I was sold when the realtor pulled the dining room rug to one side and lifted a heavy trapdoor. Peering through a transparent plastic cover and an iron grate, I glimpsed a water reflection about 30 feet down a stone-lined shaft.
How cool is it not only to have an 18th-century water well but to have it handily located in the dining room? So if Liz, my wife, and I get besieged by braves from either the Tutelo or Saponi tribes, we’ll be able to survive for weeks.
Of course, that scenario is highly unlikely for a bunch of reasons, including that neither tribe really exists anymore in West Virginia.
The last fluent Tutelo speaker died in the 1990s. Saponi went away long before that. And we are at higher risk of being besieged by Washingtonians wanting to stay for weekends to enjoy the Potomac River and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, as well the excellent restaurants in the college town of Shepherdstown.
After a two-year search across three Maryland counties, Pennsylvania’s Adams County, and West Virginia’s Jefferson County, and with several declined offers trailing us, we’ve at last found a house rooted deep in American history. And one I can happily repair on the occasions I get back stateside from trotting around Europe and the Middle East.
I easily listed the reasons for buying it to my spouse.
The house was built in 1785, seven years before West Virginia’s first post office opened just down the road. Half a mile away was where Capt. Hugh Stephenson and 98 men rallied in 1775 to answer George Washington’s call for volunteers for his Continental Army.
Dressed in wool felt hats and homespun buckskin shirts, emblazoned with a coiled rattlesnake and the motto, “Don’t tread on me,” the Virginia Volunteer Riflemen covered 600 miles in 25 days on the famous Beeline March to Cambridge to help break the British siege of Boston. “Each wore a buck-tail in his hat, and had a tomahawk and scalping knife in his belt,” according to a local historian.
Morgan’s Grove, where Stephenson and his men started their Beeline March, was named in 1989 as the birthplace of the United States Army.
Four years after the American Revolutionary War, the mechanical engineer James Rumsey staged a public demonstration of an innovative steamboat on the Potomac near Shepherdstown.
And, finally, I explained to my startled partner, who was far more interested in closet space, the house almost certainly had sheltered the wounded and dying from the nearby battlefield at Antietam during the Civil War. It was the bloodiest single day in American military history, which ended in a draw, but compelled a Confederate retreat back across the Potomac and allowed President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Every dwelling in Shepherdstown was turned into a field hospital as the battle waged, I explained, as I started reeling off the critical stages of Antietam: the skirmish for the cornfield, the fight for the sunken road, the clash for Burnside’s Bridge.
This final “clinching” argument is an excellent lesson on why you should never take a trained historian to the showing of a house. Nonetheless, despite the rundown about Antietam, I received the go-ahead to make an offer. And so we wait. I’m full of anticipation about how the house inspector will react to the water well.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
