Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

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Maple Hall in Claiborne, Md., is one of the most dominant
architectural presences in a town that today has fewer than
150 full-time residents.
In the attic of Maple Hall, the rambling old manor house that
has served as a guest house since the late 1800s, there is a chest
that contains a tangle of shirts, papers and ledgers. They are all
the remaining earthly goods of Charles “Carroll” Cockey.
Uncle Carroll’s headstone in the family plot down by the
banks of Tilghman Creek marks his life simply as “1876-
1943,” but stories about him continue to be told.
He was an epileptic at a time when the neurological disorder
was viewed with more fear than understanding. Every
summer, for much of his life, he was sent off to a home in
Easton so his seizures would not terrify guests at the inn. But
most of the time, he was a “gentle giant” who was well over
six feet tall and known for his strength.
Penny says that one family story has Cockey at the scene
of an accident where a man had been changing the wheel on
a wagon when the wagon fell on him.
“He picked up the wagon and saved the man.”
In another story, Cockey was walking across a field on
nearby Rich Neck when a bull chased him. Cockey sidestepped
the bull and pulled its tail out.
“I am sure that the farmer was not pleased to lose a prized
bull that way but that again is a folk tale among the many
stories that have been handed down forever.”
Maple Hall has long been one of the dominate buildings
in Claiborne. The village today is a quiet hamlet of less than
150 residents and a post office. But 100 years ago, it was the
hub of ferryboat and rail commerce. Named for William Claiborne,
who settled Kent Island across Eastern Bay in 1631,
the village is actually the second development on the peninsula
bounded by Eastern Bay and the Miles River, just five
miles northwest of St. Michaels.
The Tunis family operated a steam-driven lumber mill in
what is now Old Claiborne at the head of Tilghman Creek, as
well as a mill across the Miles River and up Leeds Creek in the
community of Tunis Mills. They also had mills on the Elizabeth
River in Norfolk, Va., and in Tunis, N.C.
The Tunis business journals and correspondence covering
decades of transactions are stored in various locations at
Maple Hall.
In the 1880s, Joseph Tunis had big plans for the land
around the Tilghman Creek mill. He named it Bay City, laid
out a crosshatch of streets, and subdivided it into 188 lots for
sale. It was hoped that it would rival Bay Ridge, the popular
resort across the Chesapeake, east of Annapolis that was
started in 1879 and was all the rage in the late 1800s.
The plan shows the community centered around Henry Clay
Square, with a commercial core surrounded by snug residential
lots. It may have made sense at the time, but it never developed
past a small collection of houses, mainly for the workers at
the sawmill, oyster house and shipyard that lined the edge of
Tilghman Creek. A few of those houses still stand along Old
Claiborne Road, a half-mile south of the current village.
Rick and Penny Rhine own and operate Maple Hall Inn as a
bed and breakfast, which they call “a Shore tradition.”