EDITOR’S PREFACEEDITOR’S PREFACE

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER with a plumbing problem was the catalyst for this book. In 1985 Stanley and Marian Quick moved into a house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland near a small town called Rock Hall. Carvill Hall, built in 1695, once belonged to a prominent regional family, the Carvills. When Stanley and Marian moved into the house, it had already been through at least two major renovations. The first occurred sometime during or immediately after the War of 1812. The second came along much later when the owners added electrical service.

It was that first renovation that caught Stanley’s attention. He noticed what he called “scars” on some of the bricks and stones he thought the original renovation had caused. Nevertheless, it was clear the Carvills had tried to preserve and reuse the materials from the original house. They had enlarged the house, but the old foundation and the signature of the first chimney were apparent.

Soon after Stanley and Marian moved in, a pipe burst in the ceiling, ruining plaster and wall boards in the original part of the home. The Quicks took on a fourteen-week remodel job, and it was then when Stanley had his eureka moment. “One night, sitting alone amidst the mess, it suddenly occurred to me that the Carvill renovation could not have been a voluntary undertaking to modernize the interior and styling,” Stanley recalled. “Like us, they had to do it.”

This realization set Stanley off on a quest to find out the story behind his new home. The search took him to libraries in London and Washington, and to historical societies all around the Eastern Shore. He soon learned that his home had been a focal point of a small, sharply contested British raid during the War of 1812, that the local militia had defended the place, and battle damage was the reason for the first renovation. All of this intrigued Stanley, although at first he confined his research to his home before broadening it to include the raid and the nearby Battle of Caulk’s Field. He then decided to tackle the entire British campaign in the Chesapeake. His research was meticulous and all encompassing, and he packed as much detail as he possibly could into his manuscript. Stanley spent twenty-three years on his manuscript, but unfortunately he never had the chance to finish it. He passed away in 2008. Luckily, his manuscript found its way to the Naval Institute Press, where my editor, Adam Kane, believed it was a project that an old rewrite editor could sink his teeth into.

My usual area of expertise is biographies; while I was a journalist I often had the assignment of conducting the “big interview.” Add in my other areas of interest—old sailboats, cannons, and Marines—and this appeared to be an easy match. It was, up to a point. I found it difficult at times to maintain Stanley’s sentence structure and syntax—his voice—as I attempted to focus his sweeping narrative. Stanley passed away before he could write his chapters on the seminal events of 1814—the attacks on Washington, D.C., and Baltimore—so those also fell to me to complete. All told, what we thought would be a quick six-month edit became an eighteen-month odyssey filled with frustration, discovery, and a great deal of learning. I wish I could have met Stanley, because his passion for the history of the Eastern Shore was both unmatched and contagious.

There are a great many people I could thank for their help in this project, but I don’t think it is my place to do so. This book is Stanley’s, not mine. I am just the closer, the Mariano Rivera to his Andy Pettitte; and yes, I can make a Yankees reference because Stanley, like me, hailed from the New York City metro area. If I could be presumptuous for a moment, I would like to express my deepest thanks to the officers and Marines at 8th and I, Marine Barracks Washington. Their great interest in my research into the Marines’ actions in the Chesapeake served as an inspiration on those days when I would have rather been sailing than sitting in a library. I would also like to thank the reviewers Adam lined up—the setup guys who are the unheralded part of any book. As always, the Naval Institute Press did a first-rate job in ensuring the story Stanley and, to a small extent, I tell is an accurate one.

I hope I have done justice to Stanley’s passion and that this book will ensure the endurance of the story of Carvill Hall and the dark days of the British invasion—and the bright days of American valor.

—Chipp Reid

Annapolis, Maryland

June 2014