These are more than just words, too. They are dots on the official state map, tiny crossroads communities that exist on the Eastern Shore in, respectively, Queen Anne’s, Caroline, and Worcester counties. But Hope, Harmony, and Goodwill are well off the beaten path.
So, in our winter of discontent, my 14-year-old son, Aaron, and I set out with a map and a full tank of gas in search of Hope, Harmony, and Goodwill. If we can find them, could 2009 be all that bad?
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Hope seems the most elusive. I’d seen it from the air, thanks to Google Earth, and there didn’t seem to be much there. The Internet reveals that Hope was once a postal address. The library in Centreville, the Queen Anne’s County seat, is no treasure trove, but it does supply a few clues. A Bicentennial replica of an 1877 atlas shows a school, a store, a church, and a few homes. The Wilmer clan was in evidence. P.T. Potts lived by the store. That was during Hope’s boom days. Today, library volunteer and former local newspaper editor Dan Tabler tells me, “You could go by Hope and blink your eyes and you’re past it.”
Leaving Centreville, we drive by Queen Anne’s County High School. There, plunked down in front of a large parking lot, is a small building with a sign that identifies it as the “Hope One Room Public School, Est. 1863.” I later learn this was the black school that closed in the 1940s and was moved first to the old Kent Island High School, where it was used as a workshop. The school on the 1877 map was a white school, which was torn down.
Turning north on U.S. 301, I see a highway sign to Hope. Excitement building, I turn right onto Hope Road, which is also Route 305. On the left, I pass Hopelands, a subdivision of nice-sized homes built from 2002 to 2007 on one-acre lots, and then on the right the Hope Two Farm, an “Outstanding Poultry Producer” for Perdue, a sign says. A little further on, I come across Hope’s main and only intersection, a panorama of flat farmland except for the northwest corner. There sits Hope’s last residential building, a white frame structure with two additions, standing defiantly where Hope Road crosses Dean and Hayden roads.
The building was last a general store back around 1932, when it was owned by a man named Herb Everett. The house was later home to a veterinarian who collected exotic animals, such as two-headed goats, and kept them in pens on the property.
The mayor of Hope opens the side door. His name is Kurt Schneeman. He is 57, a carpenter and cabinet maker who has lived in the 1915 house with wife Jo-Ann since 1986. Grey-haired and pony-tailed, he remembers telling his lumber supplier in Centreville that he had purchased the old place. “He said, ‘Congratulations, you are the mayor of Hope.’ I said I never looked at it that way. He said, ‘There’s nobody to run against you.’”
As for his mayoral duties, he laughs. “I used to tease everybody about putting up a toll booth and charging people for driving through.”
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It’s 28 miles from Hope to Harmony. The town at the crossroads of Harmony Road (Route 16) and Bethlehem Road (Route 578) is in Caroline County. It is far from hopeless, with 30 or so households. It has one retail business, Mary’s Country Store, and one wholesaler, the Eastern Shore distributor for the Snow Valley water company, with 10 trucks and 15 employees. At the intersection stands the town’s most imposing building, the Harmony United Methodist Church, which marked its 150th anniversary in 2008.
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