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Maryland: A New Kind of Identity | Episode 112 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Imagine you are four months pregnant.
• 0:03
  Crista Cowan: You've buried two of your babies in the German soil of the Palatinate, and now you are boarding a wooden ship to cross an ocean you've never seen, heading to a country you've only dreamed of.
• 0:20
  Crista Cowan: You and your husband have one surviving son and a thousand miles of salt water ahead of you.
• 0:28
  Crista Cowan: This was the reality for my six times great-grandmother, Anna Maria.
• 0:34
  Crista Cowan: In 1749, she wasn't looking for a political revolution.
• 0:40
  Crista Cowan: She was looking for a foothold.
• 0:42
  Crista Cowan: She was looking for a promise of a place with names like Silver Fancy and Poplar Fields in the wild red-earthed frontier of Maryland.
• 0:53
  Crista Cowan: We usually tell the story of the American Revolution as an English family feud.
• 1:00
  Crista Cowan: But for the thousands of German immigrants like the Niccums, the king in London wasn't their father.
• 1:09
  Crista Cowan: He was just the latest in a 6,000-year line of tyrants that they were determined to outrun.
• 1:17
  Crista Cowan: Maryland would prove a challenge to Anna Maria, but in the Toms Creek 100, she would hold the line so her children could inherit the West and develop a new kind of American identity.
• 1:31
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 1:40
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 1:44
  Crista Cowan: Coming down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 1:55
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 2:04
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 2:11
  Crista Cowan: To understand why the Niccums left, we have to look at the world that they lived in.
• 2:19
  Crista Cowan: It was a place where the map was cut up into hundreds of tiny principalities, each ruled by a different strong man.
• 2:28
  Crista Cowan: In my research, I found a reflection on this era that puts it perfectly.
• 2:34
  Crista Cowan: Since the beginning of time, the affairs of men have gravitated toward forceful leaders, the pharaohs, the Caesars, and eventually the King Georges.
• 2:46
  Crista Cowan: For 6,000 years, history was just a circle, from priest to king, from king to dictator, and back again.
• 2:56
  Crista Cowan: And for 6,000 years, the people at the bottom, people like Johann Nicol Niccum, struggled to survive.
• 3:05
  Crista Cowan: In 1749, the Rhineland Palatinate was beautiful, but it was exhausted.
• 3:13
  Crista Cowan: It was a land of changing princes.
• 3:16
  Crista Cowan: If a new ruler took over your village, he could demand that you change your religion, or he could install a tax station every 10 miles along the river if he wanted.
• 3:28
  Crista Cowan: Trying to build a life when the rules change every time a new man wears the crown has got to be exhausting and possibly dangerous.
• 3:39
  Crista Cowan: But for my six times great-grandparents, Peter and Anna Maria, the princes weren't the only ones who were taking things from them.
• 3:50
  Crista Cowan: The land itself had turned harsh.
• 3:53
  Crista Cowan: It was a really beautiful place, but there was a winter so cold that birds reportedly froze in mid-air, and all the crops in the fields and vineyards were wiped out.
• 4:06
  Crista Cowan: And then there were the graves.
• 4:09
  Crista Cowan: Before they ever stepped foot on a ship, Anna Maria and Peter had already said goodbye to at least two of their children, Sarah and Elizabetha, buried in the soil of Erzweiler.
• 4:23
  Crista Cowan: When your rulers are tyrants and your crops are failing, and the ground holds more of your children than there are seated around the dinner table, you start to listen to the whispers coming from across the ocean.
• 4:41
  Crista Cowan: They started hearing names that sounded like a dream.
• 4:45
  Crista Cowan: Names like the Monocacy, poplar fields, and silver fancy.
• 4:51
  Crista Cowan: To a family that had been squeezed for generations, a place called Maryland, and the idea of vacant land probably sounded magical.
• 5:02
  Crista Cowan: Not because the soil was magic, but because the atmosphere was free.
• 5:08
  Crista Cowan: So in the spring of 1749, three generations of Niccums, 65-year-old Nickel Niccum and his wife, Katerina, their two sons, Peter and Nickel Jr., with their wives and six children ranging in ages from 15 years down to 15 months, turned their backs on the Rhineland.
• 5:33
  Crista Cowan: They weren't just seeking a new farm.
