MAIN STREET
Shepherdstown, West Virginia as a Microcosm for Small-town
America During the Great War
By Justin Snead
Author Justin Snead [L.] Shaking Hands Award Panel Chairman Paul Cora
It was a quiet dawn in Shepherdstown on June 28, 1914, subtle as any Sunday morning began on that gentle plateau between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River Valley. Wispy blankets of fog rose off the glass smooth Potomac and crouched about the highest points in town-the spires of the Episcopal church on German Street and the Lutheran church on High Street, and the clock tower of Shepherd College's Reynolds Hall-before fading thinner and thinner in the coming heat of day. The river ran high due to two summer thunderstorms that rolled across the panhandle the previous week. On Monday lightening burnt out twenty-one of the town's fifty-eight incandescent streetlights. Fierce winds also took down the large poplar tree on Mr. J.S. Bragoiner's New Street property.
All in all the weather that week was sublime and representative of the summer season across the country. Temperatures averaged around "what the ice man likes!" at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Reinhart Brothers grocer on German Street turned profits selling "ice-cold grapefruits, oranges, lemons, bananas, pineapples, 'lopes and watermelons." The windows of the clothing shops showcased all the latest summer fashions, one year behind the window shops of nearby Baltimore or New York City of course. The Opera House got a new "moving picture", Bunyan's religious vision drama Pilgrim's Progress, "a stupendous masterpiece production in four parts, fifty sublime scenes, lasting two hours." The cost was five or ten cents per ticket, depending on the seating. Baseball fervor was thicker in the air than the humidity. Shepherdstown's team beat the Martinsburg White Sox 6 to 3 in the previous Saturday's home game. The Sox were "shut out until the 8th inning, when a three bagger with the basses full brought in three runs." An exciting game. Most townsfolk woke that fateful morning with the sun and the cock's crow and readied themselves for church. They were looking forward to the open-air service on the lawn of Reynolds's Hall to be held that evening at 6:30. The previous Sunday's out-of-doors service was a great success with several hundred persons present. Every seat was filled and "scores of persons sat upon the steps of the portico or upon the wall, while the children sat upon the grass." Chicken salad, ham sandwiches, coffee, ice cream, cakes and candies were to be sold. A choir of town singers was to lead the hymns. Another blissful summer afternoon.
The pistol report that slew the thrown-heir of Austria-Hungary that Sunday afternoon in late June 1914 was scarcely noticed in the capitals of Europe, only a faint echo upon reaching Washington, and in the rest of America, from Shepherdstown, West Virginia to Omaha, Nebraska and Russell, Kansas to Mendocino, California, that shot had to be explained one month later as a matter of some significance. But even when the myriad empires were gearing for war, even after the initial campaigns did common Americans really grasp the causes for the Great War and the reasons it was fought? If a contemporary observer were to travel back in time to that summer and sit on the curb benches in the shade of German Street's Cherry Trees or lounge with the parishioners after the open-air services or pull up a bar stool at Sheetz's Tavern would they hear articulate talk of Serbian revolutionaries and Austria-Hungarian nationalism, German "kultur" and French élan? Did the limited media that reached these small-town rural Americans distinctively and accurately convey what it was like to be a citizen of a European state in a time of devastating war?
The street corner in Belgrade where Gavrilo Princip drew his pistol might just as well have been a crater on the Moon. Europe was three thousand miles across an ocean, a kind of fairytale land ruled by kings and queens and protected by armies of men in elaborate costumes that marched dutifully to the battlefield like little tin soldiers. General upheaval-economic, social, political or otherwise-reigned over this place. Constant war with brief intermissions seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. The Balkan Peninsula had been a battleground for almost a millennium; major crises had erupted there each year since 1907 and two wars since 1912 leading up to that fateful shot on June 28, 1914. This line taken from an article in the Wabash, Indiana Plain Dealer after the war broke captures American sentiments toward Europe: "We never appreciated so keenly as now the foresight exercised by our fathers in immigrating to America."
