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[00:00:35] Announcer: Digitizing Delmarva's Heritage and Traditions. [00:00:37][2.2]

[00:00:39] Melissa Pollitt-Bright: There's a magic in Allen, and I've tried most of my life to define it without success. I have been told by people who come here from other places that they feel it. They don't know exactly what it is, but they feel it. It's a... [00:00:53][14.6]

[00:00:55] Velmar Polk Morris: Family community. It's a community where if you see a person in need, you will help them. [00:01:05][10.1]

[00:01:06] George Shivers: I think because it's an attractive place to live and it's rural and yet it's very close to Salisbury where there are certain amenities that people enjoy. [00:01:17][10.8]

[00:01:19] Melissa Pollitt-Bright: There's something very special in the community. I would presume that it has to come from the people. [00:01:26][7.7]

[00:01:27] George Shivers: The church, in both cases, I think, was a strong focus of spiritual life, but also of social life. And so a lot of the sense of community came from that. [00:01:37][10.5]

[00:01:42] Velmar Polk Morris: Who love Allen. They're not going any place else. They're at church every Sunday. And We have grown up in the church. People that are there have grown up in that church. [00:02:02][20.6]

[00:02:03] George Shivers: People got along, and people, you know, our relationships with people in the black community were very warm, I think. The only thing is that things were very, in a way, very separate. [00:02:18][14.6]

[00:02:19] Melinda Gerald: Well, I guess it doesn't make any difference whether I was, whether it's Allen or Timbuktu. Wherever I was born and reared, unless I was treated badly, I would like just the same. Of course, I like this because it's my home. [00:02:36][17.5]

[00:02:38] George Shivers: Allen grew up around the mill, the Grist Mill, which our oral history tells us was founded in 1702. And it was the Brewington, then called the Brereton family. They lived on Breretons Chance, which is a plantation across the mill dam. The mill was eventually owned by the Adams family. Reverend Alexander Adams was the second Anglican priest. At Old Green Hill Church, which was the church for all of this area. It was Stephney Parish. And in 1790, I've seen the 1790 Glass Tax Census, which indicates that the Adams family had not only the mill, but also a tavern, which the Methodists would not be happy to know, and a store or a trading post in Allen down by the mill dam. I mean, we can't claim like Salisbury to have a founding date, because we were never an incorporated community, but certainly it started with the mill. It was always, I think, a pretty much of a working class community. People were farmers or builders, or they lived on the water. A lot of the watermen who worked the water in the winter would work at the canning factory in the summer. Up until the early 20th century, I think the boats, I'm told, would come up Passerdyke Creek. And There was a canning factory there in the early 20th century, a tomato canning factory. Mr. Jesse Pollitt had an auction block beside his store in the 1920s, I believe, maybe into the 30s as well. And it said, and I think with documentation, that there were more string beans traded at the Allen block than anywhere else in the world. There were blacksmith shops, at least two that I'm aware of. There were three or four stores at any given time, general merchandise stores. There was at least one store on the Upper Ferry Road. And there was the bank store and cob store here. My grandfather, George Phillips, had a store from 1900 until his death. And then my mother ran it until 1946. So, Allen has been a booming place, but things have changed in many ways since then. Another big deal here was Allen's Orchard, there were peach orchards and apple orchards, and there were lots of, when the truck farming was the big deal, there was lots of migrant laborers who came up the coast from Florida in the summer, in fact most of my childhood playmates were the migrant workers who came up and uh... When they weren't working and I wasn't working, we had lots of fun together. In the late 50s, 60s, agriculture sort of changed, became soybeans, corn became king, not so much labor intensive. People found work in other enterprises and so that's the biggest change I think I've seen in my lifetime. My father was a farmer, my uncle Jay Shivers had a strawberry plant farm. Business and he ships strawberry plants all over the world. [00:06:00][202.6]

[00:06:03] Melinda Gerald: I'm Melinda Gerald. I was born November 3rd, 1998. I've lived at Allen a good bit of my time, but I have been away a good of my times. I had a happy childhood. My parents didn't give us things all the time, but they gave us love instead of that in their peculiar way. I went to school here up until the seventh grade. I went through Salisbury Industrial High through the third year and I left there and went to Baltimore and finished my fourth year and had to go to Howard University to finish my college training. And at that there was no transportation for black students. We had to get to high school the best way we could, but it so happened that I had distant relatives who lived in Salisbury, and I stayed with them through the third year. And then my father bought a truck, a van, or whatever you want to call it. It was just a box-shaped concern and had nothing else in it. And he built seats that went the length of the building. Wives of this truck. And we also were able to carry the other children who lived in Allen along with the two for a small fee for gas and so forth. I'm a pretty good student and was always most of the head of my class. I started school, I skipped a couple of grades somewhere along the line. And my older sister taught me, so I skipped the first grade. Thank you. One year we had a teacher from, he was a graduate of Hampton University and I don't know what was wrong with him but one year he flunked everybody in his class so I caught up with my older brother and sister who were just ahead of me so it so happened that the three of us were in the same class. That's the way we finished