A COUNTRY straw ride! For Baltimore's teen-agers in the late 1890's nothing was more fun. We lived in a day of simple pleasures then, and in retrospect the pleasures seem sweet indeed.
The photograph that you see here was taken just before the straw ride Joshua Levering gave for his children and their cousins and friends. It was in the summer of 1899; the picture was made at Uncle Josh's summer home on the hill above Lake station. It was snapped, I would imagine, at 7 o'clock, shortly after we young people arrived from the city on one of the Northern Central trains.
Really, nothing much happened on the straw ride. I suppose the modern generation
would find it boring. Everyone sat in the straw, the boys with their legs dangling over the
side. Then the team of four mules was whipped up, and away we went, moving slowly
along the country lanes of that quiet, thinly populated countryside.
I recall that there was singing; Mr. Davies remembers the strumming of a banjo -- or perhaps it was a mandolin. Mr. Davies also recalls our stopping in Towsontown, as it was then called, for ice-cream sodas at one of the village's few stores. It is his recollection, too, that we reached Towsontown via Joppa road. It was a dirt road, of course, and in the evening of a summer June or July there was no traffic on it at all.
AFTER the sodas, the straw wagon went along under the moon. We sang, and I would imagine that there were some of us who were bold enough to hold hands. About 11 o'clock we were back at Uncle Josh's home. We Leverings spent the night, most probably; the rest of the guests would have gone hack to town on the train. Some of the party may have been living in their family summer homes in the area.
In those days, very few people who lived in the Charles street. Park avenue, Mount Vernon, St. Paul street and Eutaw place neighborhoods spent their summers in the city. They maintained summer homes in places like Catonsville, Ellicott City, Ruxton and Lutherville. My family's summer cottage was at Relay then.
You will notice that the young people's dress seems decidely formal by today's standards. There were no shorts or sports shirts or sunback dresses then. Long skirts and hats were the order of the day for the girls; collars and ties for the boys. And you can see most of the boys wore hats, too--although I see many of them were bold enough to have removed their jackets.
Uncle Josh Levering is the man partly hidden at the extreme left of the photograph. I am sure there are only a few Baltimoreans left who remember he was the Prohibition party's candidate for Governor in 1895, its presidential candidate in 1896. Needless to say, there was no drinking on the straw ride.
Uncle Josh made his living in what at one time was a large and important Baltimore business--the coffee trade with Brazil. He and his twin brother, Eugene, were the proprietors of E. Levering and Co., which owned coffee barks at one time. My father, William T. Levering, was the brother of Joshua and Eugene. He was a coffee broker across from their Pratt street offices.
We can still identify most of the young people in the straw-ride photo. I'll start with the back row. The boy standing next to Uncle Josh is Frank Ward. The girl in the smail straw hat, beside him, was Uncle Josh's daughter Martha, later Mrs. Arthur Sherman. Basil Wagner is next, then me; then comes Ernest Levering, one of Josh's sons, and then Florence Levering (later Mrs. Dudley Williams), my sister. We cannot identify the next young woman. Charles Fisher is at the end of the row.
In the second row, from left to right, the first boy--the one with the dark suit and the cap-is a nephew of Joshua's. Edwin. Elise Vogler, now Mr. Walter Buck, comes next, and then Lily Rieman, daughter of Howard Rieman. Clarence Bailey is next in line, and then Rose Cavins, who was visiting from Lafayette, Md. You can just see the top of Louise Levering's head; she was another of Joshua Levering's children. Last in line is Wickes Merritt.
Alfred Fisher, in shirt sleeves, bow tie and boater, is first in the bottom row. The formally dressed young man standing beside him Is Henry Cook. Rita Levering, another daughter, later Mrs. Theodore Brown, is the pretty young woman. The little fellow is Sam Morgan, who died in a Lake Roland skating accident the next winter. The last is Mr. Davies, who had recently returned after serving as a soldier in the Spanish-American War. We were married in 1903. You went to dances if you were a young Baltimorean then. You might go away to the ocean with your family. If your summer home was near Catonsville, you went to the Catonsville Country Club on Bloomsbury avenue and watched them play cricket. There were picnics now and then, and parties. A quiet age--but looking back on it, a pleasant one.