Early in the twentieth century seventy-five percent of the United States population lived in rural America. They were farmers, herders, smithies, churchmen and schoolmarms, grocers, shopkeepers, clerks and barkeeps. They understood work ethic. They built and maintained their lives with their bare hands, repairing the roofs over their houses, building farms, utilizing their own animals for food, clothing, agriculture and transportation. They understood democracy and fulfilled their civic duties. They were as idealistic as the president they elected in 1912 and wholeheartedly supported for eight years. A belief in the progress of science is evident on every page of local newspapers where pharmacy advertisements for drugs and tonics abound, heralding an end to almost all sickness-"just try our Cod Liver Oil and Iron Tonic as a body-builder and strength creator for weak, run-down people… and for chronic coughs, colds, bronchitis or pulmonary troubles we ask you to try Vinol… For pimples and blotches try our Saxo Salve. We guarantee it!" Despite the small-town's distance from any major scientific research there was a genuine scientific curiosity in these places. On the front page of the June 18, 1914 issue of The Shepherdstown Register, in an article titled "Why Do Stars Shoot?" the writer explains "every world and sun attracts everything near it by virtue of the wonderful force known as gravitation." They also understood faith, packing the churches during a service and taking their religion home with them afterwards. Strong dependency on the local community with little or no outside aid tended to create a feel of isolation in these small towns; the neighboring county was sometimes as far removed from local sentiments as Flanders or Gallipoli. Their concerns, hopes and prayers were directed first toward their homes, secondly toward their country; as for the rest of the world-they never appreciated so keenly as during the Great War the foresight exercised by their fathers in immigrating to America. The people of rural United States were the essence of Americanism.
June 28 came and passed, as did the following week and the following month and there was no mention of the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand by a Russian-subsidized Serbian terrorist group in any of the local Jefferson County newspapers. There would not be any mention in these papers of any trouble whatsoever brewing abroad until war was declared. But the editor and publisher of The Shepherdstown Register, Mr. Snyder, did place this poem by Alicia Van Buren in the top left corner of the front page of the 2 July issue:
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Fireflies
Above a meadow near the river shore, Upon a summer evening still and warm, I saw a multitude of fireflies swarm, And each its tiny, twinkling lantern bore. And as the night drew darker each pale flame, Of azure, opal and of topaz hue, Began to brighten, and still brighter grew- Till suddenly a sweeping windstorm came! The great trees bent, the dead twigs stung my face, The driven leaves made tumult on the ground; The little, living lamps in darkness drowned, Were swept into the black abyss of space. Is their fate ours? Is ours a truer light- That frail, uncertain lamp we call the soul? Are we, too, swept to some abysmal goal Like fireflies blown across a windy night? |
Within four years the lights of 100,000 American men would be snuffed out by the fiercest windstorm the world had ever known.
The assassination received no press in America for the same reason that London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna were not overly concerned by the shooting-the Balkan powder keg had exploded half a dozen times in the previous seven years and failed to ignite widespread armed conflict. Matters at home were seen as more pressing. In mid July Pro-German Mexican President Huerta resigned, galvanizing the revolutionists to take control of the city of Mexico and effectively the government. West Virginia papers devoted much press during the summer months to the debate over prohibition in the Mountain State. The prohibition law, which outlawed the buying and selling of alcohol in any capacity, went into effect July 1. Another front-page issue was how West Virginia would contribute to the houses of congress in the upcoming midterm elections.
The first mention of war in The Shepherdstown Register appeared as a one-paragraph news brief on the second page of the 30 July issue two days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia: "War between Austria and Servia [sic] seems to be immiment [sic], as both governments are making every preparation for a resort to arms to settle their differences. If the slumbering coals are fanned into fire the blaze will probably sweep all over Europe." Jefferson County readers were still in the dark as to what "differences" between Austria and Serbia threatened a general European war. The matter was explained in greater detail the following week in a lengthy column, titled "WAR!" that condensed all relevant events from the assassination through the war-declarations of all the principal belligerents. The article reveals a fatal lack of understanding of European politics as the first sentence of the body claims "The cause of the outburst seems comparatively trifling to bring about so terrible a war." The greater concern of the article was the 100,000 United States citizens, mostly tourists, stranded across the Atlantic when the great European outburst erupted. It was reported that the armored cruiser Tennessee and any other vessels the American government could charter would sail to Europe to retrieve its citizens. It was assured that "vessels of a neutral country can with safety sail the high seas."