elementary school. We had to walk, and at first... We were walking two miles. And then after that, we moved down on the farm, the Wayland farm, I was telling you about. And then we were walkin' about three and a half miles. We had a teacher named Miss Mitchell, you may have known of her. When I first started, she was teachin' the first and second grade. And the other teacher would take the third, fourth, and fifth grades, and she taught the sixth and seventh grade. That's the way it was arranged. And she was in the same room. She didn't go over the room to teach the higher grades. They would come to her. I know Miss Mitchell, when she was there, she lived right, there was a house right next door to the school, and then she lived there for years. Most of them boarded right near somebody who lived near the school. There were no meetings after school. Because the term ran from nine o'clock to four. You get in to four o' clock and in the wintertime it's dark almost when we got out of school. We had books that we could carry home, but of course it was usually the books that the white children had used. We got the scrap left. Charles Chipman was principal of, at that time, It was called Industrial High School, and for several years he was there. And he was a very strict person. Yet we were able to appreciate this after we had finished because we didn't want somebody to be giving us something that we hadn't earned. In case it didn't act right, well, the old switch was around. Not only one, they had plenty, so... They would use it. There was a section of Salisbury where on Saturday nights everybody hung out, and there was the dance halls and all that sort of thing, and he would sneak around and hide and see if any of these students were, you know, was attending. And he'd come back to school the next morning. And he knew that I wasn't there, because we never did. We lived too far away, anyhow. We never did go town on Saturday night. And he would come in and look right down at me, Melinda Polk. And here I'd be ready to jump out of my boots. And then he'd start this great long tale about what happened on Saturday nights and so forth and on. And we were just scared to death of him. And he had an old paddle, he called old Maryland. And he'd walk down the aisle with this old paddle. He never hit anybody with the paddle, but we never knew what he was gonna do with this little old Maryland, we didn't live near many people, we lived what we called down the neck. And my father worked for this Mr. Whalen that I mentioned. As a day laborer, I think I told you that he was getting a dollar a day for his work. And it was mostly work on the farm. And of course, children did their share of work, too. We would begin in the early spring. We'd pick strawberries, string beans, lima beans, tomatoes, and whatever else needed to be done. And the money most of the time that we made was to go for school clothes. Well, very often, the children carried the lunch with them. And I remember at one time, when the weather was real cold, they used to have a pot on this big stove, and they would have things like beans and peas and all like that. And they would, you know, have that to help the children. And some children wouldn't have any lunch, I guess the poorer ones, and they It would help them along, because we didn't get outside of Allen, not until I went away to school. But so far as recreation is concerned, I was reared with brothers, and whatever the others did I did. We pitched horseshoes, climbed trees, rode bicycles and... Well, I did everything but ride horses. We had horses, but I was afraid of them, so I didn't ride the horses along with them. When I was six years old, I first started the first day of school, the day before school. I had this little ear of corn, about this long, I suppose, feeding the horse. Stuck my finger in the horse's mouth, this fingernail, he just crushed it. And that's the way I started school with this sore finger. And after that, I was sort of afraid of horses. We didn't have things. We had the love and care of our parents. They, it seems as though sometimes they loved us in a peculiar way. I'll never forget one time our nephew was living with us and he had a great big safety pin and he was about two years old and I suppose I was about nine or 10. I was trying to get this pin away from him and he was hollering his head off. And my father thought I was teasing him. And he just came up behind me and took hold of my hand and just... And that's the first and only time that he ever hit me. But he never apologized when I explained to him why I was trying to get what I was doing. And I thought he should have. And I'll never forget that. He never apologized or said, well, I'm sorry, I spanked you. So he just left it there. And I thought that he should have said something to me because I wasn't at fault. I do remember this, that you remember about the fishing. About the only time that my father ever, well, as I started to say, acted like a father, was usually on. Fourth of July or some holiday, he'd take us fishing. And another thing that we used to do, there used to be huckleberries growing all around in the woods and sometimes, either my father or my mother would take us huckleberry and that was sort of an activity that we enjoyed because they would go ahead of us and pick up, find a nice big bush with huckle berries on it and then call us and we'd be. They'd go find another one, and that was part of our food, too, because the huckleberries were canned for food in the winter, and you were asking, I think, a few minutes ago about how we lived. For the most part, we had hogs, chickens, and my father used to have at least three Three hogs! And that would supply us with food for almost a year. And chickens, and we got to the point where we could sell the eggs, if we had a lot of them, take them out to the store, and were able to buy our groceries that we needed for the week. Plus, we might have something left over. If the children needed a new pair of stockings, we could have enough to buy them stockings or whatever. I didn't experience electric lights until I guess I was grown. Because all down the fair roads in that area and