Thornton Phoebus Hitch

The following article is from "The Allen Historian" of August 2000

Thornton Hitch's Reflections, by Casey Parsons

Editor's Note: Casey interviewed Thornton Hitch for this article on February 21, 2000.

Thornton Phoebus Hitch is the eldest son of Beverly Tubman Hitch and Laura Richardson Hitch. Another son, Richard, born in 1915, served in the U.S. Navy as an electrician aboard a submarine during World War II and was lost in 1944, when his ship, the U.S.S. Grayback was lost in the Pacific. The Navy reported that the Grayback was caught on the surface and sunk as it was returning from a long patrol in the war zone. A third son, Donald, was born in 1920 and lives in Florida.

Thornton was named for Captain Thornton Phoebus, a ship captain from Oriole, who helped transport many immigrants to America from the old country. Thornton believes that his family came from England, and the name was originally spelled "Hytch". [Editor's Note: yes, from England, no for Hytch]

He lives today near the pond along Wicomico Creek in Somerset County, the same site on which his family lived when he was born in January, 1914. His wife, Lelia, died in 1981. His garage and workshop contain parts of the old kitchen used by the Hitch family before they moved to the larger house across the pond built by Mr. Peter Malone in 1920.

Thorton's earliest memories are of his father working as a mail carrier. Beverly picked up the mail from Eden when the train came in and delivered it to homes around the countryside. He also operated the old mill on the creek for many years, employing a part-time mill operator as he delivered the mail. Mr. Hitch attached an engine house to the south side of the mill to furnish auxiliary power to the mill wheel when the water was low. Thornton recalls moving the new engine in for the initial setup. Ralph Bounds, a young local mechanic, helped to slide the new engine along, inch by inch, on rollers and skids. Thornton, a small child at the time, had his fingers mashed during the installation.

Thornton recalls that the water power was used to turn a turbine which rotated the top stone as the bottom stone remained stationary. There was a groove cut in the bottom stone which funneled the corn meal or flour to a conveyor and then to a bag. In those days, at locations where there was no water power available, mules were used to turn the grinding stones. In addition to the grist mill, Thornton also remembers an up-and-down sawmill, which was used to cut sills for houses. The former Hitch house, standing today by the pond, where the family moved in 1920, has 12" X 12" hand-hewn sills, Thornton said.

Mary G. Payne (b. 1902) remembers playing in the barn next to the old mill as a little girl with her friends amidst the grain which was stored there, probably after being taken as payment for grinding, or perhaps bought and sold as needed in the community. Mary's father, Robert Lee Griffith, worked in the blacksmith shop attached to the north side of the mill. He made and repaired tools, shod horses and did all of the things the smith was asked to do in those days. He probably worked mostly in the shop, but sometimes took his tools to the farm if required.

The mill dam washed out in 1918, and the mill stopped after running since at least 1763. A low dam was rebuilt about fifty yards north of the old mill site. The dam was raised to a higher level in 1930 by the Maryland State Highway Department in order to restore the former beauty of the pond. Some say the old mill was dismantled by Ralph Bounds and Bill Costen and the boards used elsewhere, partly to build the Ralph Bounds garage just south of the pond. Perry Horsman also worked in the blacksmith shop by the mill, Thornton says, and when the mill closed, the shop was relocated across the stream near the old post office, and Horsman continued to work there. The site is probably where the brick house stands today, formerly part of the Beverly Hitch lot, but sold to Charlie Bishop in the early fifties to build a house. It is unclear whether the old shop was moved or a new one constructed.

Thornton's mother, Laura Lee Richardson Hitch (1888-1970) was from Church Creek in Dorchester County. She graduated from Towson College and became a teacher. Her first assignments were to schools in Wicomico County, where she met Beverly and later married him. Beverly lived with an aunt in the old house by the creek in Somerset County before he married Laura. One of the schools in which Laura taught was Trinity, which is still standing today as a dwelling.

The Allen School where Thornton attended had seven grades being taught in one room by Miss Mildred Whayland. Formerly, under Squire Price, who taught in Allen for 33 years (1860-1893), there were two rooms. When Thornton finished his schooling at Allen, he rode the bus to Upton Street in Salisbury. The bus was a long, limo-type vehicle driven by Hamp Murray and transported from ten to fifteen people. He moved to the new high school on East Main Street in his senior year and graduated from there.

