April plunged the daffodils, each an elfin cup filled with flame. They were wind, and fire, and spirit, and the beginnings and ends of spring. One moment they were gone, and the next back again. And at the last, unplucked, a hundred of them, their week's round over, they flickered out of the grass. Every passerby, in any degree sensitive to beauty, every Herrick with some lost Devonshire calling within his heart, felt a religious gratitude to the unknown planter of that wild flowering on the shadowy slope of Oak Hill.

The white gate of this estate stood wide-open. On the edge of the "bridge" near-by---a brad expanse of graveled earth---there protruded a red-painted ship's anchor, in full sight of the county and town alike. The owner of the mellowed house and plunging daffodils, William Kennedy by name, and a sea-captain by honorable profession, was once overtaken by a very terrible tempest off the coast of Central America. "He cast his anchor overboard, vowing at the same time to the Virgin Mary, that if it held his vessel through the storm, he would build on his place a church to his mother, Saint Ann, and bury the anchor at his entrance gate. The anchor held, and the church was later built," and now within it there lie the good captain and Mary Ann, his wife. The anchor holds an honored place on the lawn of Saint Ann's.

If you stopped at the Kennedy gate a little while, you saw, not only the climbing York Road, the grass-banked ditch on either side, a gable, a gleam of window on Oak Hill, but an illimitable stretch of sea, and glancing sails, and vague spirals of smoke against the horizon. A hundred hundred traffics thundered at your feet.

Bur these---furniture and gardens---all belonged to a rural highway and a rural and younger Waverly. The latter grew and spread, and became conscious and fashionable. Rag carpets turned into ingrain, and ingrain into brussels; marble-topped tables, parlor organs, hair-cloth chairs and couches---inexorably Victorian---were possessions of the average villager. Wax flowers under glass, and what-nots, a kind of walnut ladder upon which were arranged china pieces of all degrees and sorts, and hues were everywhere; crayon portraits also, of this relative or that, dull and flat of expression, yet reckoned exceptional specimens of art. Yet long after Waverly was taken into the jurisdiction of Baltimore city, it still retained much of its lovely and quiet heritage. There were still fields which you crossed in order to arrive at certain places, and woods where you could pluck violets as purple as well water, or violets as frail a yellow as though bleached in a week of rain. But the end was sure. A  post-office established, and this was the beginning; Waverly took on a post-office importance…

Some mid-April day you decided to make a trial of a double-decker. You started, perhaps, at Saint John's gate, and your way pointed directly north toward the county town. Up the winding stair you climbed, to be blown upon by all the eight winds of heaven. From your seat you looked down upon as fair and homely  a picture as only Waverly, blessed of the great gods, could show. The weather was warm. Blossoming time was over, and trees, loosening their petals, were sending them in gusts down every breath that stirred. They lay on the track, and drifted into the faces of the passers-by. It was a faery touch, as light as a petal itself. The ghost of an odor went with it down the radiant air. The box in the Aull garden was showing very green and fresh. Is there any fragrance so different from all others as that of newly sprouting box? It is the frankincense and myrrh of the garden. The sun can drive it into a costliness that will pervade every corner, the rain into a half-bitterness that will haunt us for hours. In Blum's side yard, against the wall, a spirea was just putting out its faint pink flowers. Women and men were passing below, one carrying a basket of eggs on her arm, a careful, erect figure in a starched, purple calico frock, a ruffled sunbonnet flapping about her eyes, the other a man with saw and chisel in his weathered, competent right hand. He looked up, and swung his cap at the double-decker and at all, and every soul within it, and no doubt wished them good speed and no accident. The vehicle was still new and novel enough for this demonstration, and the latter was part of the innate civility of the native York Roader. Here was O'Brien's, where they sold frothy brown ale and porter. And now a row of cherry trees no slope, marching from the Reeside kitchen door to the barn. Almost blown empty of bloom were they; a divinely blowzy look had each, in rags, and yet with their heads high, their feet firm in the solid proud earth. You were now opposite the Gabler orchard. The wind blew at that moment, and pelted you with the abandoned bloom of a score of crooked and very old apple-trees. Up, down, sidewise, before, behind, came that rosy-tinted gust. You were blind for a little; you felt yourself blowing along with the unfastened petals, on a tide, on a surge of sound, and color, and perfume. The ditch was delicate with stirring blossoms; a few fluttered down upon the seats of the car, and the ruts of the curving pike. And at this point began not only the Gabler orchard, but on the left acres of the Macdonald pasture-land. Beyond the fences of the latter the fat Macdonald cows were grazing; in this wind they appeared to be moving in a body toward the far deeps of a fragile, exquisitely vague west. The car bells beneath you tinkled cheerfully. And on your right, house after house, large, modern, important, was being erected; lumber, and brick, and stone lay in ordered heaps on the stretches of ancient, lost, unwalled meadows. You even knew the names of those who were to occupy the cheerful rooms under the high, peaked roofs. That of an insurance agent was one, the other that of a member of a long established seed and farming implement firm. The Macdonal lions. Govanstwon. The Presbyterian church. Van Kapfs'. Turballs'. Towson. In  brief while while you were riding back, still on the top of the clattering, uncouth, dull-colored vehicle, your mind the whole week thereafter crammed with pear trees, cherry trees, apple trees, stamp of horses' hoofs, clang of bells, of processions of villagers going to and fro about their day's business. You had had a taste of airy and romantic possessions, of the cloudy kingdoms of the earth…

To remember Waverly as it was, and the York Road as a track---not only leading from the neighborhood of the Belair Market in Baltimore to an ancient, and small, and busy town in Pennsylvania, not only a way between toll-gates, but a thoroughfare along which walked all of life's affairs, the little and the tragic, the mirths and the sighings, the suns, and the sleets, and the tempests of the entire human business---have been two of my wealthiest experiences. It seems only a step from its quiet of then to its bustle of now. Much has gone down and at a cost. For the Waverlyites, although perhaps an unimportant folk, had the Victorian code of morals and conventions, which turned them out individuals. Like simple people everywhere, they shouldered and carried their loads without a wimpier. Theirs was a universal note. In one of the houses lived a wayward girl, forgiven and taken back; in another a drunken son, lodged, and fed, and forgiven beyond the scriptural number of times, seventy times seven. Here, twice of thrice a week, from the whitewashed cottage up the road trudged a thick-set, swarthy woman, to sell her herbs and bunches of bright flowers in the distant town, leaving her children asleep, and locked up behind her. To insure that slumber, she had given each a dose of paregoric before her departure. Here in the next, her neighbor, more conscientious than she, went, at every crisis, to the Bible, opened it at random, her eyes closed in the meanwhile, and selected the first word upon which her eyes fastened, as her guidance. She was following a proper and hoary tradition. Had not, amongst others, the great and spiritual Wesley done the same? From the stone house on Chestnut Hill came the sound of a prayer, composed and read on the evening before the going away of a son to school. The yellowed paper, the delicate, free handwriting still survive. If you listen, you can hear a steady voice calling down blessings upon the fortunate boy, and praying for him the realization of those objects, which would tend to the advancement of "his own temporal and eternal happiness."

To think these people dull, or dull the day in which they flourished, is to make a thoroughly stupid mistake. They drew deep breaths; they went holidaying; it was a younger world...