New Book Hailed as 'Definitive History' of Annapolis

Earl Kelly - Annapolis Capital

Local historian Jane Wilson McWilliams has written what experts are calling the "definitive history" of Annapolis. Even casual readers will find this new book hard to put down.

McWilliams is legendary among her colleagues for her attention to detail, and for being able to weave facts into a story that flows smoothly.

State Archivist Edward C. Papenfuse described the book, "Annapolis: City on the Severn," as "a superb piece of literature and a well-researched history."

"It is an exceptionally fine history; it lets you understand the community and how it relates to the rest of the world," he said.

Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, "Annapolis" puts 325 years of local life into context. It is, in a sense, the biography of a living, breathing city that grew out of a village with a few cottages and some wharves.

"It is a splendid book," said Alderman Richard Israel, who purchased 40 copies as gifts for friends.

Here is an example of the countless details that McWilliams weaves into the narrative:

"In a startling use of electricity, blinking street lights broadcast results of the 1916 (presidential) election throughout the area. Residents of Annapolis, Germantown, Eastport, and West Annapolis had only to look out their windows, and remember the code printed in the Evening Capital, to see who would be the next president ..."

Five blinks at midnight meant that President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected, while three blinks meant that Charles Evans Hughes had defeated him, McWilliams said in an interview. The blinks favored Wilson.

Finding details such as this, and putting them into context -- the modernization of a small backwater town -- has been no easy matter.

"It's pretty much all I've done for 12 years," McWilliams said of writing the book.

"You might write 10 percent of what you learned doing research, but you don't know what's important until you know the whole issue. For me, (writing) two pages a day, with the applicable footnotes, was about as much as I could do."

"Annapolis" is filled with events large and small, and they all tell a story.

The city saw no fighting during the Civil War, but it was a crowded (and rowdy) Union military camp and home to several hospitals.

The worldwide flu pandemic that coincided with World War I, and killed between 50 million and 100 million people, hit Annapolis.

McWilliams quotes one observer as seeing "the heap of new coffins piled up on the sidewalk and in the street itself," waiting for their occupants in October 1918. (One Annapolis church had 45 funerals in one month.)

On Jan. 1, 1951, because of annexation, the city grew suddenly from three-quarters of a square mile in size to more than 51/2 square miles, and the tax base doubled, from $11 million to $22.5 million.

A lesser -- but illustrative -- event came when the city fathers let the traffic circle at the foot of Main Street get so overgrown and seedy, people took to calling it "Dog Turd Circle."

The book covers the period from 1649, when Protestants began arriving on the Severn River, to 1975.

Readers will learn that "sailing capital" is a relatively new term for Annapolis. The term -- and the prosperity it represents -- came after World War II.

In 1959, a veteran living in Eastport, Jerry Wood, started the Annapolis Sailing School and a decade later, he and some associates sponsored the Annapolis Boat Show.

The timing was perfect.

"Leisure time, good salaries, and quick access along the new Washington-Annapolis Expressway (Route 50) made a weekend in Annapolis, or even a day on the Bay, an easy vacation for workers in the expanding federal bureaucracy," McWilliams writes. "The first U.S. Sailboat Show, in October 1970, punctuated the city's emergence from the 1960s with an exclamation point of masts."

Colonial historian Gregory Stiverson, former president and CEO of the Historic Annapolis Foundation, said McWilliams has done scholarship a great service.

"The thing that is really impressive is she spent most of her time researching the post-Colonial period, which almost nobody does," Stiverson said. "It was hard; she had to go through every page of the City Council records and the newspapers."

"Annapolis" gives considerable attention to the well-known civil rights struggle in the city, and to the race riot that was avoided in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. McWilliams praises men such as Zastrow Sims, who is black, and then-Mayor Pip Moyer, who is white, for working together to save the city from the destruction that other cities experienced.

Throughout "Annapolis," McWilliams tells some serious, but funny, stories.

Every few decades, she notes, the Naval Academy and Congress declare war on St. John's College, and try to take the small school's land, but that rivalry has probably ended.

On a similar note, Baltimore periodically has tried to take over as the state's capital, but a huge investment in government buildings in Annapolis probably has guaranteed that the capital will stay put.

And then there was Elmer Jackson Jr., former editor of The Capital, who was forever wanting to level the city's historic buildings to make room for parking lots.

Jackson was largely responsible for the city's failure to save many of its buildings, according to this book. Then, in late 1968, Philip Merrill bought the paper and took control out of Jackson's hands.

In one of his first editorials, Merrill wrote "all those who value the city's colonial heritage, who object to high-rise buildings in the historic district and who want to see Annapolis prosper (should) vote FOR the historic district ordinance," McWilliams writes.

"The fact the paper changed hands is why the (stronger) Historic District ordinance went through in 1969, without a doubt," McWilliams said.

Sitting in the shade of a large tree at St. John's College on Thursday, McWilliams, a Bay Ridge resident, said she is relieved to have this momentous project finished.

"We haven't had Thanksgiving in my house for years," she said of the boxes and boxes of notes that have taken over her life.

"If I had known how long it was going to take, I don't know if I would have done it," she said. "For 12 years, people have been asking me, 'How's the book coming?' "

Then, McWilliams looked up into the trees and thought some more: "I am glad I did it. I am glad it's over."

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