In the book You Wouldn’t Believe! storyteller Jim Duffy serves up 44 Strange and Wondrous Delmarva Tales that run the gamut from true crime to romance and adventure and comedy. Every story is true. Every chapter is a story unto itself, perfect for relaxed flipping and browsing. Here is one of the true-crime chapters:
The last time I was in Charlestown, on Maryland’s Upper Eastern Shore, I didn’t pay the slightest attention to a little spit of water called Peddler’s Run. There were lots of better-known things to gawk at in this history-laden piece of Cecil County—the gorgeous waterfront on the North East River, a bevy of interesting colonial-era buildings, and the various signs summarizing stories from days gone by. Charlestown had some brushes with greatness back in its heyday–Benjamin Franklin and George Washington spent time here during their travels.
But I wish I’d known to look for that itty-bitty stream. Its presence speaks to what life was like on the Delmarva Peninsula in colonial times. Think romantic dates, old-time fiddling, drunken benders, an unspeakable crime, and, perhaps, a headless ghost.
A Colonial Fair for the Ages
As historic towns go, Charlestown is like a comet—its time in the limelight was brief but brilliant. The folks who started the town in the 1740s were supremely confident that it would soon surpass Baltimore as the metropolis of the Upper Chesapeake Bay. Things got off to a promising start, actually. One reason for that was the success of the Charlestown Fair.
First held in May 1744, the fair was a colonial version of our modern downtown block parties. They shut down the streets for a mix of entertainment and commerce that drew patrons from near and far. In some years, Charlestown hosted multiple fairs, with events in April, May, and October.
Merchants came from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other towns, setting up shop on the town square in “rude structures made of bushes” that measured 10 feet by 10 feet. Interestingly, that’s the same footprint made available to vendors at many Delmarva events nowadays. The rental fee was seven shillings and sixpence.
Festivalgoers, too, came from all over, arriving by boat or on horseback or aboard Conestoga wagons. Here is historian George Johnston, writing in 1881:
[They] came from distant parts of Chester and Lancaster counties [in Pennsylvania] … to see the sights and have a frolic, and sometimes to settle the feuds and quarrels that had existed in the neighborhood where they lived. … [There was] fiddling and dancing, as well as frolicking and fighting.
The fairs were especially popular with Irish immigrants, Johnston says:
They had walked barefoot many weary miles, … for it was customary [in their native land] for the females who traveled to [such a] fair on foot to carry their shoes and stockings in their hands, and when they arrived at the outskirts of town to wash their feet in a convenient stream, after which they put on their shoes and stockings and entered the town.
Quite a few of those lasses probably washed their feet in Peddler’s Run.
Postcard shows aerial view of Charlestown
Fishermen, too, flocked to the fairs, especially when the events coincided with the close of “fisher,” or the end of the fishing season on the Susquehanna and other nearby rivers. In 1807, to cite just one year at random, 16,000 barrels of shad and herring were cured and packed annually in Cecil County. The Baltimore Sun talked about those fishermen in a 1933 article looking back at the history of the fair:
Sober as they were at home, the travelers often partook too freely of the flowing bowl–and at the Charlestown Fair, they became riotous. The fair became a menace.
But the fair was glorious in many other respects. Women shopped for items that were usually available only in big cities. Those Irish couples danced to fiddle music. Vendors at the fair were the ones who introduced the exotic beverages of tea and coffee to locals, selling packets complete with printed instructions on preparing those newfangled concoctions. Coffee was much more popular than tea.
The Stream Runs Red
The story of how Peddler’s Run got its name is drenched in blood. I have come across two versions, one by the aforementioned historian George Johnston in his book History of Cecil County, Maryland and one by a correspondent writing under the name “Azton” in the Cecil Whig newspaper in 1871.
Azton claims to be quoting from a diary-like telling of the incident by another anonymous gentleman who in turn “obtained his information from a reliable source.” That source is described as straight “from the lips of an aged man … who now slumbers in the silent tomb.” Azton’s tale begins with this scene-setter:
Those who have ever traveled the road from Charlestown to the village of North East must be familiar with a small streamlet that crosses the road about one and a half miles from the former place, and known by the name of Peddler’s Run. This little gurgling stream glides smoothly and silently along in its wandering course, unconscious that its crystal waters had ever been crimsoned by the life-blood of the murdered, and here too the wild bird of the forest pauses in his onward flight, alights to cool his fluttering wing therein, little dreaming of the dark crime that hangs around this spot.
The victim of that dark crime was a vendor at the Charlestown Fair, though there is no record of his name. Azton claims that he is buried near the spot where today’s Route 267 (Bladen Street) crosses Peddler’s Run. He says that a “rude” headstone once marked the spot. The crime occurred during the fair in or around the year 1785. Here is Azton again:
Replica Colonial-Era Wharf on the North East River
The black-hearted villain who perpetrated this dark deed of a crime, after having stabbed his victim a number of times, dragged his lifeless body into the bushes nearby, and after having robbed him of his purse, and whatever property of value that might be found upon his person, was about to leave his victim to his fate, when his attention was arrested by the clattering of horses’ feet.
The killer panicked. Desperate to stay out of sight of the approaching riders, he climbed a nearby tree. The horses came to a stop at the stream. The riders led the animals to the shore, urging them to drink.
But no sooner had they put their noses to the water than they threw them high in the air and gave each a wild snort, and their riders could not prevail upon them to taste of the water of this troubled stream.
The riders started nosing around. Why were the horses spooked?
They had proceeded but a few steps when one of them discovered what appeared to be a drop of blood upon a stone.
There was more blood nearby. That peddler’s body turned up. They spotted the murderer hiding in the tree. The two riders took the man into custody. He was later tried, found guilty, and, in Azton’s account, “executed on the spot where the murder was committed.”
The historian Johnston tried to find an official account of the case in the county records, but came up empty. The only legal remnant of the case is this:
The stream is yet known by the name of Peddler’s Run.
Postscript: Ghostly Visions
As the new country took shape in the decades after the Revolutionary War, Charlestown lost its luster as a rising-star town. It was in the running to be named the seat of Cecil County, but lost out to nearby Elkton. Merchants started bypassing Charlestown in favor of towns like Baltimore and Havre de Grace. The fairs that began in the 1740s continued for nearly a century, finally dying out in the late 1820s.
The back cover of “You Wouldn’t Believe”
There is one postscript that needs to be added here, however. It comes courtesy of our friend Azton:
Often when a boy, have I listened to the many strange stories told by the superstitious, who have had occasion to pass by this spot after night had set in, of a peddler without head that might often be seen there. Did time permit, I might tell you many strange things concerning this haunted stream, but perhaps I have already occupied too much of your time and will, for the present, close.
I am thinking that when I finally do go looking for Peddler’s Run, I will do so during daylight hours.
–posted by Jim Duffy in November 2025 for Whimbrel Creations LLC/Secrets of the Eastern Shore. All rights reserved. This replaces an earlier draft version of the piece that was posted in 2020.
About the Book
Thanks for spending a few minutes with this excerpt and on this site! If you want to get a feel for the sorts of stories that are in You Wouldn’t Believe!, check out the image above of the book’s back cover. Or go to this link.
