VIGNETTE-1676-The Mother Tree

Before the Colonization of Maryland

Jim Eberton’s colonial-era writing desk, which occupied the sunlit bay of his third-floor bedroom in his Roland Park mansion, was a modest, hand-sawed and planed piece of furniture without drawers. It had been constructed of wood harvested from a legendary chestnut tree at the heart of the primordial grove dominating the high ground at Chestnut Point, overlooking the Patuxent River. The Shawnee had reverently named the gigantic chestnut Neegah Mshkiki, or ‘Mother Tree’ in English, because it nourished all the creatures of the forest. Its immense canopy provided the perfect peaceful meeting place for people of all tribes to trade news, stories, and goods.

The ancient chestnut was sacred to the natives who lived at Chestnut Point, as well as to those on their annual migrations across the nearby Patuxent River to and from the Chesapeake Bay. They would ritually stop and pay homage to the Mother Tree, rest for a spell, replenish their supplies, and then continue onward to their destinations.

Unfortunately, the mammoth chestnut met its demise at the turn of the 18^th century when a devastating derecho cut a wide swath through the towering primeval forest growing on the Point.

The lumber milled from the trunk and branches of the colossus filled an entire two-level stone bank barn. The hard, long-lasting wood provided the building material for many of the cabins in the surrounding area and was used for miles of rail fencing. The raw material was also transformed into thousands of personal-use items, including tools, furniture, and even carved doll heads.

One of those items, now belonging to Jim, was the writing desk manufactured two centuries before by an industrious flaxen-haired Swedish fur trader with steely blue eyes named Anders Joutsen.

It was in 1676 that Anders’ first wife, Emma, not suited for the rustic life at Fort Christiana in Delaware, left him for the comforts of Stockholm. The lonely woman, raising two children and running a small farm on her own, had become disgruntled by his long absences in the far reaches of the Appalachian frontier, where he had established a trading post.

After Emma left him, taking the children with her, Anders decided to make Chestnut Point his home permanently. He had become tired of the long treks to and from Fort Christiana anyway.

That prime spot had a magnificent view of the river valley below and beyond that, the forested piedmont rolling away in the distance towards the Chesapeake Bay. The incredible vista, ever-changing with the seasons and the weather, was especially spellbinding at sunrise in autumn, when the forest was ablaze with color.

Most importantly, it was from that vantage point, by looking through his telescope, that Anders could watch as native parties cautiously traversed the main crossing of the fast-flowing Patuxent River. Anders could then reliably estimate how long it would take them to ascend the deeply worn dirt path winding back and forth upward through the dense woods, to the top of the slope, and into the ancient chestnut grove growing on the Point.

There, at the center of that realm of forest giants, grew Neegah Mshkiki, the Mother Tree.

The sojourners would almost always stop to rest for a while under the venerated old chestnut, and they were among Anders’ most reliable trading customers. Whether headed northwest towards the mountain passes, or southeast towards the Bay, they would most likely want to stock up on supplies for the journey ahead, or maybe even trade for a gift to give someone special waiting at the trail’s end. And, of course, the always enterprising natives carried with them a selection of fine fur pelts and wampum to trade for what they needed or desired along the way.

Ander’s trading post was dug into the high slope, overlooking the Patuxent River to the east. It was earth-sheltered and fieldstone-lined on three sides. Across the exposed side, there was a log wall. The log-beam roof was insulated with sod that had become overgrown with tall grass and wild flowers. After his wife, Emma, and children returned to Sweden, Anders decided to renovate his trading post into a traditional log cabin for himself.

First, Anders pitch-coated the exposed exterior wall before completely burying it on the outside with seven tons of dirt and rubble. Thus, the now-completely-underground interior space was left intact for a conventional cellar. He intentionally retained the original north-wall stone fireplace, spring-fed water pump, copper basin, and drain board.

After structurally bracing the existing walls of the old trading post, fireplace, and chimney, he replaced the sod-covered roof with newly adzed floor joists. Along with laying down a thick oak plank floor, Anders framed up the columns, beams, and rafters for a one-and-a-half-story log cabin above. The strong, energetic Swede managed to finish all those labor-intensive tasks before the winter trapping season.

Then, throughout the following spring, summer, and fall, Anders worked diligently to finish the project.

In the middle of the new cabin’s first-floor front wall, now facing south downriver, he installed an ironwood-picket door with a chiseled flat piece of field granite serving as a porch stoop. Then on each side of the front entry, Anders framed out, then installed a pair of imported double-hung windows of Swedish manufacture, cautiously hauled from Fort Christiana to Chestnut Point by pack horse. They transformed the cabin's dark interior into an ever-changing light show throughout the day.

Remarkably, the only damage sustained to either of the nine-over-nine pane windows during the journey was a slight crack in the lower right light of the bottom sash of the right side one, which Anders never bothered to repair.