in other places where we lived, after I had started in the ministry with my husband, up in Kent County, Maryland, up near Chester There was no electricity, we just had oil lamps for light. The ice man came by every other day to bring us ice and put in these little refrigerators. We didn't call them refrigerators, ice boxes. But since we didn't know, we had never experienced anything else, well it didn't bother us because we had nothing to compare it with. We didn't t know any difference. We thought it ought to be like that. Because I don't know we somehow thought that the white people were superior to us until we began to go to high school. I remember there was a bus for the white children that started down there at the dividing line between Somerset and Wicomico County that took the white to high-school. It came right by this road. And um... We couldn't. Although it may have passed, I wasn't living up this area, but there were some people living, some black folks living on this road that they could have picked up, but none of them were able to ride on this bus. It didn't bother us because seemingly we thought, up until that time, we thought that, seemingly that's the way it should be because we didn't know any other way. And for instance, when Christmas came and... The white children got better toys than we did. We'd say, well, there's a white Santa Claus and a black Santa Claus. He didn't have as much money to spend on the children. There used to be a campground out over there near the river. And my mother used to go down and cook for them during the week service that they had down there. But she worked like. Just like we did sometimes. She would work in the fields picking beans. And sometime at one point, I know she used to do washing for the white people and she wasn't employed every day. She was home part-time. They had camp meetings here. Every church would have a special Sunday during the year. They would start like something in June and run up until about September. Different churches, they knew where they were going to have camp meeting this Sunday. For a while, there was two or three little stores. It was one down near the Wicomico River community called Trinity. I don't know why they called it that. There was a little store. Then on the Wayland farm. It was the largest store where we could get old things like kerosene and toilet soap and hake fish and cheese and that type thing. And then later on there was this larger store at Allen. The building is still there down just where the two counties meet. There's a creek that runs between them and that building is, I think you showed it to me on one of those That store is still there. I don't know whether they use it for a store or whether they use it or a dwelling house. And my husband was in World War I, because he was much older than I was. He didn't go into actual combat, but the war was just about over when he um. And you remember that the first draft was 21 to 31. And then the second draft was from 18 to 45, and he had just reached 18. And the only thing that he did after he was employed was to help clean up the old camps where the people were living. He was never in actual combat. Food was rationed. Shoes. Sugar, flour, these things were rationed, and you didn't get flour, you got cornmeal. So we would have hotcakes made out of cornmeal for breakfast, for dinner we would have a cornbread, the pommes, you know, and then for supper we would have muffins. So. So, we had car-car-ridden street barns. And I know in World War II you couldn't get gasoline. My husband at that time was a district superintendent in the Dover district and one of the influential men, the doctor in Dover, went to the board and spoke to them and told them the obligations that my husband had so he was able to get more gas. It was a rural community. Everybody walked everywhere they went, for the most part. Right across the way, then, there was the White Church. And some of our people lived on the other side of the White Church, on what they call now Collins Wharf Road. They had to pass way by the White Church to get to our church. But, of course, that was before. Well, even now, they don't visit. You're not completely... Uh... Integrated now so far as the churches are concerned they'd always been there they were born there too My paternal grandmother was part Indian, and I don't know about my grandfather. He was quite so much older than she was. I only had one grandparent, that was my father's mother. The others had died earlier. But as far as I know, most of them were born right there. I never heard them say anything about the slave. I know my father's mother was not a slave, but the others, I don't know. When my husband retired from the ministry and we had decided where we were going to live, we thought about Philadelphia because we had served in Philadelphia, and then I thought about all these. Problems they were having up there at the time, and I thought about living in Dover because we had lived there for six years. And then I said, well, I'm going home. And we bought this piece of land here and built our house, and we just love it here. Well, I have lived a good life, and I think one of the things... I could advise people is to live a good life, is to do the right thing by other people. There are times when people sometimes see that a person's prospering, they'll step in and my husband used to say, step on their neck, you know, keep them from climbing up. But I think if we could tell everybody to when you see somebody who's trying to do something, to help them all the way that you can to. Get to the top of what they're doing. If the parents, when we were coming up, if they said, don't do that, we didn't do it. But I think some of these children today, they would sneak around and do it in spite of the fact, hoping they won't get caught. Not all of them, but some of them. But they're not all dead, there's still hope for them. You remember George Williams? Uncle George, his wife was my father's sister. And he was one of the great prayer meeting people. And when they had prayer meeting, they had certain people that would go in, put in the verses, you know. And so I heard my father say that... Certain persons that they didn't call on They would be kind of provoked and they would be it on campground You know in dirt and sand it would kick up the sand in the other person's face So, I don't know whether it was true or not, but anyhow. [00:27:01][1258.3]

