Local News
May 2, 2008
Exhibit Recalls Jewish ‘Oasis’
Exhibit recalls the sense of camaraderie among club members at a beach community when many resorts were restricted to Jews.
Adam Stone
Special to the Jewish Times
After World War I and before the Great Depression, a cadre of Masons from the Washington, D.C., area headed east in search of sun and a few weeks break from their lives of urban commerce.
They planted themselves in the remote Anne Arundel community of Shady Side, where their seven-decade sojourn marked a curious chapter in the history of the Maryland Jewish experience.
That story is told in a new exhibit titled “For Fishing, Family And Fun: Seven Decades Of Communal Living By The Chesapeake Bay.” Produced by the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society, the exhibit opens this Sunday, April 27, at 2 p.m. at the Captain Salem Avery House Museum in Shady Side.
The free exhibit features 15 panels with photographs, information, anecdotes and quotes illustrating aspects of the club’s activities. There also will be artifacts on display, and a catalog will be available with exhibit text and three essays.
It was in the Captain Salem Avery House that the National Masonic Fishing and Country Club met from 1924 to 1989. The club, consisting largely of Jewish members living in Washington and Montgomery County, made this facility its summer home for decades, creating a small but recognizable Jewish community in this off-the-beaten-path town.
Over the years, the Masons expanded an existing local building to include an assembly hall and rooms for overnight stays, creating for themselves a waterside getaway at a time when many beach communities and resorts were restricted, banning Jews and other minorities. At Shady Side, the club members enjoyed fishing, crabbing, boating and swimming in the West River.
Eventually, the club lost its Masonic character, but its Jewish members kept returning to their retreat, which by the 1970s and 1980s had come to be known simply as “Our Place.”
Why that place, that time? “The Chesapeake Bay is the answer,” said project curator Barry Kessler, who lives in Arnold. “The Chesapeake Bay was the magnet that kept them coming back, and that makes this a very Maryland story.”
It’s also a story about the intrinsic power of community. Shady Side was a long haul from the nation’s capital back in the days before the highways were built, and life there was fairly rustic and isolated. Still, the urbanites kept returning to fish and talk and take in the sun together.
“It says something about people’s desire to come together, the desire to create a bond of friendship,” said Mr. Kessler, who conducted many extensive video interviews with family members of the club who enjoyed the summer retreat.
The exhibit is a Jewish story, too. “It was similar to the Catskills, where Jews went from New York in large numbers for some of the same reasons — recreation, getting cool, getting away from the city,” said Mr. Kessler, former curator of the Jewish Museum of Maryland. “But the Catskills were a continuous Jewish resort. Everywhere you looked for miles and miles, it was other Jews.
“This was a dot, a tiny island in a vast gentile world. These people were leaving a comfortable Jewish community and going into an isolated, rural world.”
The Masons and their families generally found themselves welcomed into that world, he said. “They bought fried chicken from the Bay View Inn, they bought fresh fruit pies from an elderly black lady named Florence, and they bought fresh produce from local people,” Mr. Kessler said.
But time marches on, and eventually the Masonic lodge, social club and temporary community of Jewish Shady Side faded into a burgeoning suburban landscape.
“People were getting more affluent,” Mr. Kessler said. “They had pools in their backyards, so why would they drive an hour or an hour-and-a-half to go swimming?”
But as “For Fishing, Family And Fun” illustrates, something was lost when these Jewish Masons stopped coming to Shady Side to relax at the banks of the West River. Simply put, it was, indeed, “Our Place.”
The Captain Salem Avery House Museum is located at 1418 EW Shady Side Road in Shady Side. For information about the exhibit, call 410-867-4486 or e-mail . The museum’s Web site address is http://www.averyhouse.org .