As the war progressed so did rural American papers' attention to it. By late August The Jefferson Chronicle reported brief war updates in every issue. By November the front page of The Shepherdstown Register, which heretofore preferred wonder tonic advertisements and anecdotal articles on pithy Civil War history to substantial news, was filled with stories on the war. Titles like "Paris in War Time" , "How Huge Armies Operate in Battles" , "Why Some Battles Have Two Names" , "Shrapnel" and "Life in the Trenches" abounded.
When Wilson assured the world that the United States would remain neutral in the war he asked Americans to be "impartial in thought as well as in action, [to] put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another." Wilson was desperate to keep the national differences that divided Europe from dividing his own country. First, second, third and forth generation immigrants from all the belligerent nations lived here. There was a substantial German-American population in the early twentieth century and it was feared that these people's perceived loyalties for the Fatherland would outweigh their patriotism. Most such fears were unfounded and disproved as the war continued.
Shepherdstown had had a large population of German-Americans since its founding in the late eighteenth century. They, along with the English gentry who owned the land, helped build the town. In laying out the streets the English relegated the German artisans, metal workers and blacksmiths to set up their shops along the muddy strip of road that was constantly flooded by the spring-water stream that is now Town Run. High Street, where the English built their stores and homes, was to be the main strip of Shepherdstown. Due to the work ethic and determination of the Germans the muddy, flooded road soon became German Street and the commercial and social heart of town.
By the time of the Great War these German-Americans were more American than any other nationality and like most Americans their sympathies were with the Allies. Americans shared the English language with the British. Loyalties to France stemmed from that country's aid to the fledgling colonies in the American Revolution. Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium was a foreign relations disaster, especially after word of atrocities leaked into the world press. A general committee, chaired by Charles J. Miller of Shepherdstown, organized a local collection of money, food and clothing to be shipped to the "towns and villages of unhappy Belgium, where vast armies have been waging battle." The editorials in The Register often scathed the Germans, particularly of Kaiser Wilhelm, who irreverent Americans would come to call Kaiser Bill: "…the Emperor declares the intentions of the Germans is to fight until every man in the empire is slain, rather than surrender. We suspect that the Emperor will make an exception for himself, if it comes to the worst." In another editorial Wilhelm is compared to Napoleon: "The Emperor of Germany seems determined to do that which Napoleon did a hundred years ago. He will do well to remember, however, the final fate of Napoleon." No similarly scathing caricatures of Allied leaders were presented in The Register during the years of war. However, a similar comparison was made several weeks after that last one: "If only Napoleon Bonaparte were alive now--or if Colonel Roosevelt were not so busy at home." The maxim implies that only a Napoleon, or a war-ready Teddy Roosevelt, could stop the German Army, which at that time was fast approaching the gates of Paris in late September 1914. But the statement was made tongue-in-cheek, satirizing the bullheadedness of the former Rough Rider-President. It was the least contemptuous of many editorials against Roosevelt who was disliked in heavily Democratic Jefferson County because of his politics, but the issue over which he was consecutively attacked-his war fervor-indicates that the strongest sentiments among his opponents, who were the same people who opposed the war, were primarily anti-war rather than anti-German.
It may be that this resistance to the war was really only a derivative of a long held, prevalent disdain for the Old World, whose poster boy, Winston Churchill, spoke of war as "cruel and magnificent…a gentleman's game" that was spoiled by the imposition of democracy and science. Roosevelt, though sixty and of ill health when America declared war, was as enamored with the romance of the battle as Churchill and attempted to raise a volunteer regiment to be sent immediately to France. Isolationists, which permeated rural America, had an 'us and them' attitude when attacking this Old World view of war. Another Register editorial comment from the first autumn of the war reads: "The evils of the fierce war in Europe will affect every part of the earth, and even the innocent bystanders must suffer. The people of the United States … will feel the awful curse of this sanguinary struggle." The millions of soldiers entrenched in the battlefields were brazenly compared to "sheep to the slaughter" who were fighting in "a game of the diplomats" and "probably not one in a thousand knows what he is fighting for." This hardly agreed with the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt and men like Lewis Einstein, who doggedly demanded the "friendly visit of our fleet to British waters," in essence extending the Monroe Doctrine to encompass all English speaking peoples.