[00:27:04] George Shivers: Well, I grew up in Allen. I was born in 1943, and grew up here until I went away to college, and then after that, eventually, after all my studies were completed, I began teaching at Washington College, teaching Spanish. But I always kept sort of one foot here. I spent the summers here. And after my parents passed away, we, the family, kept the home place. That had been built by my grandparents, Shivers' grandparents. And we continue to do that, and we spend, now that I'm retired, we spend about half the time here and half the in Chester Town. Haven't quite, can't make up my mind where I want to be, I guess. As long as I can manage it, I'll be in both. Luther Payne, who's a cousin, as almost everybody is in one way or another, had a boat yard down on the Wicomico Creek. Which was a big business, he also had horse races, race horses at one point. And so there have been lots of things going on. Now, Allen is more, I guess, we still have some of the old time natives, but there are a lot of newcomers and there are lot of, it's become more of a bedroom community for people who work in Salisbury or elsewhere. And we no longer have the business life that we once had, but we have. A real active social life through the two churches and through the Lions Club and through the volunteer fire department. The fire department grew out of a tragic fire that we had in 1970 or 71, I believe, and actually David Cobb Jr. Was instrumental in getting the volunteer department going and it's now a major, major operation. After I was three years old when we left my grandfather's maternal grandfather's store and moved to my paternal grandfather's farm. So I grew up on a farm and as all farmers' children I had chores. It was my job. We still had wood stoves, I brought in the wood to fill the wood box and I fed the chickens and I helped to feed the cattle and I mowed the lawn and so I had lots of chores but there was lots of times to have fun, as I said, in the summer. I enjoyed playing with the migrant laborer children who came up. And then they're my village friends. I spent a lot of time with. People that I grew up with at my own age. We played games. There was a lot more freedom, I think, for kids back then than I have the impression there are now. I mean, I can remember, you know, with my friends going off in the swamp and exploring. And it seemed like we were walking through the jungle. Now I go back to the same location, and it's very small, relatively. But we were able to do. To ride our bicycles and go places, or to walk out to the village, there weren't as many restrictions. I don't think parents needed to be as afraid back then as they maybe are now, and their television was just coming along. We got television when I was about 10 or 11, and I did all the, you know, I watched all the shows, I Love Lucy and all the other shows that people watched back then. But television wasn't a big deal. And when the weather was good, most of the time, we were outside. I read a lot. My mother took me to the Bookmobile, which came to the post office every couple weeks, I think. And we always got books. So I grew up enjoying reading. And that's probably why I became interested in an academic career, eventually. Originally, there had been the two schools in Allen. And of course, Allen, like every place else, in the. South was segregated in those days. And there was the black school out on the Upper Ferry Road. And there a white school here in the village, which is now the community hall, up until 1937, I think. And then students from here started going to Fruitland School, elementary school. So that's where I went. I think the African-American school closed in 1955. And students went to Fruitland. Throughout my, I graduated from high school at Wicomico High School in 1961. And so, although the Brown versus the Board of Education had happened seven years before that, it really hadn't, that awareness, that consciousness hadn't hit the eastern shore yet. I live in Chestertown now in Kent County, which has the dubious fame of being the last. County in the United States to integrate its schools, but I don't think Wicomico County was very much before that. I think my younger sister graduated in 1967, and I don't remember if the schools were integrated by then or not, but my education was entirely in Fruitland, and all the children from Allen went there to elementary school, and then to Wicomic junior high and Wicomico Senior High. I have very fond memories of going to school in Fruitland, very good teachers, and my mother was very active in the PTA, or both my parents, but especially my mother, and she was often a homeroom mother. I don't know if they still have homerooms mothers or not. It was on the whole good, but as I say, I remember, in terms of race relations, I remember... As a small child with my African-American playmates, one day asking them if they wanted to go to the movies with me in Salisbury. And that was the first time I really had it come to my consciousness that they said, well, if they went to the movie with me, they would have to sit in the balcony. And either that or the go to All Black Theater, which was the Ritz Theater back in those days in West Main Street. So that was sort of my first awareness, but I didn't become really too much aware of the civil rights movement until I went to college. I went to college at American University in 1961 and then became much more conscious and much more aware. We still have two separate churches but now in recent years, I remember I started back in the seventies I think when Reverend Curtis Smith was serving at this church and he began to work with, I think it was Reverend Wallace at to have joint services from time to time. And that worked very well for a time, and then he left. And last year, the two churches exchanged hymnsings, one here and one there, and they were very well attended