6 January 2009 - 7:36Hoodoo Marker
I want to find the Hoodoo Marker in Bel Air, Maryland. Roadside America calls it one of their longest-lived unattainables. I think it would be so cool if I were the person who finally found it. I wonder how hard they tried to find it. I should ask them, and also share the information I have on it.
The Hoodoo Marker is an old survey marker, possibly from the 18th century. It’s called the Hoodoo Marker is because it is inscribed with a quote from Deuteronomy which is essentially a curse on anyone who removes it.
“Cursed be he who removeth his neighbor’s landmark, and all the people shall say amen. Deuteronomy, Chap. 27, Verse 17.”
All I have to go on to find this thing are two WPA guides that are nearly seventy years old.
A couple of days ago, my sister Barbara told me that Havre de Grace, Maryland had some antique stores that I might like to check out. Havre de Grace is about 100 miles from my home. I thought I would look for other attractions nearby, to make the drive worth the trip. That’s where Roadside America comes in. I never travel without first checking the tips on roadsideamerica.com. The description was intriguing. It called the Hoodoo Marker a “Tantalizing El Dorado.” It also had a brief entry “Hexed to constrain removal.” How could I pass that up?
I don’t think this would interest me so much except that there is a story behind it, too. It’s a boundary marker that was put up to settle a dispute between two brothers who died as enemies. At one point, the local priest tried to reconcile the two brothers because one of them was on his death bed. He managed to get the healthy brother to visit the other in the spirit of reconciliation. All seemed well until the sickly brother told the other one that if he should recover, the feud was not over. He did recover from that particular ailment, so they spent the rest of their lives in disaccord.
It’s likely that I will fail to find it, too. That isn’t going to discourage me, though. I love a mystery, and one that can never be solved is even better. It reminds me of my fascination with the Secret Museum of Mankind. I was sure that with the resources available to me at the Library of Congress, I would be able to track down the author of that book. I could not. The author did not want to be found, because he was probably violating the copyrights of multiple publishers. Why copyright something that was already copyrighted, and expose himself to the risk of being sued? Failing that, I would still like to prove that it was a copyright violation by locating books or magazines from which the photographs were stolen.
This same love of a mystery made me good at my job at the National Agricultural Library. I was the queen of bibliographic searching there. The reference librarians used to say that if Julie Mangin couldn’t find it, it wasn’t in the library. One time, a well-respected USDA plant researcher, was sent to me because he need a book published in Russian in a hurry, and that the only place in the United States that had it was the Library of Congress. At that time, I supervised a man who worked full-time down at the Library, pulling books for USDA requestors. I couldn’t get him on the phone, so it might take a few days until his next visit to NAL in order to even inform him of the book to search for (this was before email or voicemail). Nevertheless, I called the scientist back later in the day to tell him that I had the book. On a hunch, I double-checked the NAL collection, even though the reference librarian already had. I found the book up in the stacks and pulled it for the patron, who was extremely grateful.
I don’t get enough of that in my work any more, so I guess I’ll just go look for the Hoodoo Marker.
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