ADAMSTOWN, Md. (AP) — Time immortalizes the history makers, but what’s sometimes lost are the spaces where the events between moments in history happened.
Situated along Md. 351, southwest of Adamstown, Cooling Springs Farm is one of those places.
Whether it was the Union Army and Confederate soldiers camped on its fields or freedom seekers journeying through it on their way north — the Michael family has witnessed history unfold on their farm.
“It’s a huge privilege to live here and bring it back in the family,” said Peter Michael, the eighth generation of Michael to live on the land.
Last Thursday, Peter and his wife, Vicki, celebrated the 250th anniversary of the farm’s founding, which his fourth great-grandfather Andrew Michael settled on July 12, 1768.
Andrew Michael purchased the 340 acres in sprawling Frederick County, which encompassed all the land west of Prince George’s County at the time. He soon purchased an additional 107 acres, and the extended Michael family eventually owned more than 1,500 acres in Frederick County by Peter Michael’s estimates.
Today the farm is much smaller, just 20 acres, but it has preserved a family’s and nation’s history.
A map by Heritage Frederick — formerly known as the Frederick County Historical Society — revealed that both Union and Confederate troops camped on the farm during the course of the Civil War, Peter Michael said.
Family lore also says that the stone spring house in the valley of the property was a stop along the Underground Railroad for enslaved people escaping to freedom in the north. The freedom seekers would stay in the building along an unnamed tributary of Tuscarora Creek during the day and move on at night.
Subsequent generations of Michael children would play in that same spring, including Peter during trips to his relatives’ home on the farm. Peter’s father served in the Air Force and he grew up in places such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, Morocco and Portugal, but whenever his family returned to the states, they would travel to the farm.
“First order of business was visiting the family,” he said.
For all except 27 years, the Michael family has owned and lived on Cooling Springs Farm. Peter Michael’s great-uncle and aunt owned the home — built in 1879 by his great-great-grandparents — during his childhood. Following his great uncle’s death, however, the home left the family’s possession for the first time, until Peter and Vicki purchased it in 2001.
The real beginning of the Michael family in Frederick County, however, stretches back even further.
Franz Ludwig Michel — pronounced “mee-KEL” for its germanic roots — was a naturalist and was one of the earlier European explorers to venture into the western Maryland wilderness. In 1707, he mapped the area around the Potomac River, which included Great Falls, Sugarloaf Mountain, the Monocacy River and parts of the Appalachian range, among others.
Franz Ludwig Michel’s four sons — including Andrew — later emigrated from Bern, Switzerland, to what would become the United States of America. Andrew arrived in 1754 and married Barbara Sinn, who was the daughter of German immigrants and was baptized in the oldest church in Frederick County at the then new Evangelical Lutheran Church in downtown Frederick.
Less than 10 years after arriving in Frederick County, Andrew opened Michael Foundry on South Carroll Street in 1762 where he made iron products. The foundry pre-dates the Catoctin Furnace near Thurmont, which was opened in the 1770s by Thomas Johnson Jr., who became the first governor of Maryland.
“If you needed a horse shoe or a kettle and you didn’t want to order it from England, you went to the foundry,” Peter Michael said.
Where the story gets really interesting, however, is eight generations later with Peter Michael, who’s mother is a descendant of John Hanson.
Hanson was elected to serve as president of the Continental Congress in 1781, which was the highest office under the Articles of Confederation, which predates the Constitution. He was nominated by his peers, who were the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Ben Franklin.
His work in Frederick County, however, brought him in direct contact with the Michael family. In July 1776, the Hanson family purchased the foundry, which was no longer under Andrew Michael’s control, and took over production, Peter Michael said.
Today, the foundry is the home of Sky Stage.
Cataloguing the family’s history has been a passion of Peter Michael, who has written books on both the Hanson and Michael clans.
His most well-known book is the biography “Remembering John Hanson” that won two national book awards in biography in 2013. Peter Michael has also written books for relatives on the Michael family’s history.
One challenge with documenting the Michael family is its sheer size. Andrew Michael had eight children and his three brothers even more, which quickly expanded the family across Frederick County, Peter Michael said.
“People ask, ‘How many cousins do you have?’ and I say, ‘I don’t know,'” Peter Michael said.
But the search for facts and family members continues. Peter Michael visits the historical society’s library to review family records, and sometimes a new nugget of information appears on the internet.
In the meantime, Peter and Viciki made sure the farm itself would be a protected piece of history.
In 2007, they placed Cooling Springs Farm under an agricultural preservation easement so that it would be protected in perpetuity from development. Today they welcome visitors and school groups onto the property for tours and to share slices of history the farm helped produce.
“It’s a quarter of a millennium,” Peter Michael said. “It’s a long time.”
— SAMANTHA HOGAN, The Frederick News-Post