by both communities. And I think everyone had a great time. So I think the separateness has begun to change. I understand there are white folks now living on the Upper Ferry Road, and there are African-American folks now living over here, so. So things have changed in that regard too. But even back then, I didn't have the sense that there was animosity. I can only speak from my side of the track, of course. There was a lot of interrelationship across racial lines. Mrs. Darepoke Gunther had worked for my family. She had her own farm and raised four children as a single mother. But she had worked for my family from the time my older brother, who's now 76, was born down at the store, at my grandfather's store, and right up until the time she retired from working. And I think for half the white children in this community, maybe more than half the white children of this community. She was an adopted mother or grandmother, I mean, everyone just loved her and she Yeah. She was a permanent fixture at the church dinners here. She was the prized friar of oysters and chicken in the community. It is a small community. So by necessity, you know each other, even now with newcomers. You soon get to know everybody. The church is still central, but there are a lot of people, of course, who live in the communities now who don't belong to this church. But other organizations like the Lions Club and the Fire department. Helped to maintain the sense of community. All of those things, I think, contribute to it. And I think they're just very special people who've lived here, people who've cared about each other and who've, you know, when I was growing up, people visited even much more than they do now. Every, you now, then mothers didn't work outside the home, so Christmas, I can remember from Christmas Day all the way through New Year's Day, it was just a constant round of visits. People visited each other's homes. They oohed and aahed over each other gifts. They shared each other's cookies. But there were lots of organizations. There was in my research, I found that there was a, going way back, there was Cotillion club. They had dances on the second floor of one of the Allen store building. There was a sewing circle. There were the homemakers. There the couples club. People in the winter, when the farmers weren't working, they had card parties. So there was a lot of social life that kept things going and kept people integrated, and even though that integration didn't cross racial lines until recently, I'm sure the same thing goes for the Allen community and the upper Ferry Road. It was, as I say, founded by the Brereton or Brewington family. In fact, the community for a long time through the 18th Center was known as Brereten. And then in the late... 18Th century, it became known as the trap or upper trap, and trap referred to the mill. And then in 1883 or 1884, it was changed to Allen to avoid confusion for the postal department because there were too many traps. And so they named it after the postmaster at that time, who was Joseph Stuart Allen. But the mill was in constant service, as far as I know, from 1702 until 1919. The last miller was Mr. Beverly Hitch, who lived in New York City, and he was a very actually built a new home, which it still stands, it's Allendale Cottage. He built that in 1920, the year after the old mill was torn down. What caused it was the dam, there was a bad storm and the dam washed out and after that they just they closed the mill and tore it down. But some of the foundation stones, they weren't bricks, they were actually stones that were probably ship ballast from the 18th century, were used in the foundation of his new house as well as some of the choices. So he transferred to his new house. And also there's Bounds Garage, which still stands across the way, which Norris Howard owns now. And that was Ralph Bounds' car garage in the early part of the century. A lot of that was built from stuff taken from the old mill. So the old Mill lives on in other forms. But it was a real focus of commercial life. And local people had their flour and corn ground there for... For their own use as well as for feeding their animals. Allen has never had any government of any kind. It's sort of operated through the churches and through the clubs. We had a local citizen, Mr. Jesse Pollard, who was sheriff of Wicomico County for many years in the 40s and 50s, I think. But he served Wicomic County, not Allen. I'm not aware of any, I mean there have been crimes, you know, there were, as I heard growing up about a couple murders that took place maybe in the 40s and the 50s, but they were, you know they were handled by the local authorities. Community is in two counties as a result of that changeover, and you know there, on the other side of the pond we still have people that we considered Allenites, but In terms of governance, I don't think so. I mean, if you go all the way back to the late 1600s, William Brereton was, in fact, a high sheriff of Somerset County at that time. And he lived here. And it was his family that started the mill. I think it was a son who started the. We've somehow managed to survive for three centuries without any official government. I love the people. Most of us are relatives of one distantly. We have lots of newcomers now, of course, and the newcomers, it seems like it as much as we do. [00:40:21][797.4]

