Civil War comes to Shepherdstown

The Rumsey Memorial Plaque in St Margaret’s Church

Soon after incorporating to build a monument to James Rumsey in Shepherdstown, the Rumseyan Society inquired about also putting up a memorial in St Margaret’s Church, where Rumsey had been buried, near Westminster Abbey in London. On Oct 1, 1906, the Secretary, State Senator William Campbell, got a reply from Rev. H. Hensley Henson:

Dear Sir
I am now in a position to send you a definite answer to the questions relating to the proposed erection of a tablet to the memory of JAMES RUMSEY.
I shall be prepared to give consent to the erection of a suitable tablet on the walls of S. MARGARETS WESTMINSTER on the following conditions.
I) The said Tablet must not exceed in size 30 inches in length and 20 in width.
II) Its form and material must be approved by me before erection.
III) The inscription must contain no disputable proposition, and must be submitted to me and approved before being placed on the tablet
IV) A fee of fifty guineas must be paid.
The payment of a substantial fee guarantees that the desire to erect a table is genuine and general.

Henson noted that a tablet in Westminster Abbey itself would cost 200 guineas. Campbell’s reply for the Society was polite:

The fee you suggest seems, as you admit, to be a large one, and it is uncertain that we can avail ourselves of your offer, but at the next meeting of the Society the matter will receive consideration, and it is possible that we may take definite action one way or the other.

But the polite language could not disguise the sticker shock. Two months later Campbell was informed by the Norfolk & Southern that it would no longer simply donate the land for the Monument: that to satisfy the Trustees it wanted $125 to release it. Campbell wrote to the Society, “if they charge us this much it will put the proposed park out of reach”. At the 1906 rate of about $5.00 to the pound, the fee for the tablet would have been $250, or twice what Norfolk & Southern wanted for the entire Monument site. The Society turned its attention to funding their local Rumsey memorial.

However, a St. Margaret’s plaque continued to be discussed. On Dec. 3 , 1953 the Junior Rumseyan Society was organized by teacher Rachel Snyder among her eighth-grade class. Two World Wars must have increased the demand for memorial tablets. The fee had grown considerably from $250; the class worked for one year to raise the money to have the plaque made and placed. James Rumsey’s memory alone also no longer met the “genuine and general desire” for a tablet. A memorial to Elizabeth Herrick, niece of cavalier poet Robert Herrick, had disappeared in the 18th c., along with the famous poem Robert Herrick had written for it. The Junior Rumseyans were asked to fund a replacement for that, along with their memorial to Rumsey. Robert Herrick and his niece got top billing. But at least the statement that Rumsey’s steamboat had been “demonstrated privately to George Washington in 1784” escaped being considered a “disputable proposition”.

On May 18, 1955, in front of an assembled crowd of about a hundred British and Americans (including Rachel Snyder) a small American flag was pulled aside by Admiral Sir Guy H.E. Russell to reveal the memorial tablet.

One student who was part of Snyder’s fund-raising was G. Jay Hurley. He would leave town and have adventures, but always carried the thought of Rumsey in his head until he returned to start O’Hurley’s General Store. Thirty years after being a Junior Rumseyan, in 1983 he launched the effort to build a working reproduction of Rumsey’s steamboat, now on display at the Museum.

-Nicholas Blanton