New book retraces historic Turkey Foot Road

Mount Savage Historical Society
P.O. Box 401
Mount Savage, Maryland 21545
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NEWS RELEASE -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 29, 2010 -- Contact: NancyE.Thoerig@verizon.net


MOUNT SAVAGE, Md. – Along the northwestern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania border, an Indian trail led traders, drovers, travelers and settlers into the American frontier. The primitive road that evolved from this ancient route spawned scattered settlements that today are our hometowns.

“In Search of the Turkey Foot Road: From Fort Cumberland to the North Fork of the Youghiogheny,” by Lannie Dietle and Michael McKenzie, retraces this historic and nearly forgotten route, highlighting the part between Cumberland and Confluence, Pa.

The Mount Savage Historical Society is publishing the work , as announced by President Dennis Lashley. Visit http://www.mtsavage.info/ to see sample pages.

The serious reader soon finds that this 342-page book is more than a story about a road. The Turkey Foot Road, disguised by different names, still takes us where we need to go; and this historic transportation corridor continues to define us today as descendants of those who braved the elements and events of the early American wilderness to make homes, and leave legacies, in a boundless new land of opportunity.

Co-authors Dietle and McKenzie, and Editor Nancy E. Thoerig, found that they share ancestors who traveled this road and settled along it. They suspect that many thousands of Americans similarly can trace their lineage to settlers along the Turkey Foot Road.

Relying on maps, property surveys, aerial photographs, crop marks, landscape scars, oral traditions and local guides (namely Salisbury, Pa. Mayor Harry Ringler, Sr. and Mount Savage amateur historian and archaeologist Francis Bridges), Dietle and McKenzie delineate the route in detail. Assisted with their GPS coordinates, a dedicated hiker might set out to walk the 18th century route from Cumberland to Harnedsville, Pa. The authors also identify key points between Harnedsville and Pittsburgh.

“In its heyday,” Dietle summarizes in the final chapter, “the Turkey Foot Road was an early route west. It helped to settle the towns and environs that interest us most: Barrelville and Mount Savage in Maryland; Wellersburg, Pocahontas, and Salisbury in Pennsylvania.”

Dietle continues, “The road also serviced points farther west, such as Springs, Savage, Confluence, Harnedsville, and so forth, all the way to Pittsburgh. By 1820, the United States population had grown to 9.6 million, and about half of it had moved west of Cumberland. As this tremendous migration and population growth occurred, some of the people along the Turkey Foot Road moved on, helping to settle and populate the great American west.”

The antecedent to the Turkey Foot Road, traditionally called the Turkey Foot Trail, was an Indian trading path. In 1749, the colonies of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland, at the request of the Miami Indians, improved this route to facilitate easier trade between Pickawillany (Piqua), Ohio and Wills Creek (Cumberland), Md.

English trade flourished along this primary corridor into the contested Ohio territory, and tensions with the French mounted. Thus, the early Turkey Foot Road, the authors contend, provoked the first large scale attack of the French and Indian War, at Pickawillany in 1752.

George Washington made the earliest mention of Turkey Foot the authors found, in reference to the confluence of the Casselman River and Laurel Hill Creek with the Youghiogheny River, at present-day Confluence, Pa. Most likely, the authors believe, the road takes its name from this destination.

“In Search of the Turkey Foot Road” is a fascinating read through history in our own backyards. Meticulously researched and abundantly documented, with almost 80 appendices and 460 maps, figures and photos, the book is sure to tickle any reader’s curiosity about the people, places and events that transpire along the Turkey Foot Road.

Drawing upon his ancestral connections and childhood memories in Somerset County, Pa., Dietle writes from his home in Houston, Texas, where he works as principal designer for an engineering firm that makes seals for oilfield equipment.

Descended from one of the first settlers in Mount Savage, McKenzie led the project’s local research endeavors. He lives in Barrelville and works as a diesel locomotive mechanic at the CSX shop in Cumberland.

Proceeds benefit the Mount Savage Historical Society. Visit http://www.mtsavage.info/ to see sample pages, a general overview and chapter summaries, biographies for the co-authors, editor and contributors, and to contact Becky Korns, MSHS secretary, to order.

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NEWS STAFF: For more information on the Turkey Foot Road project, or to arrange an author’s interview, write NancyE.Thoerig@verizon.net.

Turkey Foot Road history becomes personal

Published in Cumberland Times-News Sunday, November 14, 2010.
(Beginning mid-October 2010, the Times-News limited Letters access to online subscribers.)

Historic roads take us where we want to go, and they transport us to where we come from.