[00:40:23] Velmar Polk Morris: I was born right here in Allen. I came 1935, the youngest of eight children, two passed during infancy. My parents were Ulysses and Velmar Dorman Polk. I've been in Allen most of my life. I'm a graduate of Salisbury High School. As a matter of fact, my class was the last class to graduate from the Salisberry High School located on Lake Street. And we just celebrated our 55th reunion. Well, my mother used to work in the canning factory and do domestic work. My father worked on a farm. He had a farm, the main farm was not located where the home place was. I lived in the homeplace, we did, and then we would go down to the farm to do the farm work. I have lived in Allen. Most of my life, most of my life. And now I am between two places. But Allen is still my home. I still attend church here and everything. And I'm involved in a lot of things. It was always a welcome center And I grew up there from the time I guess when I was an infant because I always remember being in Friendship Church. That church is home for most of the people who are attending it today. I would say it has a great influence. I can see a decline in the membership, but still, some have moved away, come back home. Some have been there all of their life, never moved away. Some of the people who were there, there was a lady, Mrs. Mary Joyce, and she did a lot to help the children. And there were other people. My cousin, Conrad Williams, he was a helpful person. And I knew that if I would go to church, even after my parents. It was something I was supposed to do, not just go, because the church is there. But I knew I had to go to church when I was young, and it's something that grew up as a part of me. Well, when I a child, I knew that this church was here. There was nothing on my mind saying anything about coming to this church. I don't think I came to this Church probably maybe seven or eight years ago might've been my first time. I grew up in friendship and it was just a part of me. I never thought about coming to this one. I knew that one was there, had relatives. We'd go to their house and play. There were only certain houses. My mother wouldn't let me just go to every house in Allen. There were certain houses, I went over to my grandparents' house because I had cousins there. When I came home from college during my break. Well, we went to Salisbury. We went to Ritz Theater in Salisburry. I can't remember what year, but as the years moved along, a cousin of mine built a tavern. And we would go down there not to drink, but just to listen to the music, dance, and socialize, to talk. And then... Those times. We have sponsored church functions, other activities in the community and we've attended those. There were fashion shows, dinners, musical programs and so forth and Just like now we have a church. Anniversaries where there's a lot of singing. We have groups coming from other churches and worshiping with us. We go places as result of the church. So those are basically the type of things that we have today. I remember when before I got married my husband asked me, Who did you ever go with in L? I said no one. I'm related to everyone. There was no one for me to go with. Most, I would say 99% of the people in Allen are Polks. P-O-L-K. Their last name might not be Polk because their mother married someone else. Polk blood is there. It's a family community. They love each other. They will do things for each other, although mostly everybody tries to do things by themselves. We mostly had upper Ferry Road. And like someone was saying, now there are whites living on upper Ferry Road. And African Americans are living back here in this section. Years ago, that would never happen. My neighbor, Naaman King, was a school bus contractor. After his time, his brother, Linley King, became a contractor. And my brother and his son. And of course, my brother and his son are still Wicomico County school bus contractors. And they transported the children to school. They rode all of the children. They were not segregated because schools were integrated and they carried the children to fruit and school. I think that brought... The younger people closer together. With some of the older ones, you could still see a little friction. But when you've been used to something, you've been used it, and it takes time to integrate. Things are better today than they were when I was a little girl. There is more. Of a togetherness. You live in your house, I live in my house as long as you don't harm the other person. I have not heard of any disturbance in Allen since integration. I think It's nice that Asbury and friendship get together. During the year and because this is the first place where you should see a change in the church. If you're not going to change in a church, then there's not going to be a change anyplace else and I'm glad to see that. Allen's a pretty nice community and it has grown and I'd like to see it. Continued to grow for the welfare of the people, not just one or two people, but for us to be together, you know, the togetherness. Some years ago, before Friendship Church was built, which was built in about 1877, the African Americans worshiped here at Asbury United Methodist Church. They worshiped in the balcony. This was not what the white settlers wanted to happen because the slaves were too emotional for them. They were clapping their hands, stomping their feet, shouting, and they felt that this was just too much noise, too emotional. So, one. Farmer gave his old sheep barn for the people to worship in. This was quite a long walk for those people who lived on what was called Old Knights Road. Today it's up a ferry road but it was Old Knights road. So finally Rufus Fields gave line for Friendship Church. To be built and this gave them a free method of worshiping the way they wanted to worship as long as they wanted worship and they were all in the area where they stayed. We had some slaves. One especially Mr. Bill Dennis. His wife was Elizabeth Dennis. They had, one son was Herman Dennis. Mr. Bill Dennis lived right on Upper Ferry Road, our old nice road at that time. And he and his wife presented themselves the way that they felt comfortable in doing. Mr. Bill Dennis was the main slave that we knew of, because at that time, there were still other communities. Those African Americans who were surviving at that time fought and made the way clear for us today. I don't know what Mr. Bill Dennis did. I don't know what his wife did, but they did something. And opened the path for us. I remember those old slaves. I remember them very well. I think Mr. Bill was about 101, I can't exactly call. His son, Herman Dennis, was a teacher at Salisbury High School. He went to college in Virginia. He left from Allen with one dollar in his pocket. He caught rides down to that college. And he finished his education and came back up here at home to teach. That was very outstanding, I would say. I would save that everybody. Appreciated him and they respected him and all of that. They are buried right out at the Friendship Cemetery today. I never heard anyone say anything bad about him, because they knew what he had gone through. My grandfather, Thomas Polk, was a Buffalo soldier, and as far as I know, he is the only one from Allen, the only original one, I should say. It started in about 1866. And the reason it started, during those days, the army was segregated. And the white settlers wanted to drive the Indians out of the Midwest, Oklahoma and that area. And what they did, they got the Buffalo soldiers to go in. And chase the Indians out. My grandfather spent 1882 to 1887, five years, and at September he went right back in 1887 to 1892. He was definitely a true Buffalo soldier. [00:55:43][919.9]

