As I looked around the room dedicated to Howard County history in the offices of the Howard County Historical Society (HCHS) offices in the Charles E. Miller Branch of the Howard County Library in Ellicott City, I thought of the quilt RoCo’s good friend, local immigration attorney and progressive activist Becca Niburg made for us using the campaign t-shirts of many of the Democrats who ran for local office in the 2018 Gubernatorial primary. Like that quilt, the HCHS displays wove a telling tapestry of the triumph and tragedy of the human experience, as the National History Day website named this year’s theme for student projects. In the quilt’s case it’s the experience manifested in one life, that of yours truly, Robert Morgenthau. In the HCHS displays’ case, it’s the experience manifested in hundreds of thousands of lives, those of the residents of a mini-megalopolis in central Maryland that we call “Howard County.”

Distant and Nearby

I was in the chamber just off the main library area, where I was browsing as Shawn Gladden, the Executive Director (ED) of the HCHS wrapped up a meeting. I’d asked him to get together to talk about the basics of Howard County history, and I was a few minutes early. In a glass case I saw books about haunted HoCo houses, historically significant women from the area, and a pictorial retrospective of Maryland mill towns (like Ellicott City). I leaned over a table nearby to take a gander at some scarves, pins, and other historically-themed tchotchkes (in a good way) with a Maryland theme that were for sale. And just as I heard Shawn saying goodbye to the person he’d been talking to in his office, I noticed a dollhouse built, decorated, and furnished by a local woman that depicted her childhood home in nearby Virginia. The whole tapestry metaphor I’d been thinking of made me smile as I recalled one of my favorite songs on one of my favorite albums, “I Feel the Earth Move,” on Carole King’s “Tapestry.” One verse from it is as follows:

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever you’re around

And then I did feel my heart tremble a little, and I put my hands in my pockets for a moment. It would have been a nice time to have my t-shirt quilt on me.

“Hey, Robert!” Shawn said, and I perked up at the prospect of getting to delve into the nuts-and-bolts of the day-to-day of a HoCo historian. He showed me into his office toward the back and off to the left of the HCHS offices. Sunlight illuminated the various accouterments of a historian stored around it and the to-do lists, notes, and printouts of a busy ED. I took a seat in front of his big desk with one of those sidecar thingies that he sits at because a simple table shape isn’t enough to accommodate all his objets d’historien.

Related: See what local politico Natalie Ziegler told me about her previous life in news reporting. 

Learing From History

While I’m a fan of general history, and an eager student of HoCo history in particular, I admitted to Shawn, I knew little about either. This probably explained why most of my responses to his observations about his work amounted to: “Wow–cool!”

“My job is to collect and interpret documents from Howard County’s past. Then we provide programming for all age groups and for all demographics. We make it so that everyone can utilize our resources,” Shawn told me.

Someone who knows a good deal about local history, Mary Catherine Cochran, Delegate Terri Hill’s (D-12) Legislative Director, sang Shawn’s praises in this regard in a conversation she and I had a few days after I met up with Shawn. From 2015 to 2017, Mary Catherine was the Executive Director of the Patapsco Heritage Greenway. She led its efforts to “preserve, protect, and restore the environment, history, and culture of the Patapsco River Valley,” as its website reads.

“Through partnerships with HCLS [the Howard County Library System] and often sold-out educational programming, Shawn has excelled at sharing our local history with new listeners,” Mary Catherine told me.

The default stance of historians, like that of amateur journalists RoCo before we began this website, at least from a lay person’s perspective like mine, is to approach what they do from a national perspective, Shawn said. But Shawn can make you a fan of local history if you aren’t already one with his enthusiasm for it. As such he’s taught courses at Howard Community College, where he’s an adjunct professor, in Western Civilization, United States, Maryland, and African-American history. After he got his Master’s in history and museum studies in 2004, Shawn worked at the Maryland Historical Society, the Fells Point Maritime Museum, the Preservation Society of Federal Hill and Fells Point, and the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Then, six years ago he became ED at the HCHS.

“I think there’s something really magical about local history, to see how your local community fits into a larger picture,” he told me.

Shawn hopes he’s brought an energy and passion to the HCHS, thereby increasing its profile. The organization has 500 dues-paying members now. All the while, I could tell, he kept at the fore of his work how history is about the people who live it–including him. When a painful part of his childhood came up, he produced an edition of the Columbia Flier. Its front page was emblazoned with a picture and headline about this tale from his past.

