A front-page article published in The Marylander and Herald newspaper in September 1962 announced the opening of a new business – and what perhaps was a seminal moment in the history of commerce in Princess Anne. William P. Hytche, a young math professor at then-Maryland State College, and his wife, Deloris, opened a sandwich shop on the…Read more The Hawks’ Nest
Over some four decades, photography instructor Thomas H. Wiles captured the hearts of students he encountered and the soul of a campus as he chronicled the evolution of an obscure historically black college into the University of Maryland Eastern Shore through his camera’s lens. Along the way, he endeared himself to nearly everyone he encountered…Read more Thomas H. Wiles
Two early graduates of the school that evolved into the University of Maryland Eastern Shore were memorialized with their names emblazoned on buildings when the institution celebrated its 125th anniversary. One is Thomas W. Kiah, who as chief administrator guided his alma mater for 26 years to the cusp of becoming a baccalaureate degree-granting college. Lida Brown,…Read more Lida Lavinia Brown
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a 30-year-old Baptist minister in the spring of 1959. He was perhaps best known as one of the leading advocates of the Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott that four years earlier made Rosa Parks a household name and became a seminal moment in the nation’s Civil Rights movement. King…Read more The Day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visited MD State
A philanthropic couple from New England who prospered from America’s Industrial Revolution extended a helping hand to the University of Maryland Eastern in its early days when the school was known as Princess Anne Academy. Harriet and Dexter Smith of Springfield, Mass. made a donation that was used at what was then a prep school…Read more Eliza Smith hall
A newspaper published an article on Monday, Feb. 2, 1959, about a building fire deliberately set the previous day on the Maryland State College campus. It reportedly read, in part: “Princess Anne, MD – February 1 – (A) Scientifically controlled inferno this crisp, near cloudless Sunday morning began reducing DelCon Hall, a 67-year-old (condemned) wooden structure, to glowing embers…Read more DelCon Hall
The original footprint of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore’s campus is on the National Register of Historic Places. The “Academic Oval” is the ancestral heart of the institution that, when founded on Sept. 13, 1886, housed students, faculty and classrooms in a converted late-18th century farmhouse known as Olney. Neither Olney nor other early wood-frame buildings that sprung up on the…Read more The Academic Oval
Seventeen-year-old Mary Omega Moore graduated with honors May 27, 1926 from Princess Anne Academy. It was a foregone conclusion she would attend the school. Born Sept., 11, 1908 in Concord, Del., she was brought as a young girl to live in Princess Anne by her widowed mother, Eliza G. Boyce Moore, who had accepted a…Read more ‘Education Yesterday, To-day and To-morrow’
Dolores Margaret Richard Spikes took over as the University of Maryland Eastern Shore’s 11th chief executive Jan. 13, 1997 from William P. Hytche, who urged her to apply for the job. Hytche and Spikes knew one another from their work as leaders of historically black land-grant institutions. Spikes became president of her alma mater, Southern University and A&M…Read more Dolores Spikes
We look at old photos and wonder whatever happened to those people? How did they live? Who knows about them? Estelle Livingston Stansberry was from Philadelphia, a descendant of slaves who worked on the Wye plantation as well as the Nanticoke Indian tribe. Estelle’s father, the Rev. John B. Stansberry, was a prominent African Methodist Episcopal…Read more A picture on a (web) page