The Register editorialists praised Wilson as much as they scorned his gun-toting predecessor. Some represented him as no less than a Christ figure. The people were largely satisfied with his handling of the Mexican crisis and believed "his great wisdom and his acknowledged strength of character [will] bring balm to the terribly wounded nations of the earth." Neutrality, it was hoped, would ensure the respect and trust of all the belligerents toward America, which would allow us to step in and broker an equitable peace for all sides once the fighting had ended.
On Christmas Eve 1914, as an unprecedented calm settled over the whole Western Front and the unofficial truce was declared by the fighting men in the trenches, fathers in Shepherdstown settled into their arm chairs by their hearths, children at their feet. They read aloud "Santa Clause and Little Billee", an amusing tale about a boy who meets Santa, from the front page of The Register. At the end of the story some might have decided to read on, sharing the article in the very next column with his family. It was called "The Law of Peace" and its writer professed that the war was God's punishment to Europe for defying Christ's teachings: "By as much as the Golden Rule is the law of world politics, there will be peace between the nations; by as much as the rule of grab-and-get governs, there will be war." All of the Old World, Allies and Central Powers alike, Germans and English all, were on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of morality and even against God in the eyes of most Americans. The war was essentially evil and to fight was a crusade not of the righteous but of the damned.
Three bloody years and several sunken ships later, the war was one to make the world safe for democracy, President Wilson sounded a lot like President Roosevelt and Americans were whistling to the tune of "Over There!" On the afternoon of 7 May 1915 a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania, sending 2,067 passengers and crew to the bottom of the Atlantic, of which "188 were American citizens, and besides many women, there were 124 children aboard the ship, of whom 40 were babes in arms." What the American papers neglected to mention in their coverage, seeing, as they were, too busy vilifying the "wicked cruelty and savage, murderous spirit of the Germans," was that the Lusitania was carrying munitions to England, to be employed on the Western Front against the German army. Advertisements were placed in the New York Times by the Germans prior to the sailing warning passengers not to board the Lusitania, that it would be sunk. Reparations were also paid to the families who lost loved ones. But Germany could do nothing to save face for this blunder. The sinking was the turning point in American public opinion. Roosevelt demanded immediate declaration of war to avenge the act of piracy and for the first time many Americans agreed with him: "The press of the United States is practically unanimous in its condemnation, and so universal is the feeling against the barbarous act that the country would back the President if he should go to the extreme of taking steps, looking to a declaration of war against Germany."
It is a testament to Wilson's leadership that he was able to bring his public back from the brink of war fervor. He believed and was able to convince the nation that "There is such a thing as being too proud to fight." But the antiwar sentiment, so strong just a few months before, had been torpedoed with the Lusitania.
Wilson would maintain control over his country's passions for two years. On February 1, 1917 Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. Within one week it became clear that America would enter the war on the side of the Allies in defense of its perceived right to safely sail the high seas for purposes of commerce, travel or otherwise.
The war quickly came to Shepherdstown. A first-class quartermaster in the U.S. Navy, Frank Duffin, visited Shepherdstown on February 5, 1917 "for the purposes of looking up recruits for Uncle Sam." Later that week rumors that German U-boats were stealthily making their way up the C&O Canal caused a panic in Bridgeport. Lock-tender Hebb closed the gates and fetched his trusty musket, swearing that no Germans would pass his lock. Charlie Kretzer drove his pigs and cattle into the woods and hid with them in a cave. Will Knode loaded a wheelbarrow with some of his valuables and came to Shepherdstown and once there readied plans to dynamite the bridge upon first sighting of the German subs. Bridge keeper Sam Pennell dissuaded this plan but vowed to arrest any German who set foot on West Virginia soil. The excitement was suddenly dispelled when some levelheaded citizen reminded everyone any enemy submarines, if they did exist, surely could not get past Washington and there was no water in the canal anyway.
Germans were suddenly everywhere, under each bed and around every dark corner. The Register reported on April 12, after Congress passed Wilson's war declaration, that there were "200,000 to 250,000 Germans who needed watching" in the United States. Despite the strategic uselessness of West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle to the Germans, locals found no lack of spies or threat of subterfuge. Soldiers guarding the Norfolk & Western railroad bridge had their eyes on "a stranger acting suspiciously" who made several visits to the bridge "studying the surroundings very carefully." He was to be arrested "on the slightest excuse." Three "strange men"-two Austrians and a Baltimore man "thought to be a German" -were arrested while loitering around the tunnel of the Baltimore & Ohio rail line. A rumor that a Shepherdstown woman was arrested for being a secret German agent and had important plans and maps tattooed to her body spread quickly in town but the newspaper discounted it as "a fairy story."
