Rambling writer sees fences falling in York County

The situation

In his walk through from northern Maryland to southern York County in 2021, Neil King Jr. found a Mason-Dixon line monument not placed by the surveyors in their 1763 to 1767 work.

He observed the invisible line running straight through the marker – a New Freedom-area farm – the barn on the Maryland side and the stone farmhouse in Pennsylvania.

In his 2023 book “American Ramble,” he wrote about the South-facing balcony on the then-vacant farmhouse: 

“You could imagine Mr. and Mrs. Krebs (former owners) standing there when the place was new and shiny. Standing there one spring morning, looking from the free part of the country into the non-free part a few feet away. The crops coming up, the trees in bloom. You wondered if they ever owned people here, and if not, if they had ever given refuge to anyone scrambling North. My guess was they had done neither as they milked their cows and tilled their fields, like the farmer in the Brueghel painting where Icarus falls unnoticed.”

His deep research into the people and places he would visit on his walk – his ramble – from Washington, D.C., to New York has earned him the standing to make the Brueghel comparison. According to a count in 1783 in York County, some Pennsylvania Germans enslaved people, but the Scots-Irish were the largest enslavers. And some of these Pennsylvania Dutch families harbored freedom seekers, but English Quakers were the most inclined to operate Underground Railroad stations.

Neil King’s budding influence on York County can be compared with that of another outsider, David Rusk, the noted urban planner who wrote three reports designed to, really, encourage county residents to think differently.

King’s writing encourages York Countians to continue the enterprise of interrogating their county’s deep past.

His observations from his 26-day, 330-mile walk that appear in “American Ramble” remind you of Kentucky farmer/philosopher Wendell Berry, who writes that many community problems today enter from the past: “And so the first right thing we must do today is to take thought of our history. We must act daily as critics of history so as to prevent, so far as we can, the evils of yesterday from infecting today.”

These links tell about the influence of Neil King’s visit and subsequent written observations about York County.

Neil King is taking in York County, a founding slice of America (ydr.com)

Strolling writer takes in York County, region at 3 miles an hour (ydr.com)

York County PA History Center new museum fuels change in storytelling (ydr.com)

York Pa.’s surrender at 160: ‘It was not York’s finest moment’ (ydr.com)

The witness

Check out other observations about York County and the people he met by the late author – he died earlier this year – in his own words:

-About King’s first in-person encounter with Samantha Dorm of the Friends of Lebanon Cemtery: “She meets me among the gravestones of Lebanon Cemetery, where I find her standing in a red knit overcoat on a hillside with a view of a Motel 6, an interchange of Interstate 83, and the spires of the city to the south. Before I know it, she’s down on one knee, pulling the thick turf back from the bronze marker of a child buried at our feet, after a few months of life, in 1954.”

The writer thus located Lebanon Cemetery, an unknown place for many county residents, in reference to the familiar Interstate 83 and Route 30 interchange and showed all readers how an area can lose touch with its people, old and young, amid chain hotels and limited-access highways.

About catching his first glimpse of the Susquehanna’s petroglyphs in company with historian Paul Nevin: “As we shimmied upriver over light chop, Big Indian Rock rose from the water like a huge gray turtle with an entire denuded tree atop its shell, left there after some recent storm. Formed of a mica schist hundreds of millions of years ago and smoothed by the river, the rock was warm to our bare feet when we stepped from the boat.”

Then he quotes Nevin: “This is the first rock the sun touches in the morning, and the last it touches when it goes. This river has been flowing around it for hundreds of millions of years.”

At just the right points, Neil is willing to interrupt his own flowing prose to let his sources paint the scene.

After meeting with Jim McClure and a discussion about York County’s 20th-century loss in memory about the Civil War and, thus, the issue of slavery that caused it: “York is in the midst of a memory boom now and is shaking off its long amnesia and is digging up and chronicling and remembering and depicting and translating into art and murals every imaginable aspect of its past, good and bad, comfortable and uncomfortable This is not a fit of nostalgia for some golden time. Quite the opposite. It is an active and aggressive confronting of the past, both the paved-over scars but also the unheralded heroes and forgotten giants. Some national version of this, I thought, would be so good for the national psyche.”

He wrote in similar terms after returning to his York quarters after meeting with York mayor and historian Michael Helfrich and learning of his passion for revolutionary Thomas Paine: “I shivered walking back to my little rented room that night along the yawning Codorus Creek. Not because of any chill but from a sense that ghosts were scampering about town. A couple of months earlier, after I’d published an essay about that field where Frederick Douglass had his famous brawl, the owner of the land nailed NO TRESPASSING signs to all the fence posts along the road, to keep away the curious. Here in York, the opposite was happening. Fences were coming down and the memories freed.”

The questions

• Neil King Jr., a Wall Street journalist, chose to walk the streets, sidewalks, and trails of York County. In fact, he walked from New Freedom to York and then to Wrightsville. Where in the county is your favorite place to take a walk?
• We frequently zoom by in our cars, rushing to our next appointment. Paul Connerton, a British anthropologist, wrote a book called “How Modernity Forgets.” He suggests the generation of Americans who grew up at the end of the twentieth century live in a state of constant movement. Our home is no longer felt with such definitive lines because we constantly purge the past and rush toward the next thing. Can you think of a time where you slowed down to take in your surroundings? How did that slowing down process feel?

Related links and sources: In York County PA Neil King wrote, fences come down, memories freed, Photos: Neil King Jr. except for James McClure’s Penn Street graffiti wall picture.