Note: This is the cake shown on my appearance on CBS Mornings, September 16, 2021
Robert H. Clark was one of the two-thirds of Civil War fatalities who died not from the violence on the battlefield, but of disease. The Canada-born Union soldier enlisted in the 7th Maine Infantry in August 1862 at the age of 23. He left behind his wife Mary Ann and one-year-old baby Henry Gilbert, and headed for Maryland. The Maine 7th took part in the Maryland Campaign and a battle at South Mountain, before fighting at Antietam, a significant and bloody turning point in the war.
Constant campaigning had cost the regiment the loss of many men. They returned to Portland, Maine through January of 1863 before reporting to Northern Virginia for more fighting, including the Union victory at the Second Battle of Fredericksburg. In June, the company would pass through Maryland on their way to the fateful battle at Gettysburg. As it happened, Robert H. Clark would never make it to Pennsylvania.
Sources differ on whether the young man had contracted typhoid or died from sunstroke. According to Lt. Colonel Selden Connor, men “fell out by scores… by the heat, dust and exertion” on the trip, some dying in the road.
Clark made it to a hotel in Westminster Maryland, where he was tended to by Mary Bostwick Shellman, a 14-year old who routinely volunteered with the care, feeding and entertainment of residents of the town almshouse. That day, the dutiful girl was caring for soldiers at the City Hotel, which was inundated with infirm soldiers passing through town between battles. She fanned Clark for hours, but it was in vain. Young Mary Shellman watched as Robert Clark died. She would never forget the experience.
Collections of the Bangor Historical Society
Born in 1849, Mary B. Shellman was one of four children born to Westminster citizens Catherine Jones and Col. James M. Shellman. At 14, Shellman was already shaping up to be the stuff of local legend. It’s said that one of the first entities she crusaded to memorialize was a sycamore tree, sentenced to be cut to make way for a street. Shellman persuaded the mayor to rename the lane Sycamore Street in the tree’s honor.
Shortly before her experience caring for the Union Soldier Robert Clark, J.E.B. Stuart greeted Shellman and a group of Westminster children and was apparently rebuffed. Stories vary, but in one, she replied “I’m southern by birth but Yankee in principle,” irritating the Confederate general. In another she mocked him by calling him “Jonny Red Coat.”
At one point, passing herself off as “M.B. Shellman“, Mary started Westminster’s first boy scout troop, serving as a scoutmaster until the organization found out her gender.
As telephone lines made their way into towns like Westminster, Mary made sure her home was the first residence in Carroll county to have one. She became the manager of the regional division of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. When Alexander Graham Bell came to inspect the system, he gave Mary a telephone pin, which remained among her possessions and became a part of her legend.
Shellman had another pin in her collection —a Red Cross Pin, care of Clara Barton— earned in 1889 when Mary joined Marylanders who rushed to Pennsylvania to assist in the aftermath of the Johnstown Flood.
Mary was a suffragette, also championing suffrage’s companion cause, temperance. Stereotypes aside, she seemed to have some fun. After Christmas of 1865, she wrote to a cousin in Frederick, describing a joyful holiday party spent dancing with “would you believe it… a returned Reb.” She playfully mentioned a visit from “a fair-haired friend,” and her eagerness to meet his friends.
“Rose Geranium Cake” is one of four recipes that Shellman contributed to “Choice Maryland Cookery,” a 1902 cookbook compiled by the women of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Uniontown. Other recipes are for a horehound “Cough Remedy””, Pink Watermelon Preserves, and Pineapple Marmalade. Shellman’s interest in food continued during the first World War, when she worked in Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration.
In the 1920s, Shellman did work preserving Westminster’s history, laying the groundwork for the institutions that preserve her own memory to this day. The “Sherman-Fisher-Shellman House” where she grew up is now a property of the Carroll County Historical Society. She wrote a book on Westminster history that is in the collections of the Pratt Library and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. The latter library houses an additional history manuscript she wrote, as well as some poems and letters. A plaque honoring her suffrage work was unveiled in Westminster in December 2021.
Mary’s motley life was also peppered with the arts. She performed in community theater and wrote poetry, including lyrics to a rally song for William McKinley’s 1900 presidential campaign, a poem honoring the life of Nicholas Paroway (a Westminster citizen who was born into slavery in Baltimore), and a memorial hymn for Arlington National Cemetery.
The hymn reflects Mary’s lasting effort to honor the lives and deaths of soldiers.
In May 1868, when Mary was 18, she responded to a call from Union veterans’ organization commander Gen. John A. Logan to decorate the graves of soldiers. She led an assembly of local children through town on their way to Westminster Cemetery to lay flowers on soldier’s graves. “Decoration Day” eventually became Memorial Day, and Mary Shellman would remain involved in Westminster’s Memorial Day Parade for the next 60 years. Five Union soldiers are buried in a plot that Shellman set aside to spare the men from “pauper burials.” Robert H. Clark’s grave marker is the first and the largest.
The soldier’s death that cemented Mary B. Shellman’s commitment to honor fallen soldiers remained personal. In the 1880s, Shellman corresponded with Henry Gilbert Clark, Robert’s son. Another child left fatherless by the Civil War, Henry Clark had been just an infant when Robert left for war. Henry’s mother lost custody or abandoned him after the war, and he was raised by family. Historians’ attempts to trace his later life and whereabouts dead-end at 1924.
Mary isn’t buried near the soliders at Westminster. In later life, she moved to live near her nephew Rev. Paul Reese in Rockland Texas. She died in 1938, shortly after instituting Memorial Day ceremonies there. She is buried in Rockland Cemetery.
I didn’t even do much of my own primary-source research for this post. There is just too much. Volunteers at the Historical Society of Carroll County have done much to chronicle the varied events in the life of Mary B. Shellman and of those she came into contact with. It’s a wide web with threads cast via the memorialization of the casualties of the Civil War, of the history of the telephone, the Red Cross, of votes for women, a street named Sycamore, and now, by a cake recipe.
Recipe:
- 1 Cups butter
- 1 Lb sugar
- 6 egg yolks, 4 whites
- 3.5 Cups sifted flour
- 3 Teaspoons Royal baking powder
- 6 Rose Geranium leaves
- 1 Cups cold water
“One cup butter, one pound A sugar, yolks of six eggs, whites of four eggs, one cup cold water, three and one-half cups sifted flour, three teaspoons Royal baking powder. Cream butter and sugar together, add yolks and beat well, then stir in the water. Beat whites of eggs to a stiff froth; sift baking powder in flour; add whites of eggs and flour, alternately; stir well, but do not beat. Grease and flour well two mountain cake pans, lay three rose geranium leaves in each, pour the batter on them and bake in a moderate oven. Use the whites of the two eggs left from the cake for iceing, and flavor iceing with vanilla. When the cake is baked, remove geranium leaves before putting cakes together. Put iceing between layers, on top and sides. The leaves give cake a delicious flavor.”
Recipe from “Choice Maryland Cookery“, Printed at the Caroll Record Office, 1902
