Oxford’s beautiful Town Park is an ideal location to start our tour because it provides access to many layers of our town’s accumulated history. You won’t need to grab a trowel. Just exercise your imagination…
Can you smell the smoke from small campfires? This area of the coast was originally the summer camping grounds of a local Indian tribe, called the Choptanks, whose name means “beautiful waters.” For centuries before the first European colonists arrived, the native people navigated the local waters in dugout canoes, built seasonal wigwams, and harvested the bounty of the local lands and waters.
Can you hear the clatter of horses’ hooves and the rumbling of wagon wheels? When the town of Oxford was laid out by British settlers in the late sixteen hundreds, this area along the High Street was designated as the original marketplace. It was here that goods traveling from inland plantations to the waterfront and back again would be traded. In fact, Market Street, just across from the park, is the only town street that still bears the original name given to it.
Do you hear the ringing of the school bell and the laughter of young children? In the eighteen hundreds Oxford’s first two schools, a grade school and a high school, were established on the north or right edge of the park. They served the town’s white children until a new building was opened just outside the village in 1928.
Or is that the pealing of the bells from the steeple of the old Methodist Protestant Church? The first wood-frame church was built here along the north or right side of the park when members from St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church (Stop #29) broke away to form their own congregation in the eighteen seventies. This new and larger Oxford United Methodist Church rose to serve the growing congregation in 1948.
But look at all those tourists on the southern side of the park! They must have come to stay at the magnificent Eastford Hall Hotel. This is the largest wood-frame building ever constructed in Oxford, standing a full three stories tall all along the left side of the park (Stop #24). What a beautiful, peaceful place to spend a few days in this summer of 1878.
It’s a shame the hotel didn’t last. Its hallways are now echoing with the shouts of military cadets. The Maryland Military and Naval Academy (Stop #25) has taken over the place, and its young men are parading through the park in their uniforms.
Oh, no. Is that smoke you smell again? And can you feel heat from the erupting blaze? It is 1894, and the former Academy building, former Eastford Hall Hotel is burning to the ground. A few bits of pottery and glass are buried in the rubble.
Be sure to walk all the way to the water’s edge. Rather than build a sea wall or position huge boulders of “rip-rap” here to protect the shore, Oxford planted a “living shoreline” of vegetation and natural swales to control erosion, reduce wave energy and improve water quality. Look closely - these grasses also provide a natural habitat for birds and marine wildlife.
Look beyond the grasses now and at the Tred Avon River. The spit of land on the opposite side of the Tred Avon is called Benoni Point.
When you are ready, head back out to Morris Street and look across to the Museum.