Out of high school, he helped his father on the farm for a while, his father having retired from the mail job. Together they devised a sprayer to destroy the Mexican bean beetle. They then experimented with the new sprayer to determine the best time for spraying when the maximum number of beetles were exposed. Thornton drove a truck for Joe Reading for a while, and while traveling to Cleveland, Ohio, he saw a sign saying: "Learn to weld; free of charge!" Thornton stopped long enough to learn welding before returning to Maryland. Later, he would make good use of his welding skills.

Thornton recalls trucks and wagons loaded with beans lined up as far as the church on the way to the auction block north of the store in Allen. As many as twenty truckloads a day went out of Allen. First came the string bean crop, followed by the Fordhook butter beans. (George Cordry's history states that "in the early 1900's, as many as 10 to 12 thousand bushels of string beans were sold at the market in Allen" and that the market was owned and operated by the late Jesse M. Pollitt.) The buyers were Jesse Pollitt, Kirb Gunby, and a man named Holloway. Harvey Mariner was the auctioneer and lived on the Mariner farm on Collins Wharf Road where Charlie Habilston lives today. (The old house burned down many years ago). Arlie Moore was the first farmer to grow string beans commercially, and Thornton recalls, Mr. Moore also usually had the earliest crops of the season.

Some of the beans and other vegetables were transported to Baltimore by the Victor Lynn boat which left Salisbury in the afternoon, arriving in the city for the early morning produce market. The boat stopped at Collins Wharf about four o'clock in the afternoon. Al Wooten, Lynn's father, started the Victor Lynn Lines in the 1920's, Thornton recalls, and changed the power from steam to gasoline. The "Henrietta Francis" was the name of the first boat, which looked like a tug boat.

Thornton remembers one day when his father asked him and his brother Richard to take a few baskets of peppers to Collins Wharf in time for the afternoon boat shipment. When they got to the point near the intersection of Collins Wharf Road and Allen Road, a bolt came out of the harness, causing the shaft to fall down around the horses's legs each time he took a step. The horse was soon running headlong down the main street of Allen. As they raced past the Messick place, Fred Messick ran out to try to help. He could only grasp hold of the back of the wagon as it sped past, dragging him along until his knees were scraped bare and bruised through his trousers before he could let go. Thornton and Richard were finally able to control the horse by reining him in one direction, which happened to be the home of Laura Twilley, who lived where the Lentz family later lived. Thornton says the horse ran all the way up to the side door as if to enter the house. When Mrs. Twilley came to the door, she looked into the face of a scared, snorting, wild-eyed horse, a sight she long remembered.


Thornton remembers that the Gilbert Disharoon family once lived just west of the Community Hall where Fred Dennis lives today. The Disharoon House burned about 1925, and Olin Dennis helped get things out of the house during the fire. It is remembered that Olin brought the mattress down the stairs and threw a china closet out the window!

Thornton traveled as a young man, going abroad twice aboard ships out of New York. The first trip carried him through the Strait of Gibraltar, into the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and Ceylon. While in India, he visited the Taj Mahal, the 17th century mausoleum in Agra, India. On this trip he also visited Alexandria, Egypt. His second voyage took him through the Panama Canal where his motor ship developed engine trouble. After delays in getting to Los Angeles for repairs, he traveled to Pearl Harbor, Oahu, to deliver seven mooring buoys which were in use there when the Japanese attacked the U.S. Fleet on December 7,1941.

After he married Lelia Bozman, he got a job welding at the Bethlehem Steel Company located on Key Highway in Baltimore where they lived for a while. Before the war, he helped to manufacture gun carriages for an arsenal in Watertown, N.Y. He helped to raise a second deck on the old Esso Tanker that used to come to Salisbury and tie up in the east end of the Wicomico River and pump oil across Route 13 to storage tanks and truck tankers. When the war started, he helped to build the first Liberty Ship at Bethlehem Steel Co. He also worked for a while before the war at the Maryland Drydock Company where he repaired ships damaged by German submarines lurking close to our coastline. Some of these ships, Thornton says, had been sunk and recovered. The amount of shipping thus sunk and damaged was enormous.

Richard Hitch returned home from the war, Thornton recalls, late in 1943, on leave entitled him after his long patrols in the far east. The Navy needed an electrician, however, to fill the compliment of the submarine U.S.S. Grayback and Richard volunteered to return earlier than he had planned. The Navy Department reports that the Grayback with eighty men aboard was lost in combat on February 27, 1944 in the East China Sea. A few years ago, Thornton received a letter from the relatives of one of the other crew members that the Navy thought that the ship, upon returning from a long combat patrol, was caught on the surface and sunk. Richard's grave marker is in the Allen Cemetery near the other members of the family.

