HENRY'S CROSSROADS DORCHESTER COUNTY.

HENRY'S CROSSROADS

DORCHESTER COUNTY, MARYLAND

ON THE NANTICOKE RIVER

Henry's Crossroads if you don't mind mosquitoes and sheep flies, this is the perfect place to be. No condominiums, mini malls, or traffic jams, just blessed peace and quite in abundance.

Here, right in mid down town Henry's Crossroads, well off the beaten path, live Virginia and Tom Tyler. Now that's a Dorchester county name if ever there was one. They live in what the locals still call Crossroads Store, at the crossroads of Lewis Wharf Road , Elliotts IslandRoad and Drawbridge Road. Sometime in the 1970's they bought the store and an it for two years. It was not a money maker, just a convenience store for the locals, so it was closed. Even after it closed, people would stop, knock on the door, not knowing the century old place wasclosed up.
It was a typical country store, a gathering place for the men to gossip, play cards or checkers, tell their fibs and have a coke or two.

Just to drive by one will say this place is isolated and uninteresting. Looks are deceiving, that is not the case.

The patch of green grass across the road of the old store once held a boat building businessof Powell Horseman, another Dorchester county name if there ever was one. The building was not always a workshop, it was a church with tales of ghosts and a mysterious treasurer, the Wainwrights Church which held the best camp meetings with good Eastern Shorecooking.

Jesse Wainwright had the church built and gave it to the community in the mid 1800's as a gift. What makes this 'gift' so extraordinary is that everybody knew Waunwright was so

poor he almost starved to death. Wainwright lived a bit south in an 18^th century brick house,

and the story goes that while digging his cellar larger he found a pot of gold coins. This

story has a source of historic fact, rumor or no. The fact was that a slave boy who did the

actual digging told the story to his father who told it many times at the Crossroads Store.

Then there is the ghost haunting the house and nearby Ghost Island who is seen with a wood

box. Is the ghost the real owner of the gold.

Anyway, Wainwright paid off his mortage, then sold the farm and moved away and

after WW II the church gave way, many service men did not return to the Crossroads but moved to better jobs. The church closed in 1946.

There now is the Crossroads Methodist Church , the only black church around and a brick home that was once a one room school house.

Henry's Crossroads got the name from the owner of Weston, John Henry, once a Maryland Governor.

Another story is that during the Civil War, southern sympathizers from Vienna,

loaded supplies at Lewis Wharf, brought to the wharf by horse and wagon, the horse hooves

wrapped with burlap bags to deaden the sound, and shipped to Confederates.

Maybe Wainwrights pot of gold was payment for that.

Salisbury Daily Times, January 13, 1993