The blown-glass windows were vulnerable points of entry, so Anders also installed blacksmith-welded solid-metal-plate shutters and a similarly wrought metal gate for the entrance way. Each was lockable from the inside. The protective gate had a peephole with a sliding cover, a small bolted hatch for exchanging items, and several strategically placed gun-barrel loops. Thankfully, those precautionary measures to ward off attack proved unnecessary during Anders’ lifetime.

However, the metal barriers once successfully prevented the violent breach of the cabin by an enormous, drunken black boar bear that had liberally availed itself of the thick, sweet honey and fruit liquor that Anders was brewing in the shack out back. The inebriated, fiercely vocal, wild creature was a mean drunk, not a jolly one.

Anders’ cozy new home featured a prominent open fireplace, a food-preparation counter with a spring-fed water pump, a drainboard and basin, a reasonably sized private bedroom for himself, and a sleeping loft for guests, all under the security of a weatherproof cedar-shake roof.

Anders could now live comfortably like his fellow colonists back home in Delaware. At first, he held out hope that his wife, Emma, would return to him with their two children, so he wanted the cabin to be a welcoming home. However, that was a happy ending never meant to be.

Initially, Anders used his new cellar to store wampum and other valuables needed to conduct business with the natives. To keep those items secure, Anders devised an ingenious way to reach the underground room from the first floor of the cabin above.

After the renovation, there were two covert ways to access Anders’ now-completely-underground private cellar. The original was an emergency escape route, involving shimmying through the stone-lined, gravity-fed water-supply tunnel that led down from the spring house higher up the slope. The newly invented access was a fiendishly clever puzzle that provided access through the first-floor girders of the cabin above—but only to those who could figure it out.

Not long after, the industrious settler took a second wife, a compactly built Shawnee healer who went by the shortened name of Neeshee. Unlike Emma, Neeshee was entirely at ease with life in the wilderness.

In those idyllic surroundings, the Swedish fur trader and the Shawnee healer, along with their growing family, contentedly thrived on Chestnut Point, overlooking the sparkling Patuxent River, flowing through the forested hills of the Maryland Piedmont, rolling into the distant slope towards the Chesapeake Bay.

During the passing decades, both easy and hard, Anders and Neeshee added several substantial extensions to their log cabin. Anders relegated his private cellar room mainly to storing root vegetables, pipe tobacco, and home-brew, but also to playing chess against himself on a white oak barrel that remained from his trading-post days. Anders’ intricately carved chess set of Asian ivory, worth a small fortune, was the one extravagance he had allowed himself to bring to the New World from Sweden. That was how the veteran fur trapper enjoyed spending his quiet time: playing chess against himself, consulting a seminal book on historic matches.

Only Anders had access to this secluded space, where he enjoyed uninterrupted respite from the frenetic hubbub of family life, because he alone knew the two secret techniques for gaining entrance.

Despite Ander’s best efforts to keep his personal refuge off-limits to others, the cellar became the clandestine meeting place for a certain two lovers: Mårten Joutsen, who was Ander’s botanist son by his first wife, and a tall, elegant, and brilliant French-Syrian immigrant to Maryland named Estella Chastaigne.

Mårten, like his pappa, was fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, and consumed with love for both nature’s beauty and its utility. Estella, like her beloved grandfather in Aleppo, had dark eyes that could interpret the stars and delicate hands that could feel even the most subtle nuances of silk. Estella’s thick, long, ebony-colored hair reflected a lustrous auburn sheen when viewed in certain light. And her deep brown eyes sparkled with flecks of green. Those touches of color came courtesy of her wealthy French father, who was a prestigious broker of Syrian silks and Armenian gold.

The unlikely love affair between those two culturally dissimilar people began when the botanist, Mårten, traveled from Sweden to visit his father, Anders, while investigating the commercially valuable growths of ginseng, rumored to thrive along the banks of the upper Patuxent River.

After arriving in the Maryland Colony and traveling twenty-four miles by sail up the Patuxent River to the Port of Benedict Town, Mårten stayed for several days directly across the Post Road from the landing at an accommodation called Sheffield’s Tavern.

As it just so happened, that was when Estella was the tavern’s manager and the two of them hit it off in spectacular fashion. They clicked together, heart and mind, like strong magnets, becoming almost inseparable, so much so that Estella felt compelled to accompany Mårten upriver to the frontier destination called Chestnut Point.

About a month later, Anders, Neeshee, and other able-bodied family members went on a two-week journey to a Shawnee Bread Dance on the shores of the Youghiogheny River in the mountains of western Maryland. Taking advantage of that opportunity, Mårten and Estella, seeking privacy from the elderly folk and the children who had stayed behind, put their combined powers of logic and reasoning to good use, devising a trick to gain entrance to the underground room.

One would not be surprised to learn that when Anders returned home with the others, he quickly deduced the surreptitious canoodling that had occurred in the hidden cellar during his absence. Of course, he did—because a veteran trapper like him would miss practically none of the subtle happenings within his domain. However, it was his wife, the intuitive herbalist Neeshee, who first detected that Estella was with child and quietly shared that information with Anders.