Just to the south and west of Thornton's garden behind his house on Wicomico Creek stands a walnut tree about thirty inches in diameter. The tree, Thornton says, marks the exact spot where an old ice house stood years before he was born. The house was set in the side of a sharp rise in the ground and closed in to cover the huge chunks of ice, some of which were cut from the pond seventeen inches, up to twenty-four inches thick. The chunks of ice were covered over with sawdust to keep the air away, and the sawdust brushed back to chip ice for making ice cream and cooling lemonade. The ice house, he recalls, wasn't much of a house at all, but a sort of cave covered over with boards and filled with sawdust. Eventually, the ice house faded out and the walnut tree grew over the spot.

Thornton recalls that the Allen Pond used to freeze over for a period of about three months each year to a depth of a foot to two feet. The young people skated mornings and evenings and weekends. Fred Messick writes about skating parties beside the pond in the later part of the nineteenth century, when crowds of two to three hundred people gathered to skate and watch and enjoy food and drinks. The writer remembers Thornton skating gracefully back and forth across the pond, but it's been a long time. Miss Lillian Malone recalls the late Joseph Smith as a very graceful skater in his time. We tried to fix a time when the last real skating occurred on the pond, and it was probably in the late fifties or early sixties. The weather pattern has certainly changed!

The first generation of Hitches in Allen of which we have record was the family of Robert J. Hitch (1810-1832) and his wife, Mary M. (1816-1834). Robert J., grandfather of Beverly Hitch, and great grandfather of Thornton, was left on a schooner anchored off Whitehaven in the Wicomico River, all alone, to guard the ship's contents. He became tired of waiting for his rowdy shipmates, so he jumped overboard to swim ashore and drowned in the attempt. Mary gave birth to R. J. in 1833. (Courtesy of Henry Hitch, from the family Bible).

Robert John Hitch (1833-1901) married Sarah Amanda Phoebus Hitch (1836-1904) on January 11, 1865. They had four children: Mary Louise Hitch (1868-1914), Kirby Atwood Wilson Hitch (1865-1925), Robert Thornton Phoebus Hitch (1873-1946), and Beverly Tubman Hitch (1876-1960). Mary Louise married Earnest Winfield Whayland (1866-1913). They had one child, Ada May Whayland. Kirby Atwood Wilson Hitch married Mary Eleanor Bothurn in 1892. They had seven children: Elizabeth Amanda, Alexine Wilson, Nettie May, Iva, George Thomas, Kirby Wilson, and Marguerite Eleanor. Robert Thornton Phoebus Hitch married Edith E. Bounds in 1895 in Wicomico County. They had six children: Henry Atwood Hitch, Hanna E. Hitch, Robert John (Jack) Hitch, Howard Christy Hitch, Paul Phoebus Hitch, and Edith Amanda Hitch. Henry Atwood Hitch (1896-1973) married Rosalie Harrell in 1920. They had two children: Henry Atwood, Jr., and Oliver Lee Hitch. Rosalie died in 1952. Henry Atwood married Blanche Ramey Hazelgrove, who died in 1983.

Thornton Phoebus Hitch (1914-) married Lelia Bozman (1919-1981). They had two children: Thornton Scott Hitch and Linda Jean. Thornton Scott married Mary Ellen Malone and they have one child, Kimberly Ellen Hitch, who married Jay Ragains. The Ragains have one child, Alex, bom in 1991. Linda Jean Hitch married Preston Waller and they have one son, Jay, a graduate engineer who works for the North Carolina Power Company.

Thornton Phoebus is the last Hitch living in the Allen area, on the site occupied by his father, Beverly, about one hundred years ago. Nearby, the large grinding stones stand alone and still, proudly marking the spot where once stood the bustling old mills, sawing and grinding out the history of the village of Allen.

Thornton married Leila Thistle Bozman, daughter of Winfield Scott Bozman and Manie A. (?), on 04 Jan 1941 in Oriole, Somerset Co., MD.¹ (Leila Thistle Bozman was born in Dec 1919 in Wicomico Co., MD,^{5 6 7 8} died in 1981 in Wicomico Co., MD ⁶ and was buried in 1981 in Allen Church Cemetery, Allen, Wicomico Co., MD.)

Thornton next married Mildred Frances Collier on 11 Jan 1983 in Crisfield, Somerset Co., MD.¹ (Mildred Frances Collier was born in 1918 in MD ⁹.)