Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
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Attic Treasures<br />
Tell History of Maple Hall, Claiborne<br />
By Dick Cooper<br />
The box on Penny Rhine’s table holds answers and secrets,<br />
memories and mysteries. Like the ones stored in the<br />
attic and garage of Maple Hall Inn, the historic bed and<br />
breakfast she owns with her husband Rick, the box contains<br />
ledgers, letters, photos and documents that track 150 years of<br />
the Tunis, Cockey and Cook families of Claiborne, Md.<br />
As she pulls out a pack of old picture postcards, Penny<br />
almost sheepishly admits that she hasn’t had time to sort all<br />
of the treasures.<br />
“Every time you get started, you wind up spending too<br />
much time just examining each piece,” she says.<br />
She points to the elaborately decorated diploma that would<br />
rival a sheepskin from an Ivy League institution. It notes that<br />
in May 1913, John Cockey completed “Prof. Beery’s Mail<br />
Course in Horsemanship.” It is signed by Jesse Beery, presi-<br />
Penny Rhine and CBMM curator Pete Lesher explore some<br />
of the historic treasures in Maple Hall.<br />
dent of Miami County, Ohio, and reads that Cockey “is hereby<br />
entitled to the respect and confidence of the public … with<br />
complete knowledge of training colts and breaking horses of<br />
bad or vicious habits.”<br />
“How do you study horsemanship in a mail-order course?”<br />
she wonders aloud.<br />
Everything in Maple Hall has a back-story.<br />
Take Theophilus Tunis’ sword, for instance.<br />
Penny opens the glass door of the large display case in the<br />
breakfast room of the B & B and takes out the weapon that<br />
Theophilus wore on his side as a Confederate officer in the<br />
Civil War. He was only 18 when the War Between the States<br />
broke out and he joined the Southern Cause.<br />
“He was one of the youngest Confederate officers,” Penny<br />
says. “See these dents in the scabbard? The story goes that<br />
during his first combat, he was so scared that he forgot to<br />
draw the sword, and these dents are from bashing a Yankee<br />
on the head.”<br />
For generations, it seems, when a family member passed<br />
away, his or her personal records and private possessions<br />
were put in boxes and chests<br />
and stashed away.