A Sparkling Local History
Located between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., College Park, in Prince Georges County, Maryland, is the home of the University of Maryland and of the historic College Park Airport. The University and the Airport are deservedly featured in this photographic history of College Park published as part of Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" series. Written by two long-term community residents, Stephanie Stullich and Katharine Bryant, this book includes rare photographs that describe the community from the early 19th Century through the early 1960s. Stullich currently serves on the City Council of College Park. Bryant is the author of another book in the Images of America series dealing with Prince Georges County.
College Park emerges in this book as a center of transportation and education. In a chapter titled "Roads and Rails", Stullich and Bryant show how the community developed as a result of its location on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line between Baltimore and Washington beginning in 1835. Railroad enthusiasts will enjoy several photographs of old stations and trains dating from the 19th Century. In the early 20th Century, College Park became a hub of streetcar and trolley service and a "streetcar suburb" of Washington D.C. Readers who remember and love the old streetcars will find themselves at home in this book. The book also offers photos of dusty roads, of the early days of the automobile, and of the businesses that serviced them. There are rare photos of an old-time ferris wheel and circus, (p.76), of the once-common "Little Tavern" hamburger parlors, an ancient predecessor of today's fast-food outlets, (p.77), and of a fire which raged in downtown College Park in 1960 (p.78).
The University of Maryland dominates today's College Park while its predecessor plays a large role in this book. The present-day university began in 1856 as the Maryland Agricultural College. Thus, it predates the 1862 Morrill Act which created the system of land-grant colleges. These colleges became the basis for public higher education in many states. Stullich and Bryant show the formation of the College from its earliest days as an almost military institution. The college had an elite cast in its early years even though its purpose was to provide broad-based education in farming. The College survived, if barely, a disastrous fire on the evening of Thanksgiving in 1912; but, with dedication and purpose, it was rebuilt almost immediately. Maryland went coed in 1916.
Together with the expected photographs of buildings, students and athletics, this collection offers an unexpected window into local college traditions. From 1923 to 1961, the College celebrated May Day with its own Rite of Spring. Dressed in long, willowy white gowns, fresh, nubile, and pretty young women every year danced merrily around the maypole. In later years, the University annointed a May Day Queen complete with retinue. Several photos in the book capture this regrettably lost ritual with its paean to rebirth and to budding sexuality. (pp. 36-37)
No treatment of the University of Maryland, however short, can dispense with Testudo, the terrapin that became the university's official mascot in 1933. Testudo is memorialized in several statues on campus, especially in front of the library where students continue to rub his nose as a good luck charm for exams, courtship, and other worthy purposes. (p. 42) Testudo's taxidermied remains still go on display every year for Maryland Day.
Stullich and Bryant devote a chapter of the book to the "Cradle of Aviation" -- the College Park Airport. Founded in 1909, the airport is the oldest in the United States and became listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. It is the home today of an Aviation Museum. Wilbur Wright conducted military training at the Airport beginning in 1909. The Airport claims many firsts in aviation history. Among other things, it hosted the first woman airplane passenger (1909). It was the originating terminus of the first regularly scheduled airmail service, (1918) which covered Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. The Airport also witnessed the first controlled helicopter flight (1924), and the first "blind" flight which used only instruments to guide the plane (1933). This iconic site in aviation history is well-covered in the book.
This little book, like its subject, is a diamond in the rough. With the enthusiasm and focus of the authors, the book captures an American community and the elements that make it distinctive.
