WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State was first published in August 1940 as the American Guide Series volume for Maryland, compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Maryland. Governor Herbert R. O’Conor, who sponsored the book and supplied its foreword, presented it on behalf of the State and noted that it had been prepared by the Maryland Writers’ Project, with the University of Maryland serving as state-wide sponsor.

In his foreword the Governor reflected on how far the State had come from its humble beginnings of 1634, and on how a large group of writers had drawn on official records and on community tradition — channels of personal contact not always open to the lone historian — to assemble a comprehensive inventory of Maryland’s resources. Many points of interest, he observed, were here gathered and presented for the first time, a work offered in the hope that residents and travelers alike would find in it a ready and reliable companion.

The volume follows the series plan in four parts. A first gathers essays on Maryland’s background — “Maryland, My Maryland,” the natural setting, the Indians, history, racial elements, agriculture, industry and commerce, labor, transportation, religion, education, the press, sports, architecture, literature, the theater, music, arts and crafts, and a chapter on the State’s distinctive cookery.

A second part describes the cities, from Annapolis and the Naval Academy through Baltimore to Cambridge, Cumberland, Frederick, Hagerstown, and Salisbury; a third lays out nineteen numbered touring routes with their many lettered branches, threading the State from the Pennsylvania line across the Eastern Shore to the mountains of the west. A chronology, bibliography, and index close the book — a full and affectionate portrait of the Old Line State.