[00:55:46] Melissa Pollitt-Bright: I was born in 1956. I've lived in Allen all my life. I went away to college, and when I was first married, my husband was in the Marine Corps, and so we were gone for a little while while he finished his active duty. But other than that, I've live in Allen my life, and in fact, I am now back in the home where I grew up, which is on land that was part of the old family farm since at least 1848. So, my family on both sides, well, on the side Both sides of my father's family have deep, deep roots in this area. One of my cousins used to say, because we started out in the area north of Princess Anne, that it had taken us 300 years to get 10 miles up the road. And I'm not furthering that much. So I'm just here, and I live across the street from the cemetery, so the only move I have planned is when they move me across the streets. That'll be my final move. I've even had real estate appraisers tell me that when they do comparables and appraise properties in Allen, because it's in Allen they tack on 15%. So there's value here. We tend to grow people who care about community and about the community at large. We had a conversation just a little while ago about the fact that Allen has produced in the last 50 years a county sheriff. A judge who was appointed not only to the circuit court in Wicomico County, but also to the Court of Special Appeals, the second highest court in the state. An orphans court judge, which is a much smaller position. The town manager of the city of Fruitland for 22 years, who is now the first county executive for Wicomo County, and the current mayor of Salisbury, who's been mayor for the last 10 years, was raised in Allen. So I think there's a spirit here of of giving back, a feeling of belonging to community, initially the community of Allen, but taking that outward as well, and a sense of obligation to give back and to be part of what makes society work. That sounds kinda uppity, but that's the way it is. Growing up in Allen was a privilege, and I'm very. Blessed that i was able to raise my daughter and Allen as well We had a lot of freedom growing up in a small village. We were able to ride our bicycles within our parents would set parameters, and we needed to stay within those parameters. But your parents didn't need to have their eyes on you every moment of the day, because it was a much less dangerous world. We rode our bicycles. We visited back and forth from house to house. We were required to check in certain times of the day, and I know in my case, my mother. Insisted that I not eat elsewhere because she was afraid it would spoil my appetite for dinner and that sort of thing, but we had a great deal of freedom. We spent a lot of time sitting in trees watching the world go by, both the man-made world and the natural world. We spend a lot of time exploring. One thing that made Allen very special and contributed to our upbringing was that all of us in my generation knew with a certainty that we were accountable to every adult in the village. Any adult could call you down if they perceived that you were misbehaving. And they would speak to your parents about it. There was no doubt whatsoever. So we had tremendous respect for everyone in the village. And we felt as though our neighbors were our aunts and uncles. Now, in many cases, they were actually distant cousins. But We always felt like almost everyone were aunts and uncles. And I was very glad to hear when my daughter was graduating from high school, she and some of her friends were having a conversation that I overheard, and they felt the same thing. And then a few years ago, there was a public safety meeting. Allen, as has been discussed in other contexts, Has a history of being sort of two towns, which sometimes come together. There was a public safety meeting where the African-American community and the white community met together to discuss a particular issue. And at that time, members of the African American community said the same thing, that they felt like growing up they were accountable to all of the adults within their neighborhood and their community. And then a guidance counselor from one of the middle schools in Salisbury, where a lot of our children have gone to school, said that, by and large, the kids from Allen keep their noses clean and do well in school. So that was all very gratifying and very validating. And it just served to reinforce what I felt growing up in Allen. There were definitely two communities in Allen, there was not a feeling of animosity, of which I had any awareness at all. I don't. To this day, I don't believe it existed. I hope it didn't. It was not part of my life. There was respect. There was genuine friendship between the two communities. But there was a line in those days. And people didn't talk about the line. Everybody just sort of knew where it was. I had the sense that members of both communities would be there to help one another if the need arose. Absent a need, they would live their lives separately. They would be friendly. They did business together. They worked together. They didn't socialize together. And there didn't seem to be any real ambition that was visible to me at any rate. And maybe I was very sheltered. But there didn't t seem to a real ambition to do away with that line for any kind of artificial reason. There there was It's really hard to explain when you didn't grow