Constant Context

As a professional historian who educates the public about HoCo’s past, Shawn–and his staff–put history in context for people.

“We have to make sure we’re presenting it so that all sides get represented, but also so that we correct any misinterpretations of history, which tend to happen when you throw politics into it,” Shawn said. The temporal distance from which he works allows Shawn to contextualize the area’s rich, complicated, often tricky past.

“Sometimes it’s hard to understand that this was a slave county in a slave state,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

I asked him about a topic I think about often that plays into local journalism like the articles on rocoinhoco.com no less than any other kind, the obligation to be as “objective” as possible. He said he definitely thought that when you’re caught in the middle of something, as often occurs for journalists, its hard to get that supposedly unbiased point of view. By definition, a journalist is always a part of her stories–and maybe histories too. His go-to source as a historian, then, is the journalistic article.

“Historians often say that journalism is history’s first draft,” Shawn said, straightening his spine and putting his right hand on his swivel office chair’s arm.

Another similarity between journalism and history came up then.

“I think of myself as a storyteller,” Shawn said. He told me one of the prime gratifications in his work is seeing the look in someone’s eyes when he’s taught something they didn’t know before. That’s heightened when he puts an exhibit together, which he told me he loves to do the most in his job.

“You always get someone who says, ‘That’s my Uncle Joe!'” smiling big and closing his eyes a little with satisfaction.

Just as exciting to Shawn is the “treasure trove”of historical artifacts he gets to work with, many of them right there in the HCHS offices. Sometimes, he said, he’ll find something that changes an established narrative on a topic or topics.

Shawn took a deep breath and let it out quickly when I asked him what the most challenging part of his job was.

“Money,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “I spend more time fundraising than anything else. It’s really expensive to preserve all this stuff.”

Later Shawn showed me the temperature-controlled, behemoth steel racks in the HCHS offices that store documents dating back to the mid-16o0s. He donned a pair of white, fabric gloves to show me one in particular. It echoed the magic of history he’d mentioned earlier.

Intricacies of Ellicott City

When Shawn told me what he’d do with a blank check for Howard County and Howard County history, it made me break eye contact and look out the window behind him for a moment. Wow–these people, so many that RoCo has interviewed said something similar that made it clear how much its residents care about this place.

“I’d fix Ellicott City, that’s what I’d do,” he told me folding his arms in front of his chest.  “It’s a beautiful town. Unfortunately, it was built in the worst possible location. We just have to accept that it’s in a flood plain.”

Old Ellicott City (OEC)–although I guess back when it was founded it was called Current Ellicott City!–used water to power the manufacturing structures that made it the vital cog in the local, economic machine that it was. Also, Shawn reminded me, it’s right on the route from Baltimore out west.

“Other communities have moved after catastrophic flooding–Sykesville, Harper’s Ferry. There are lots of towns that did drastic things to avoid flooding. If I had unlimited funds I’d figure out what to do for Ellicott City,” he told me.

I had to stop him and say something then.

“Well, if we can move it, then why don’t we?” Shawn laughed at the urgent way I said this, and then I did too.

And: Colleen attended UUCC’s Transgender Day of Remembrance and reported back on her experience.

Fiduciary Fixes

Shawn told me he’d love to use some extra money, should the HCHS ever come into it, to hire a full staff and pay the volunteers he sang the praises of.

The current full-time staff are Shawn, Deputy Director Paulette Lutz, and Museum Director Mary Sanphilipo. The rest of the staff is all-volunteer.

“I’ve got a great staff, and I’d love to create jobs for them,” Shawn said with enough gratitude to make his already golden voice even richer.

I imagined that it was no easy feat taking care of all the documents, artifacts, and other antiquities of various sorts. At my request, Shawn took me back and proudly showed me the rows of document storage in the back. He uncovered what looked like a giant, biblical scroll. It was a high school diploma from the now-defunct Ellicott City High School. He told me in those shelves, which were meticulously cataloged somewhere was Babe Ruth’s Ellicott City marriage certificate. As a basebell fan, I considered demanding to see it, but we had more to discuss.

I could tell the wonder of it all of this still struck Shawn, even when he said with great professional aplomb, that the HCHS also has a check with Abraham Lincoln’s John Hancock.