Conservative propagandists, using the schools and newspapers, were waging an "ideological guerilla warfare" across the nation spreading their message of "patriotism, heroism and sacrifice" to all Americans while actually spending most of their rhetoric vilifying the Germans. Teaching the German language was banned, even those who taught it were labeled traitors; schoolbooks were considered seditious that did not satisfactorily condemn German history and culture. These "hate-the-Hun" messages, which had run rampant in Allied countries since 1914, made their way to Shepherdstown after the war declaration. Most revealing is the story of the street-name change that Jim Price always tells when lecturing on the Homefront. Dr. Price is the resident historian in Shepherdstown who is happy to offer any of his chiasmic knowledge of local lore and history to anyone who will listen, especially desperate college students with term paper assignments. A proposal to the Shepherdstown Tow Council was made in November 1917 to change the name of German Street to Main Street. Hardly any debate ensued and the proposal was passed. One year later, on the day of the Armistice, the street signs of the main town strip still bore the name of the Fatherland. Nearly a year after that, August 1919, a town clerk dutifully marched up German-or Main-with his stepladder and screwdriver and a stack of freshly painted street signs tucked in his arms. It is almost humorous that anti-German attitude was so strong that the signs were changed even a year after the fighting ended. "I have always been of the opinion it had to do with the abhorring thought of anything German-because of WWI," Price says before going on to site other instances of similar racism. Shepherdstown lore records that "German Shepherd" and "Dachshund" quickly fell from popularity and that grocers and meat markets sold only weenies and hot dogs, never wieners or frankfurters. Main Street would not become German Street again until the Shepherdstown High School graduating class of 1964 petitioned Town Council to make it so.
President Wilson designated June 5, 1917 as Conscription Day. All able bodied American men between twenty-one and thirty-one years of age were required to report to local polling stations to register for the military draft. The 1910 Census reported Jefferson Country had a population of 15,889; 1,588 of those were eligible for the draft. Registrars, working in Shepherdstown's Fireman's Hall, busily and efficiently processed all of them between 7a.m. and 9p.m, that Tuesday. One hundred fifty-nine Shepherdstown residents were registered. One month later, when the first draft numbers were picked in Washington, 112 of those men were called to the colors. They would be the first of many local boys to fight in France.
By 1918 a new column was added to The Register's pages: "News From Our Soldiers." Its brief updates followed many prominent local men from training camp to the battlefields and by the summer of 1918 included obituaries. By that time the front page of each issue was coated with the letters from young men on the front. The tone of all of these letters, published by permission of the parents who received them, was commonly upbeat, sometimes cheerful and always idealistic.
"I can't help but feel that this is but an opportunity to do something for humanity," wrote Lieutenant Cleon Osborn of the 6th U.S. Field Artillery to his parents upon landing in France in March 1918. Many of Osborn's letters home were printed in The Register and likely because of their cheery optimism and innocence. When he described a battle there was none of the gruesome horror of reality in his words; instead "we got away alright…we withstood the gas alright and are all ready for the next." He didn't even complain about the food, writing home that he had "the best French fried potatoes I ever ate"; though he did wish he "might get a hold of some corn meal here" for corn cakes.
Osborn's letters were typical of the other printed letters. It was important to appease the apprehension of mothers and fathers who had sons over seas and the best medium for this was the local newspaper. Many articles focused on the weaknesses in the German army and homefront. At least once a month an article would appear that suggested the Kaiser had had a nervous break down and literally gone insane. On July 18, 1918 a column titled "The Soldier's Chances" appeared: "Great as the danger and large as the losses in the aggregate, the individual soldier has plenty of chances of coming out of the war unscathed." And mothers were left wondering whether or not "Twenty-nine chances of coming home to one chance of being killed" was good enough odds for their darling boys. But they were quickly reassured because their sons "will live five years longer because of physical training, [will be] freer from disease in the army than in civil life, and has better medical care at the front than at home." Truth be told, the only medical care a soldier was guaranteed on the front was a gauze bandage with a pressure pad, which he carried on his person. Of the 100,000 Americans killed in France, over half, 60,000, died of disease.