• 5:36
  Crista Cowan: They were betting their entire lives that they could finally break a 6,000-year cycle of hunger and fear.
• 5:44
  Crista Cowan: But to get to that silver fancy in Maryland, they first had to survive the Elliot.
• 5:52
  Crista Cowan: Leaving Erzweiler was the first step, but it was a long way from the finish line.
• 5:59
  Crista Cowan: To get to the ocean, the Niccums had to float north up the Rhine River.
• 6:05
  Crista Cowan: Today, that's a scenic tourist cruise that takes six or seven days with lovely stops along the way.
• 6:12
  Crista Cowan: But in 1749, it was a bureaucratic nightmare.
• 6:16
  Crista Cowan: The river was choked with nearly 40 different custom houses.
• 6:22
  Crista Cowan: And at every single one, they had to stop.
• 6:25
  Crista Cowan: And at every single one, they had to pay a different fee to a different prince or local lord.
• 6:31
  Crista Cowan: And it took them six weeks just to reach the North Sea.
• 6:35
  Crista Cowan: Then they had to wait in Rotterdam while they secured passage to America.
• 6:40
  Crista Cowan: They hadn't even seen the Atlantic Ocean yet, and much of their life savings was already gone.
• 6:47
  Crista Cowan: Then came the ship, the Elliot.
• 6:51
  Crista Cowan: It wasn't a passenger liner.
• 6:53
  Crista Cowan: It was a wooden shell designed for cargo, now packed with hundreds of people.
• 7:00
  Crista Cowan: Now I want you to look at this through Anna Maria's eyes.
• 7:04
  Crista Cowan: She is first five, then six, then seven months pregnant on this trip.
• 7:10
  Crista Cowan: She's living in a space no bigger than a kitchen table with her husband Peter and their nine-year-old son Michael.
• 7:16
  Crista Cowan: Next to them is Peter's brother and his wife with five more children.
• 7:22
  Crista Cowan: Her in-laws on the other side of her, at a time when 65 years old was considered old.
• 7:29
  Crista Cowan: The water in the barrels on the ship starts to turn slimy and black.
• 7:33
  Crista Cowan: The food is limited to salt beef and hard bread.
• 7:37
  Crista Cowan: And when the storms hit, they're locked below deck in the dark, tossed by waves that make the giant timbers of the ship groan.
• 7:47
  Crista Cowan: And she's pregnant.
• 7:49
  Crista Cowan: But they survived.
• 7:51
  Crista Cowan: After months at sea, on August 24, 1749, the Elliot dropped anchor in Philadelphia.
• 7:58
  Crista Cowan: The men were rowed ashore to a big brick building called the Courthouse.
• 8:04
  Crista Cowan: There, my seven times great-grandfather, Johann Nicol Niccum, and his sons, Peter and Nickel Jr., stood before the English authorities.
• 8:15
  Crista Cowan: They couldn't speak the language.
• 8:18
  Crista Cowan: Peter and Nicol Jr.
• 8:20
  Crista Cowan: couldn't even sign their own names.
• 8:23
  Crista Cowan: The clerks certainly couldn't spell Niccum.
• 8:27
  Crista Cowan: They were likely exhausted, their legs still shaking from months at sea.
• 8:33
  Crista Cowan: Peter and Nickel Jr.
• 8:41
  Crista Cowan: just made their marks.
• 8:42
  Crista Cowan: Doing this, they swore an oath of allegiance to an English king they had never met.
• 8:49
  Crista Cowan: They were officially off the ship, but they still weren't home because the promise wasn't the city of Philadelphia.
• 8:58
  Crista Cowan: The promise was the silver fancy, still 140 miles away down a rough wilderness track called the Monocacy Trail.
• 9:08
  Crista Cowan: And they had to get there fast because Anna Maria was now nine months pregnant.
• 9:15
  Crista Cowan: And her American story was about to begin with the scream of childbirth, the miracle of childbirth.
• 9:23
  Crista Cowan: They bought a wagon loaded up with 12 people, three generations of their family and belongings, and turned onto the Monocasy Trail.
• 9:31
  Crista Cowan: This wasn't a road, it was a rough limestone, heavy wilderness track that followed the base of the mountains.
• 9:40
  Crista Cowan: It was the gateway to the west.
