Visit to Tuscarora, Md., post office recalls George Washington, birdhouses and other memories

Delivering the Mail by Allen Abel

On Friday afternoon, Aug. 5, 1785, an unemployed army veteran named George Washington crossed the Potomac River from Virginia and dined at a hostelry known as The Dutchman’s in Frederick County, Md.

Washington was on a road trip with a work gang that was bushwhacking a route for what would decades later become the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

“Drank Tea — supped — and lodged,” the former general and future president recorded in his diary of a postbellum summer day.

In 1932, the bicentennial of Washington’s birth, a marker was erected at the site. The marker still stands. It commemorates the dinner at the now vanished Dutchman’s and notes that “One mile south of here is Noland’s Ferry frequently used by Washington on his travels.”

Noland’s Ferry ceased operation early in the 20th century. Long before then, the settlement and its slave market on the Maryland bank of the Potomac had become known as Licksville.

Today, the hamlet is called Tuscarora for the Native Americans who passed through in the 18th century on their exodus from North Carolina to New York and Ontario, a small homage bestowed on a vanished people. There are a couple of houses, a weathered United States post office with a peaked roof and a rusted weather vane, and that is about all.

Four miles west of Tuscarora is Point of Rocks, Md., whose 1873 Gothic Revival railroad depot is one of five historic terminals featured on a set of five Historic Railroad Stations stamps (Scott 5758-5762) issued March 9, 2023.

Commuter trains to the nation’s capital still call at Point of Rocks, but the building itself is padlocked, its windows boarded, a few panes of glass missing higher up. Tickets are vended by machine. Point of Rocks is on a stamp, but it’s no longer a station.

A dozen years ago, just around the bend from the Tuscarora post office, there was a workshop where Richard Keeney crafted adorable little birdhouses out of scrap wood and put them out for sale for $10 or $15.

This was how a Linn’s reporter came to know about Tuscarora, Md. — not from Washington, or the crossing of the Potomac by Robert E. Lee on the way to Antietam, or the beleaguered Indians fleeing north from North Carolina — but from the birdhouses.

In early July, that Linn’s reporter found himself again in Tuscarora, en route to the Point of Rocks Bridge. He remembered the birdhouses, which are on his front porch and are occupied every spring by families of chattering wrens, and his pigtailed daughter, then 6 (now 19), who helped to pick them out and proudly put the money in the collection box at Keeney’s house.

Perhaps Keeney was still making his birdhouses. There was no one to ask but Manoj Adhikari, the clerk in the Tuscarora post office, who is from the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal.

The Tuscarora post office is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and serves only two or three customers on an average day. The facility is owned and overseen by a woman named Summers who lives next door and was born in the same year the sign was put up to commemorate Washington’s supper. Summers declined an interview with Linn’s.

Adhikari considers himself the luckiest man in Tuscarora. In Nepal, he had entered the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program — better known as the green card lottery — that makes 50,000 U.S. entry permits available annually to citizens of “countries with low immigration rates,” of which Nepal certainly is one. So Adhikari, who had a bit of computer training, mailed in a form. And then he waited.

“After one year, the postman brought a letter,” he said. “I opened it, and I couldn’t believe that I had won. But that was only the first letter.”

“The second letter said I need to fill out my qualifications,” Adhikari said. “The third letter told me to come to Kathmandu for an interview. I took the bus and they interviewed me and they said, ‘You have won.’ ”

“Why America?” Adhikari was asked.

“America is the highest,” he replied. “The economy. The opportunities.”

“I brought my wife with me,” Adhikari said. His wife is studying to become a nurse. They have a 4-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. Adhikari did not know anything about Keeney and the little birdhouses.

Over in Point of Rocks, there is a much newer and busier post office.

When asked about Keeney, the counter clerk at the Point of Rocks post office said he died of an aneurysm 10 years ago. Keeney was 59.

It was time to go. A sad, sweet memory; a link to Washington, the father of his country, and a new American selling stamps behind an old wooden desk. That was Tuscarora.

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