Our fortune to live in such a notably historic place in America gives us an advantage, if we explore it, to understand how the past shapes our present. That dynamic becomes personal when “In Search of the Turkey Foot Road: From Fort Cumberland to the North Fork of the Youghiogheny,” by Lannie Dietle and Michael McKenzie, retraces this mostly forgotten early route that breached the barrier of the Allegheny Mountains and opened travel westward for settlers from Wills Creek.

Dietle and McKenzie are collaborators on items and articles of historical interest in nearby southwestern Pennsylvania and northwestern Maryland, posted at Dietle’s family genealogy web site Korns.org. This is their first book. It is a volunteer project to benefit the Mount Savage Historical Society, which plans to publish a CD with a print companion.

Mount Savage was a destination for settlers and travelers along the Turkey Foot Road, an upgrade of ancient Indian trails. At the town’s northern border with Pennsylvania, Arnold’s Settlement sprang up where Archibald Arnold (proprietor of Arnold’s hotel), and Logsdon, Durbin, Mattingly and McKenzie families (and relatives) stopped on their way west from Westminster in Carroll County, Maryland around 1770.

The Turkey Foot Road follows Wills Creek northwest out of Cumberland, and then Jennings Run west to Barrelville, where it tacks up the hillside to join Mile Lane in northeast Mount Savage. Then it scales Bald Knob Road, and at the top of the hill goes northwest to Pocahontas, Pa., then to Salisbury, Confluence, and the Forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh.

As an early traders trail, the route forged on to Pickawillany, Ohio (present-day Piqua), where the French and their Indian allies waged a battle on the English in 1752. In this sense, Dietle and McKenzie suggest, trading activities along the Turkey Foot trail in the contested Ohio territory helped incite the French and Indian War.

George Washington made the earliest mention of Turkey Foot the authors found, in reference to the confluence of the Casselman River and Laurel Hill Creek with the Youghiogheny (at present-day Confluence, Pa.). Most likely, the road takes its name from this destination.

Drawing upon his ancestral connections and childhood memories in Somerset County, Pa., Lannie Dietle writes from his home in Houston, where he works as principal designer for an engineering firm that makes seals for oilfield equipment.

Descended from Gabriel McKenzie, one of the early settlers who accompanied Archibald Arnold, Michael McKenzie led the project’s local research endeavors. He works as a diesel engine mechanic at the CSX Cumberland shop.

It was my pleasure to sign on as editor. The book is a fascinating read, meticulously researched and abundantly documented and illustrated with appendices, maps, figures and photos. It is sure to tickle any reader’s curiosity about the people, places and events that transpire along the Turkey Foot Road.

Dietle, McKenzie and I found that we have ancestors in common. Drucilla Ann McKenzie, a descendant of Gabriel, is my mother’s father’s grandmother. Drusianna’s son Ozias Weimer, my mother’s grandfather, was Johannes Weimer’s great-great-grandson. Ozias married Elizabeth Rose Breig, Martin Weimer’s great-great-granddaughter.

Martin and Johannes Weimer were brothers who emigrated from Langensoultzbach, France (in Alsace, on the border with Germany). Martin Weimer, also Dietle’s ancestor, built the first house in Salisbury, Pa., Dietle documents, and owned property along the Turkey Foot Road.

Visit http://korns.org/Turkey-Foot-Road-Book.pdf to see sample pages from the book; among them are the Table of Contents, and first and last chapters. Watch for announcements about availability; or enquire at MountSavageHistoricalSociety.org.

Is groundwork done for Islam's aggression?

Published in Cumbelrand Times-News Wednesday, October 13, 2010.

In our current smoke-and-mirrors political and social environments, where hypocrisy steamrolls sense, astute educators very rightly
may wonder, “How better might Islam transform America than to confuse the views of America’s youths?”

The Texas State Board of Education’s adoption Sept. 24 of a resolution to reject future textbooks that unfairly represent Islam and Christianity is proactive, given current radical Muslim aggression in America.

Proposed in July by Randy Rives, a school board member in Odessa, Texas, the resolution cites abundant instances in high school history textbooks that the TSBOE agrees document a “pro-Islamic anti-Christian bias.”

The board’s action sends a message to publishers: If it’s biased, we won’t buy it. With about 4.7 million students in K-12 public schools, and contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Texas wields mighty sway in the textbook publishing industry.

In our current smoke-and-mirrors political and social environments, where hypocrisy steamrolls sense, astute educators very rightly may wonder, “How better might Islam transform America than to confuse the views of America’s youths?”

Most Americans recall the horrific 9/11 attack, and object to the Ground Zero mosque. We believe Sharia law is incompatible with American justice, and puzzle over President Obama’s advancement of Islam in America.