• 9:43
  Crista Cowan: And in late summer 1749, it was muggy and a bone-jarring ride.
• 9:49
  Crista Cowan: On September 4th, Anna Maria gave birth to a son named George.
• 9:55
  Crista Cowan: Think about that timeline for just a minute.
• 9:58
  Crista Cowan: It's 150 miles from the docks of Philadelphia to the banks of Tom's Creek in western Maryland, where they landed.
• 10:05
  Crista Cowan: In 1749, that journey took at least a week, maybe more.
• 10:10
  Crista Cowan: We don't know the exact timeline math.
• 10:14
  Crista Cowan: When George took his first breath, Anna Maria was either at a makeshift camp along the side of the road, or she had just arrived at the place they would call home.
• 10:26
  Crista Cowan: There was no doctors, there were no midwives from the old village.
• 10:33
  Crista Cowan: There was just humidity in Maryland, the sounds of a forest that was still probably an intimidating wilderness, and the red earth that would soon become their lifeblood.
• 10:46
  Crista Cowan: She was likely aided by her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law.
• 10:50
  Crista Cowan: In the old world, George would have been born a subject of a Germanic prince.
• 10:59
  Crista Cowan: But because Anna Maria held on through that ocean crossing, because she endured those final miles on that road, George was born into a different atmosphere.
• 11:11
  Crista Cowan: He didn't know the palatinate.
• 11:17
  Crista Cowan: He didn't have the memory of the cycle of tyrants.
• 11:21
  Crista Cowan: His first breath was the air of the Maryland frontier.
• 11:26
  Crista Cowan: His first drink was the mountain water that the local tribes believed had magical healing powers.
• 11:33
  Crista Cowan: For Peter and Anna Maria, George was the proof that the gamble had paid off.
• 11:40
  Crista Cowan: They had found their foothold.
• 11:43
  Crista Cowan: But as Anna Maria held her newborn son, the state of Maryland was about to change from a silent forest into a battlefield.
• 11:53
  Crista Cowan: They sat right on the edge of a war.
• 11:56
  Crista Cowan: The Niccums settled in the Toms Creek Hundred.
• 12:00
  Crista Cowan: In Maryland, a hundred was a community of about a hundred families.
• 12:05
  Crista Cowan: And this one was as isolated as it got.
• 12:09
  Crista Cowan: It was a day's ride on horseback from any real help in the nearest town, Fredericktown.
• 12:16
  Crista Cowan: Just a few dozen miles away, a 22-year-old militia officer named George Washington was making the mistakes that would spark the French and Indian War.
• 12:29
  Crista Cowan: Suddenly, the silent frontier was not so silent.
• 12:33
  Crista Cowan: By 1754, the Toms Indians who had lived here were moving out, replaced by French-backed raiding parties.
• 12:42
  Crista Cowan: Soon, Indian raiding parties were moving through the woods.
• 12:48
  Crista Cowan: Then, news reached the Niccums that Monocacy Village had been burned to the ground.
• 12:55
  Crista Cowan: Many of their neighbors began to flee back to the safety of the coastal cities.
• 13:01
  Crista Cowan: Wealthy land barons in the area were building forts.
• 13:06
  Crista Cowan: But the people of Tom's Creek, the record tells us they were defenseless.
• 13:12
  Crista Cowan: There was no fort there, no soldiers.
• 13:15
  Crista Cowan: Anna Maria was now a mother to more children.
• 13:18
  Crista Cowan: Michael and George and their young siblings were being raised in a house that didn't have stone walls.
• 13:26
  Crista Cowan: This family, their extended family, their small community, was protected only by their own resolve.
• 13:33
  Crista Cowan: Maryland didn't offer them a fort, but it gave them a choice: stay and become part of the land, or flee and remain a refugee.
• 13:43
  Crista Cowan: The Niccums chose to stay and became part of the land.
• 13:48
  Crista Cowan: By the 1760s, the defenseless frontier was starting to feel like home.
• 13:54
  Crista Cowan: The forests were becoming fields of wheat, reportedly the best in the colonies.
• 14:00
  Crista Cowan: But as the threat of the French faded, a new tension started to rise in the taverns and the mills of Tom's Creek.
• 14:08
  Crista Cowan: We often talk about the American Revolution as if it's a fight between England and her colonies, this family feud across the Atlantic Ocean.
