The Old Mill Bridge and Mills on Parkers Creek
Table of Contents
The Old Mill Bridge and Old Mill Road
About a dozen wooden posts barely visible above the water are all that remain from a bridge that once connected people north and south of Parkers Creek. This and, very likely, predecessor bridges spanned this narrow segment of the creek, just above the wide tidal stream that flows east into the Chesapeake Bay. The bridge was still standing in the late 1930s: the only photograph we have found was in a family scrapbook dated 1937-1945.
Looking west toward the bridge over Parkers Creek, between 1937 and 1945, from the Karrer family scrapbook, courtesy Scientists Cliffs Association Archives.
The bridge played an important role in the life of Thomas B. Turner (1902-2002), a physician who served as dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1957-1968. A native of Calvert County, Turner grew up on Holly Hill farm north of the creek, owned by his parents George D. and Virginia “Jennie” Turner. In a 1997 interview, Thomas Turner described his courtship in the 1920s. “There was a bridge across there,” Turner said, recalling his horse and buggy rides south across the bridge to the home of Anne Parran Somervell, “and you could go to Port Republic, where she lived.” Thomas and Anne were married in 1927.
The road that crossed the bridge was for many years called the Old Mill Road. The earliest mention we found is in an 1866 deed (rerecorded in 1883, SS 1/76) that documents Octavius W. Bowen’s sale of 35 acres of land to George W. Dorsey: “All that part of the tract of land situated in Calvert County bordering on the old Mill road, and adjoining the lands of John Chambers, the heirs of Capt. John Hance and others.” Seventy years later, another deed mentions land “at the Old Mill Bridge on Parkers Creek . . . formerly owned by Gilbert Gott.” (AAH 27/292) When this same property changed hands in 1958, the survey identified one boundary corner as “a large poplar tree located on the South side of the old County Road leading from Dares Beach to Port Republic, known as the Mill Road or the Parker’s Creek Road.” (JLB 20/396)
Three roads crossed Parkers Creek
Three north-south roads are shown crossing Parkers Creek on this 1901 U.S. Geological Survey Prince Frederick quadrangle map. The colored shading for the three roads and several labels were added for this webpage presentation in 2024.
Regarding the illustration above, the blue-shaded road in the center is the Old Mill Road, subsequently called Parkers Creek Road for most of its length, and Double Oak Road for its northernmost segment. When the Old Mill Bridge was active, this road ran south from today’s Dares Beach Road to Port Republic, a short distance beyond this map’s southern edge. The following section summarizes an 18th century reference to a mill on Parkers Creek where the “waters of all branches descend.” At this writing, we interpret this statement to mean the confluence of the main stream and two tributaries, marked by the red circle just to the west of Old Mill Bridge.
The red-shaded road followed a routing long established as the county’s main north-south highway, the ancestor of today’s highway 2-4 and its immediate predecessor, today’s state route 765. The bridge shown here crosses Parkers Creek just east of Sullivans Branch, and a newspaper story informs us that a new concrete bridge was installed at this location in 1912.
The green-shaded road is called Bayside Road in a 1901 deed (GWD 02/368), and it crosses the creek near its mouth. Little is known about a bridge at this location and, indeed, many travelers may have forded the creek in the shallows where it enters the Bay. We have seen an 1870 deed for a bayfront tract defines a boundary that “begin[s] at Parkers Creek bridge” (SS 1/573, 1890, rerecording of SS 2/50, 1870), and a local resident recalled traversing a footbridge in about 1945.
The old mill and William Hunter, miller and schoolmaster
Although there may have been more than one mill on the creek, the clearest reference we have found is in a privately held document from a 1798 legal case concerning land boundaries near Parkers Creek and its tributaries. Here’s a sentence that suggests the document’s tone:
The Defendant denies and Rejects the Plaintiffs Location of the Land call’d Freemans Lot, but Omits making any Location thereof, as he can procure no Proof to the Beginning or any Other Certain Boundary thereof . . . .
The document is incomplete and, although some plat diagrams are included, the one referenced in the following sentence is missing:
T’ V’ W’ [markings on the missing plat] Show Part of the Main Branch of Parker’s Creek — V’ Shows the place where a Grist Mill, & Fulling Mill was formerly Erected by William Hunter, on the Main Branch of Parkers Creek – Where Note, that the Waters of all the Branches here Located, descend into Parker’s Creek . . . .
Grist mills that grind grain are familiar to most of us. Fulling mills, less so. Fulling refers to beating woven woolen cloth while wet, causing the fibers to interlock and form a tighter textile with better structure. Manual methods for fulling were practiced in antiquity, while mechanized fulling mills appeared in Europe as early as the 12th century. The phrase formerly Erected by William Hunter may mean that, by 1798, this structure had already been abandoned or destroyed.
Regarding location, at this writing we interpret the phrase Main Branch of Parkers Creek – Where Note, that the Waters of all the Branches here Located, descend into Parker’s Creek to mean the area at or near the Old Mill Bridge where two tributaries join Parker Creek’s main stream, upstream of the broadened tidal flow to the east.
William Hunter, the miller identified in the 1798 document, had also been a schoolmaster. According to Ailene Hutchins, a close student of Calvert County history, the Calvert Free School (a private school for sons of the gentry) operated near Parkers Creek from about 1725 to 1770, on land about one mile west of the bridge location. Hutchins wrote that “a reference to old records stated that the Rev. [Jonathan] Cay [rector of Christ Church] and William Hunter were entitled ‘masters’ in this school.” In 1778, “the free school land and buildings were sold to William Hunter for £1,972,” adding that “the same old reference mentioned above stated that the land was later known as Hunter’s Mill-dam.” (Calvert Recorder, 2 Sept 1971)
Hutchins’s reference suggests a possible alternative location for Hunter’s mill, near the former school site rather than at the bridge. An 1866 report on Maryland’s schools has a historical segment that includes a footnote also supports this alternative: “Tradition indeed tells us of a Grist and a Fulling Mill; no trace of which now exists, except an embankment, still known as ‘Hunter’s mill-dam.'” (First Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction . . . For the Year Ending June 30, 1866, from the Archives of Maryland.)
Meanwhile, although not directly connected to Hunter’s mill, we also note that a 1663 land patent for a tract of land south of the creek, about halfway between the school site and the bridge, carried the possibly aspirational name of Mill Run. For now, however, we will cling to the historic bridge and road names as indicators that, very likely, a grist mill had once been located near the bridge.
Acknowledgements
This webpage was written by Carl Fleischhauer in December 2024, and it relies upon research findings contributed by Robert J. Hurry, Leila Boyer, Ailene Hutchins, Rachel Bissett, Mark Switzer, Mary Rockefeller, and Carl Fleischhauer.