We find the President’s radical upbringing undeniable and his liberation theology undesirable; and we hear that radical Muslims intend to influence American foreign policy and redefine America’s Judeo-Christian tradition.

Then a year ago, the Dubai royal family, headed by a sheikh who is “young, ambitious and quite entrepreneurial,” as described on a “history and lineage” website, was “poised to become a major shareholder,” as reported in the July 28, 2009 Independent.ie, in Education Media & Publishing Group.

EMPG owns Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Harcourt Education. The royals “lost (their) stake,” as reported Sept. 23 by MSNBC, when EMPG restructured its debt earlier this year.

Realistic fears of radical Islam’s influence and infiltration hearken back to Communist penetration that took hold in our government and religious institutions from the 1930s into present times. Just three months ago, the FBI arrested and deported 10 Russian spies.

The American Communist Party, founded in 1919, was purported by liberals to be harmless. However, in 1995, the Commission on Government Secrecy published the Venona papers – 2,900 documents of radio messages from top KGB agents in Washington and New York to their superiors in Moscow (1943 to 1948) – that confirmed the American Communist Party did influence American policy, and commit espionage.

Claremont Institute reports: “It is now plain that by 1945 every important branch of the American government…was infested with Communists busily doing the work of the Soviet Union.”

At the same time, Communists infiltrated the Catholic Church. In 1952, Bishop Fulton Sheen converted Bella Dodd, who revealed that as a Communist agent, she recruited young radicals to enter Catholic seminaries.

According to a June 21, 2009 Detroit Examiner article, Dodd confessed: “In the 1930s, we put 1,100 men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within. The idea was for these men to be ordained, and then climb the ladder of influence and authority…. Right now they are in the highest places in the Church.”

The idea of Communist infiltration, writes Clare Kolewski, was to destroy the faith of the people “through the promotion of a pseudo-religion — something that resembled Catholicism but was not the real thing.”

Kolewski goes on: “This would be necessary to shame Church leaders into ‘openness to the world’ and to a more flexible attitude toward all religions and philosophies. The Communists would then exploit this openness in order to undermine the Church.”

Might we wonder if Communist infiltration into our government and values systems, begun as much as 80 years ago, has done groundwork for Islam to “shame” us today, into “opening” our culture to their radical philosophies?

Would this mosque be America's undoing?

Published in Cumberland Times-News Sunday, August 29, 2010.

"So how can a radical Muslim who pledges fidelity to the Koran and (spiritual, if not physical) death to Christians and Jews lay such an impassioned claim to the U.S. Constitution?"

Many believe the Ground Zero mosque symbolizes militant Islam and threatens to undo America’s Judeo-Christian tradition.

On Oct. 22, 2001, six weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll reported that Muslim organizations aim to redefine America’s heritage.

Zoll writes that a post-9/11 study commissioned by the American Jewish Committee shows Muslim organizations in America inflate their numbers, by more than double, to exceed six million.

Six million Jews live here, and by claiming more, Muslims “would buttress calls for a redefinition of America's heritage as 'Judeo-Christian-Muslim,'” ACJ Director David Harris tells Zoll, “a stated goal of some Muslim leaders.”

President Obama’s Aug. 13 mosque endorsement barely got air until Nihad Awad, director of the Washington lobby, Council on American-Islamic Relations (criminally implicated for Hamas support), called other national leaders “to speak out in defense of the freedom of religion…enshrined in our Constitution” (USAToday, Aug. 14).

Our unique Judeo-Christian Constitution establishes America as the world’s grand experiment in religious freedom. Muslim countries do not embrace this concept. So how can a radical Muslim who pledges fidelity to the Koran and (spiritual, if not physical) death to Christians and Jews lay such an impassioned claim to the U.S. Constitution?

Hypocrisy? Mockery? Deception? Would a scoundrel like Awad set out to transform America, in a covert 21st century Conquest? (Google “taqiyya.”)

If not, then he might consider a well-reasoned, common sense precedent in this matter.

In 1984, Carmelite nuns set up a convent in a former administration building at Auschwitz. In 1993, they moved, because Jewish sensibilities -- nearly half a century after the holocaust -- were offended.

The sisters had a legal right to stay, and they had a rightful mission: Praying for the souls who died there, among whom were Polish Franciscan priest St. Maximilian Kolbe (starved Aug. 14, 1941) and Polish Jewish convert and Carmelite nun St. Edith Stein (gassed Aug. 9, 1942).

One of the controversial Carmelites was an Auschwitz survivor. Among more than a million who perished at Auschwitz, 149 were Catholic religious (Auschwitz.org, May 24, 2004) and 600 were Catholic Jews (TheTablet.co.uk, Feb. 13, 1999).