Politics and the Past

Even when you’re pretty sure of something yourself, it’s still meaningful to hear a professional who really knows his stuff say it.

“I want people to know that this is a really special place,” Shawn told me. He grew up here, attending Wilde Lake High School, but he had moved away briefly after that. He returned for the same reason many people do, and that was to raise his two children here.

“We look out for each other here–or at least we always had,” he said. “We’re hatin’ on each other a lot these days. I hope we can get back to a civil discourse.”

Like so many of the people RoCo’s interviewed, growing up here is a source of pride for Shawn, especially because it made such a mark on him. He attended Wilde Lake High School before that. After a stint playing baseball at Virginia Wesleyan University, he transferred to University of Maryland at College Park. Eventually, he got his Bachelor’s degree in history from Towson State University. Perhaps because of it grounded him in the experiences of others, he completed a Master’s at George Mason University in African-American labor in 1860s Baltimore.

“But this place–including its diversity–made me who I am today,” Shawn said, his voice getting quieter for a moment.

When residents clamored to have the Confederate Memorial in —- taken down, they met opposition, Shawn said returning to what he does as a local historian. People look to him and his ilk for the gravitas and learned perspective they bring to what can be contentious issues like that.

“The Historical Society said, ‘It shouldn’t be on public property. But let’s put it in the museum where we can can give it some context and people can still see it,” Shawn said with a touch of concern in his voice.

Also: I visited the Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant in Savage.

Days of His Lives

As with many upper-level administrators, Shawn’s daily grind involves a hefty amount of communication: he answers emails, makes phone calls, and interacts with visitors to his office like me. He also checks off items on his daily “hot-button” to-do list, which he’d written on a mini-dry-erase board that lay next to him.

“What I love doing most is actual research, which is part of putting an exhibit together,” he said. “For this next exhibit we’ll be doing on firefighting in the county, I’ll sit down and go through our database of images.” He’ll use those images to tell a story, he said, recalling the comparison he’d made earlier of his work as that of a storyteller. Once he’s culled the images that paint a picture of this aspect of HoCo’s past, he’ll send them to his museum designer and she’ll create an exhibit based on them. All of that takes about a month. The last event the HCHS put on drew 155 attendees.

In the coming years, Shawn said he hopes the HCHS will be a part of the revitalization of Old Ellicott City. As it is, the HCHS museum sits atop the hill there. Howard County is set to have what he described as a “great historical campus.

As he told me that the local historical figure he’d most like to have dinner with is Senator James Clark, Shawn’s phone rang. With my permission he answered it.

While Shawn took his call, I wondered if the focus on material objects and images in history, there might be a danger in historical research that the lived experience, and even more importantly, the relationships of the people whose stories it told would be lost.

I asked a family friend of ours, Josh Rothman, the Chair of the History Department at the University of Alabama and a social historian, for his input on how he keeps peoples’ experiences in mind as he does his work.

“I’m looking at things like deeds and wills and tax records and lawsuits and letters to try and piece together the fragments of people’s lives. For other kinds of historians–people who work in cultural history or policy history or political history–I imagine that keeping people’s lives front and center is a little more challenging,” Josh told me in an email exchange.

I can say for sure, though, that Shawn’s able to do it well. It was at an event honoring Harriet Tubman a week prior to our chat in his office that he agreed to talk to me for this article. That event was all about lived experience–song, speech, and a chance to meet people who’d gone to the famed Harriet Tubman Elementary School in Columbia. And snacks–snacks are important.

After a tour of the back of the offices, where the documents and other historical goodies live, I couldn’t help being gauche and asking Shawn if I could have two ceramic ornaments I’d seen on his desk. One was of the Maryland state flag and the other of the Howard County flag. They’re now hanging of the drawer pulls in the room Colleen and I are sharing at the Sheraton downtown.

Though Shawn had been a gracious host, I said I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. He said I should stop by any time.

On my way back to my car, I reached in my pocket for my phone. I saw a text from Colleen alerting me to the shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. It dawned on me that the tremble I felt in my heart must have occurred right around when a shooter killed 49 worshippers in two mosques in the area and injured 20 others.

I remember what Shawn had said about how divisive national politics had trickled down to infect discourse everywhere. I just hoped–hoped against hope–that we’d prove untrue the lyrics to another one of my Carole King favorites: “It’s Too Late.”