up with it. People have often said to me, oh, well, you live in a small town. Everybody knows everybody's business, don't they? And that's not true here. I grew up knowing that I could call on almost anyone who lived in this community if I needed help. But nobody was trying to see what I was up to. And I wasn't trying to what anybody else was up too. Except for when we had party lines on the telephone. And then that was kind of fun. But when they were gone, that was the end of that nosiness. And we have, by and large, let each other live our lives, whether it's our next door neighbor or our neighbors on the next road. But I think there's a sense that you can count on one another. If the chips are down, the people will be there. Family has lots of different definitions, especially these days. But when you grow up... In a community where people, generations before you, have grown up and married among the neighbors, then everybody's a relation and everybody has ties to one another and so you just have this sense of extended family and of belonging and of everybody being part of the same thing. In the Upper Ferry Road community and the African American community of Allen, that there's so many people who are all part of the extended families. And so I think it must be a very similar thing. And then I think, too, because families have tended to stay here, the African-American families and the white families, who are what we'll call, for lack of a better term, the older families in the community, have known each other for many, many generations. And so they're friends and neighbors. And we might not spend a lot of time together. We might not be socializing. Um... Over the the years and even over the last couple of centuries but there was still that that knowledge of whose children were who's who belong to which family and and who your grandfather was and child you better not be doing that because i know your mother wouldn't like that i mean it's it's that way all the way around the community i think there's so much development in the county and Allen is not immune to that A great deal of what used to be farmland in my childhood is now. Covered over with houses. And that has its downside, particularly for someone who would like it to always be the idyllic place that it was. But that's a good thing, because if you don't have growth, you die. And there are many, many other little communities not very far from us. Siloam comes to mind. It's a small community down by the ferry on the river, up by a periphery. There are many, many people who live in Siloam now that do not know they live in siloam, because their mailing address is Eden or Salisbury. And so the church has basically, there's a new church there now, but the church that was there for 100 and some years had closed, the store had burned down, and the sense of community was lost. Allen has been blessed in that we have retained a sense of a community. And even with an influx of new neighbors, there is still that sense of the community. End. A real effort on the part of the people who have been here longer to welcome people and to invite them to be part of the things that go on in Allen. And there's so much that goes on in this community. We have dinners, we have parades, we have functions going on all the time. And all of that helps build a sense of community because people are working together for the common good. As a child, as I mentioned, we rode bicycles. We hiked in the woods a lot. Pretending to be on all sorts of adventures, Lewis and Clark type things, or cabins in the jungle, or something like that. In the wintertime, particularly, we used to ice skate. The pond used to freeze over, and it was a wonderful thing to come home from school, eat dinner as fast as you could, finish your homework, and then run down to the pond with your skates slung over your shoulder. And you get down there, sit down, and put your skats on. In those days, some of the men would start a fire on the bank so that people could come and warm up, and also for light. And we didn't know you weren't supposed to burn old tires. So we burned old tires after the fire got burning, because they burned all night and gave lots of light and heat. And we know it stunk, but we didn't know it was ecologically poisonous. We don't do it anymore. But then the pond doesn't freeze over anymore. So maybe we burned too many tires. I don't know. But that used to be a lot of fun. And you'd go down and. And skate, and if you didn't know how to skate, sometimes you take a peach basket or a chair and push it around on the ice until you learned how to ski. People ask all the time what the population of Allen is, and the truth is we don't know. We've never been incorporated, we've never had any municipal government, so we've never had boundaries. We don't really know where Allen stops or starts. So without a line of demarcation, it's more a state of mind. To be a citizen of Allen, one only has to claim it as one's own. [01:07:09][682.8]

[01:07:11] George Shivers: There is always something going on, sometimes too much. And I guess the family connection is a big part of what has kept me here. And I've discovered I've become more and more interested in the local history as it went beyond my family history. Done a lot of research. I've perused the old newspapers, the Allen News columns, and found out about a lot of the people from the past. Away. In a way, I feel like I know some of the people from the past almost as well as I know the people who currently live here. We and I and another group of people from communities founded the Historical Society back in 1995-96, and the idea was to do as much as we could to preserve that history and to see that the newcomers learned about the history. And that's what we've found. Been trying to accomplish through our own museum, our newsletter, some publications that we've done. We were able to get historical markers for this church and for Friendship Church as well as the site of the Allen Mill. Those were back in the year 2000. We got them through the Maryland 2000 project. Allen is the closest thing to heaven that that I think we can find on Earth. [01:07:11][0.0][3969.5]