馬德拉斯普林斯 (馬里蘭州)

Notice 03-05-2025 : A Better Way to Stay Informed—Visit our refreshed website for organized, timely content at your fingertips. Recorded history of the Barren Creek area dates from the mid-1600s, when English fur traders drifted into the Nanticoke River watershed to open commerce with the native Americans living there. Maryland's 1634 charter included all that part of the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean (Delaware River) north of Virginia. Settlers moved into the lower peninsula coming north from Virginia's eastern shore and east from Virginia's Northern Neck area across the Chesapeake Bay. When William Penn in 1682 claimed the western shore of the Delaware River, it started a controversy with Maryland that would last until a boundary line for Delaware was agreed on in the mid-1700s. Native Americans living along the eastern shores of the Nanticoke River were part of the Nanticoke tribe, but locally known as the PUCKAMEE group. They fished, hunted, and raised crops, lived in long houses, and, except for one recorded massacre of a white family, were generally peaceful toward European settlers. From 1678 to 1698 a reservation was established by the colonial Assembly, stretching from the mouth of Barren Creek to near Riverton and inland to the present town of Mardela Springs, mirroring the Chicone group’s reservation on the river’s western shore. By the early 1700s most Puckamees had moved out of the area, going either north to Pennsylvania or east to the area around Millsboro, Delaware. Settlement by white families was delayed until the latter 1600s, primarily due to white fur traders' desire to avoid disruption of their dealings with Indians for beaver, deer, and fox hides. Families began patenting land in this northwestern part of Wicomico County by the 1680s, however, and early families included the Wrights, Venables, Weatherlys, Roberson/Robinsons, and Wilsons, among others. Farms were largely self-sufficient, depending on ships sailing up the River and into Barren Creek for manufactured goods from Europe and sugar from Bermuda. Both indentured servants and slaves were here, but there were few large slaveowners. They raised tobacco as a cash cop, the same ships loading hogsheads of tobacco at the wharf by the warehouse on the south bank of Barren Creek. Tobacco gave way to grain farming by the latter 1700s, and by the mid-1700s hundreds of families lived in the area, and a small village began to form on the banks of the Creek, taking the name of Barren Creek Springs. The "town with three names" grew because of four factors: the location of the tobacco warehouse, a number of water-powered grist and saw mills on the stream, the location on the major road linking county seat Princess Anne with all points north of the Nanticoke on the Eastern Shore, and the prevalence of mineral water springs. Earliest references call it Barren Creek, then Barren Creek Springs; in 1880 town leaders changed the name to Russum in honor of a local business man and resident, then back to Barren Creek Springs in 1884. Ten years later entrepreneurs in the bottled mineral water business urged another change to Mardela Springs, hoping to avoid any associations with images of a "barren" place or of water that came from “Barren Creek”. The town as a spa and tourist mecca began to evolve in the 1840s. The fame of the mineral water springs made the town a destination for national political figures and campaigns, and the Barren Creek Hotel expanded from a small inn built in the latter 1700s to a two story, then three story, hotel. Soon after the end of the Civil War a "Spring House" was built on the grounds of the hotel, near the largest spring, and guests would come to drink the "health-giving" waters and soak their feet! By the late 1800s hundreds of visitors from Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia and throughout the region flocked to the town every summer, promenading along the tree-shaded Main Street in the evening, boati