Dr. Price reiterates that despite these assuaging overtures Shepherdstown knew the horror of war. During the Civil War the bloodiest single day's battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere was waged just across the Potomac in Sharpsburg. Shepherdstown was the main Confederate hospital after that battle, which in a single day filled every spare room and empty alley with five to eight thousand Confederate wounded. Anyone sixty or older in 1918 who lived in Shepherdstown during that time remembered the scene on the corner of Market Square, at the building that currently houses "Sweet Shop Bakery." The upper floors of that building were converted into a surgery, and at that time "surgery" meant only the basest of medical procedures: amputation. The howls of those men as they were sawed by white-hot blades haunted this town in 1918, they haunt it still. After the lifeless limbs were severed they were simply tossed out the windows into wooden carts on the street below. For those limbs that splattered on the pavement there were young boys, dismissed from their chores, to pick up the warm appendages, slippery like fish, and fling them into the carts. 2,500 of those who could not be saved, by the saw or any other method, were buried in a mass grave outside town. Shepherdstown was even shelled twice by Union troops.
Despite the memory of war days and attempts to alleviate that memory the only relevant question to be asked during all the years of neutrality and war was this: whose sons came back and whose did not? Mr. and Mrs. Osborn were lucky parents. One Saturday afternoon in August they were staggered to see their son bound through the front door of their home, as he had done a thousand times before he went to war. Hoping to surprise his mother and father he had not informed them that he was ordered back to the States and their first reaction was a cold chill and they thought that they were looking upon the ghost of Cleon Osborn, killed on the front. The lieutenant was very much alive, plucky as ever, cited for gallantry by his commanding officers and assigned to artillery training in New York for the remainder of the war.
Many in Shepherdstown were not so fortunate. In June 1918, one month before he was to be killed in action, Lieutenant Randolph F. Mason wrote his last words to his father in which he pleaded that the old man "Please take the best kind of care of yourself, as the war probably wont last very much longer and I want more than anything else to see you again and have our long talks together." His sister, Ida Mason Bruke, published a poem along with her brother's final correspondence in The Register. The last stanza read:
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What though his body sleeps in foreign soil, Since he has died to serve humanity, Beyond all space is his-and he has won A wooden cross, and wears it worthily. |
This town and its people were changed irrevocably from that calm Sunday afternoon in late June 1914 when they gathered for prayer under the sunset. November 11, 1918 began as quiet and subtle as that day and as every day after, despite The Register's screaming headline that "The Great War is Over." Shepherdstown and the rest of America was changed by the knowledge of a great pain, of a newfound pride, a new hate and a new love. Loss of innocence is the inevitable consequence of the passage of history. History continues everywhere and shaped our antecedents on the same paving stones and cobbles we walk across every day. History shapes us still from those same stones.
Bibliography
The Shepherdstown Register, 1914-1918.
The Jefferson Chronicle, 1917.
Einstein, Lewis, "Viewpoint 1: Neutrality May Harm the United States," Reprinted from Lewis Einstein, "The War and American Policy," in Lew Einstein, A Prophecy pf the War: 1913-1914 (New York: Colombia University Press, 1918). HIST 399, The First World War. Shepherd College, Shepherdstown. August 8, 2000.
Wilson. Woodrow, "Speech for Declaration of War Against Germany," April 2, 1917, HIST 399, The First World War. Shepherd College, Shepherdstown. November 1, 2000.
Churchill, Winston, My Early Life: 1874-1904. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Churchill, Allen, Over Here!: An Informal Re-creation of the Home Front in World War I, New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968.
Kennedy, David M., Over Here: The First World War and American Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Henry, Allen, "A New Day Dawns in America-1910-1920: When Crazy Confidence was the Norm," The Washington Post Weekly Edition, October 11, 1999.
Price, Jim. "German/Main Street." E-Mail to Justin Snead. November 15, 2000.
Price, Jim. "Shepherdstown: A Walking Tour." Class lecture. Print Journalism 209. Shepherd College, Shepherdstown. October 29, 2000.
About the author: Justin Snead is a sophomore history major at Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, West Virginia. He originally produced this paper for his course History 399, The First World War. His instructors were Dr. Anders Hennriksson and Dr. Mark Snell.
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