Dr. Ady Steg, a French Jewish leader at the time, blasted Catholic officials: "[T]he Carmelites come to Auschwitz to exalt the triumph of the Church” (Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1987).

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to France, whose mother died at Auschwitz, and Polish Pope John Paul II, who narrowly escaped Nazi capture, empathized.

The nuns relocated to a convent built for them across the street. It houses an information center about the Jewish holocaust.

The nuns, though, did not set out to destroy the country from within. The Muslim Brotherhood, with whom Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf allegedly has ties, does.

In his Sept. 9, 2007 Dallas Morning News commentary, Rod Dreher quotes from an 18-page Muslim Brotherhood document, seized by the FBI:

“The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is…eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ their miserable house…so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions.”

Earlier credit goes to San Ramon Valley (Calif.) Herald reporter Lisa Gardiner for quoting CAIR founder Omar Ahmad on July 4, 1998: “The Koran…should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

If Cordoba House is legitimate, then true moderate Muslims might say, “Move it.” But if those involved, like Awad and Abdul Rauf, intend this mosque to be the axis for America’s undoing, and for world domination by Islam, then we all should say, “No way.”

Liberation theology politicizes Christianity

Published in Cumberland Times-News Tuesday, July 27, 2010.

"Jesus says our Father sent him to stir up the social order, to raise up
the poor and scatter the proud. But Jesus’ radical idea of revolution is a
spiritual wave of individual conversions. The savior’s poverty, and power, is a humble spirit."

Jesus teaches us that our personal relationship with him is the heart of our service to others (Lk. 10:38-42).

Today in America, perhaps emboldened by a President who champions their beliefs, liberation theologians -- and not just black adherents -- are ramping up efforts to remake Christianity into a politicized Christology.

Considering the movement’s genesis, it is unsurprising that President Obama has found friends at University of Notre Dame, where liberation theology founder Gustavo Gutierrez holds a prestigious professorship in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Rev. Gutierrez’ bio at the Institute web site lists Latin America as his focus and “[t]he historical background and continuing theological relevance of the preferential option for the poor” as his current research topic. Gutierrez, a Peru native, is a Dominican priest.

Most associated with the Jesuits and 1960s insurgency in El Salvador, liberation theology hit a high pitch with assassination of San Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed March 24, 1980 because he publicly called Christian Salvadoran soldiers to obey God’s order and honor human dignity, and not follow government orders to oppress, abuse and kill countrymen.

A 12-year civil war ensued. Among 75,000 killed were six Jesuit priests, murdered in their home Nov. 16, 1989.

Fr. Jon Sobrino was not in the rectory that day. He continues to work and teach in El Salvador.

Two of Sobrino’s books published in 1999 are the subject of a Vatican notification to the faithful of March 14, 2007. Fr. Sobrino’s work with the poor is “admirable,” the Vatican writes, but he strays from church doctrine in his theological “presuppositions” that humanize Jesus Christ and neglect his divinity and “the salvific value of his Death.”

Fr. Sobrino’s material, rather than spiritual, view of Jesus and his teachings constructs the premise of liberation theology: That Jesus manifests social liberation from economic and political injustices imposed on the downtrodden by their oppressors -- not personal redemption from sins of immorality.

Along with Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff of Brazil (a former Franciscan priest twice admonished by Rome), and Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay (a Jesuit priest, deceased in 1996), Sobrino was instrumental in formulating this humanistic view of social justice into a modern liturgy.

These liberation theology creators supposedly gained inspiration from the Vatican II document, Lumen Gentium: “the Church encompasses with love all who are afflicted with human suffering and in the poor…sees the image of (Jesus). It does all it can to relieve their need and in them it strives to serve Christ” (Chapter 1, paragraph 8).

Consider Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Like Fr. Gutierrez and the others, she lived among the world’s poorest outcasts and devoted her life to improving their condition. Unlike the priests, however, she embraced Jesus’ spiritual poverty, his acceptance of suffering and surrender to God’s will, and his divine power to show us the way to heaven.

Jesus says our Father sent him to stir up the social order, to raise up the poor and scatter the proud. But Jesus’ radical idea of revolution is a spiritual wave of individual conversions. The savior’s poverty, and power, is a humble spirit.

Salvation history, Jesus teaches, is God’s domain, not man’s. Our monumental spiritual task in our puny human existence is to transcend injustices with charity and forgiveness.

Largely diminished in Latin America after Rome’s 1984 rebuke of Marxist (and underlying atheist) concepts, liberation theology remains a current among liberal Catholics and a prominent force in American black churches.

Among notable U.S. liberation theologians is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose 1990 sermon “The Audacity to Hope” inspired the beliefs of longtime Trinity United Church of Christ member Barack Obama.