• 14:19
  Crista Cowan: But that's not how it felt here.
• 14:22
  Crista Cowan: For Michael and George Niccum, the boy who survived the ship and the boy born on the road, the king in London was just a name.
• 14:33
  Crista Cowan: They didn't feel like English children.
• 14:35
  Crista Cowan: They weren't.
• 14:36
  Crista Cowan: They were Marylanders.
• 14:38
  Crista Cowan: When the Stamp Act hit and wagons were being seized, the people of Tom's Creek didn't just see attacks, they saw another strong man starting to restart that 6,000-year cycle of control.
• 14:54
  Crista Cowan: When the local militia formed the Gamecock Company with their plum feathers, they were fighting for the land that their mother had sacrificed everything to reach.
• 15:05
  Crista Cowan: But Anna Maria, she wouldn't live to see the plum feathers or the birth of the new nation.
• 15:13
  Crista Cowan: In 1767, at the age of 47, Anna Maria Sangers Niccum died.
• 15:19
  Crista Cowan: After nearly a dozen children and 18 years of holding the line on the Maryland frontier, her journey ended like so many women before her and since in childbirth.
• 15:31
  Crista Cowan: She's buried in Tom's Creek Cemetery, just east of what is now Emmettsburg, Maryland.
• 15:37
  Crista Cowan: The soil there is this distinct red.
• 15:39
  Crista Cowan: The locals call it Terra Ruba, red earth.
• 15:42
  Crista Cowan: It's poetic, really.
• 15:44
  Crista Cowan: After crossing the black waters of the Atlantic to find a new life, she became a permanent part of the Maryland Earth.
• 15:54
  Crista Cowan: She was the mother of the foothold this family would have in the New World.
• 16:02
  Crista Cowan: While some of the Niccums stayed in Frederick County and still are there today, Michael, my five times great-grandfather, left with his wife and children.
• 16:15
  Crista Cowan: Maryland had done its job.
• 16:17
  Crista Cowan: It had provided the nursery and the food and the freedom for their family to grow strong.
• 16:23
  Crista Cowan: They weathered and won the American Revolution.
• 16:28
  Crista Cowan: Then in the early 1800s, with War Service land grants in hand, they headed west, moving into Ohio and Indiana and beyond.
• 16:38
  Crista Cowan: But they carried that red earth with them in their names and in their stories.
• 16:44
  Crista Cowan: Maryland isn't just another state on the map for my family.
• 16:49
  Crista Cowan: For this branch of my family, it is the place that gave us our start.
• 16:55
  Crista Cowan: It is the place where we stopped being weary German subjects of yet another ruler and started being Americans.
• 17:04
  Crista Cowan: And so I've been thinking about Anna Maria.
• 17:09
  Crista Cowan: I think about what it took to leave the land of her ancestors.
• 17:14
  Crista Cowan: I think about that 10-day window between the wooden ship arriving in Philadelphia and the wilderness birth of her son George.
• 17:23
  Crista Cowan: I think about her standing her ground in the face of commotion and war.
• 17:28
  Crista Cowan: I think of her raising those children in the middle of all of that.
• 17:34
  Crista Cowan: I've also been wishing I knew more of her story.
• 17:39
  Crista Cowan: I don't know what she looked like.
• 17:41
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if she wanted to leave Germany or not.
• 17:46
  Crista Cowan: Did she resist?
• 17:48
  Crista Cowan: Was she terrified?
• 17:50
  Crista Cowan: Was she resolute?
• 17:51
  Crista Cowan: Was she both?
• 17:52
  Crista Cowan: I don't know what she whispered to that baby born on that road, or if she knew she was dying when she gave birth to her last child.
• 18:02
  Crista Cowan: But I do know I wouldn't be here without her.
• 18:06
  Crista Cowan: History remembers the men who signed their names.
• 18:11
  Crista Cowan: It often forgets the women who made it all possible.
• 18:16
  Crista Cowan: Somewhere in your family tree, there is a woman like Anna Maria.
• 18:22
  Crista Cowan: She signed nothing.
• 18:25
  Crista Cowan: She appears in very few official records.
• 18:28
  Crista Cowan: But you would not exist without her.
• 18:30
  Crista Cowan: Go find her and say her name out loud.
• 18:34
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.