Just before departing back downriver with Mårten, Estella, unaware that she was pregnant, said her extended goodbyes to Anders and Neeshee, as well as the other family members and friends at Chestnut Point.

That’s when the old frontiersman and his native wife each took Estella by a hand.

First, Neeshee said, “Please take care of our grandchild.”

Then Anders added, “We expect to be invited to the wedding.”

Estella, then 35, was utterly confounded by their words because she believed that she had been rendered barren by the prolonged, difficult, premature childbirth of her eleven-year-old son.

The unanticipated revelation concerning Estella being pregnant made matters very complicated for Mårten. He not only had important, pressing issues awaiting his attention back in Sweden, but he had conveniently not told his father that Estella was already married, though estranged, to a seafaring schooner captain named Robyn Mann. Nor had he shared the knowledge that Estella was also the devoted mother of an eleven-year-old boy named Jeremy, whom she had affectionately nicknamed ‘Early Bird,’ because he was born two full months premature and, as a result, was very small and slight in stature.

During her youth, while growing up downriver in Benedict Town, Estella and Mårten’s daughter, Annali, spent most of her summers away from the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes of the Maryland coastal plateau, in the cooler climes of the rolling piedmont upriver at Chestnut Point. There, little Annali spent many happy hours writing fanciful stories at the old chestnut-wood writing desk and then reading them aloud to her dolls, which she carefully lined up in rows on the surface, much like attentive schoolchildren.

Neeshee’s elderly father, Tekamthi, didn’t want to die until he had tasted chocolate, which he had heard was like heaven on earth.

The frail old warrior watched as his time on earth slipped past faster and faster each day. At that rate, Tekamthi formulated that his next-to-last day alive might well be merely a blink and the next a blink-by-half, and so on, until nature intervened to put an end to the infinite nonsense and let him move on to his next spirit life..

Then, suddenly one day, Tekamthi was startled yet thoroughly pleased when, unannounced, his lovely, nine-year-old great-granddaughter, Annali, newly arrived at Chestnut Point for the summer, entered the room with a big grin. The fair, blue-eyed, yet raven-haired girl was carefully balancing a serving tray on which rested an imported fine-china Swedish cup of cane-sugar-sweetened hot South American cocoa, sitting on an equally delicate matching saucer. Also upon the tray, Annali had placed a folded, soft cotton napkin, a small silver stirring spoon, and a matching china vase holding an artful arrangement of wildflowers freshly picked from the upper meadow.

And not only that, the cheerful girl had topped the creamy treat with a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkle of ground nutmeg!

As Tekamthi very, very slowly and mindfully sipped the heavenly concoction, Annali sat by his side, watching with anticipation for his reaction.

The Shawnee elder wanted to savor the heavenly beverage forever. After licking the last drop of the deliciously sweet, thick liquid from his index finger, which he had used to wipe the inside of the china cup clean, Tekamthi lifted Annali’s soft hand to his lips in thanks. After which, he lay his head back down to doze, newly optimistic about what lay beyond.

Upon his passing, Anders bequeathed the chestnut-wood writing desk to his exotic-looking and remarkably gifted granddaughter, Annali. She had grown up to become a female author who published her popular tales under the pseudonym Jack Chapman because women of that era were not taken seriously as writers. Nevertheless, Anders was very proud of her success.

The old writing desk came into the possession of Sonny Mann, Jim Eberton’s father, and subsequently to him after three generations of Manns, starting with Estella’s son, Early Bird, baptized Jeremy Chastaigne Mann, who first inherited the Chestnut Point Estate.

In 1886, after the invention and commercial success of John Kemp Starley’s Rover safety bicycle, Jim’s mysterious father, Sonny Mann, moved from Chestnut Point into his military-style quarters near the Baltimore docks to establish a safety bicycle manufacturing factory of his own. He couldn’t have done it without the cooperation of his longtime partner in both adventure and business, Benny Barsky. They named the new entity the Superior Bicycle Manufacturing Company.

And with him, to Baltimore, from Chestnut Point, Sonny brought several select, utilitarian pieces of furniture. Among them was the colonial-era chestnut-wood writing desk, built almost two centuries earlier by a distant relative named Anders Joutsen.

Sonny, who, over the years, became comfortable living on the road, riding big-wheel bicycles from place to place with Barsky, had developed an extremely streamlined lifestyle and utilitarian tastes.

So, in a nutshell, that’s how and why the heirloom writing desk, constructed in the early 1700s by a Swedish fur trader with flaxen hair and steely blue eyes, was among the personal items that Sonny bequeathed, along with ownership of the Superior Bicycle Manufacturing Company, to a young stranger whom he figured out was his son born to a woman he once had fallen in love with named Letitia Eberton.

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