Post by Pat (Friend) Thompson on Jun 10, 2006 18:30:37 GMT -5
"Garrett County, A History of Maryland's Tableland, by Stephen Schlosnagle" page 53, While farmers were plowing fields and girdling trees in Blooming Rose, another settlement was gradually growing along the Youghiogheny about two miles to the east at the site of John Friend's first Garrett County home - Friendsville. Friend's Post Office was established there on January 7, 1830, with Gabriel Friend serving as the first postmaster. The name of the office was shortened two years later to Friendsville. Friendsville Town itself grew with the development of the Allegany Iron Company, incorporated in 1828. ............... in 1839 the iron business in Friendsville died. On October 10, 1839, the Allegany County sheriff sold at public auction all property of the heavily-indebted Youghiogheny Iron Company, 'the reason assigned for closing ' later explained the local Reverend D. A. Friend, was due to the cost of transportation which consumed most of the profits. Tobacco was an early crop of the Friend settlement, but its production was soon halted, as it was elsewhere in western Maryland, after a few brief growing seasons, due to high costs of transportation to markets and depletion of the soil. ........The settlement grew..........as a center for the work of pioneer tradesmen and a place to barter for the exchange of goods and services. By 1860 the goods and services offered in Friendsville were quite numerous and diverse. page 56 John Friend, Garrett County's earliest permanent settler, died before the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century at the town he had helped found. "According to the story handed down to us, " a descendant later recorded, "it was on a winter's night, and all others of the family for some cause were absent except the old man and a granddaughter. In the evening he laid down on a deerskin with his feet toward the fire, as was his usual custom. When bedtime came the girl said to him, "Grandfather, get up now, and go to bed, for it's getting late." He replied, 'I believe I'll just lie here awhile yet.' Then he called her to him and said in a gentle tone, 'Daughter, if Grandfather should die tonight do you think you would be afraid?' She replied, 'O no, Grandfather, I don't think I would.' Her suspicions being aroused by this remark, she took an easy chair and sat by him for awhile when he seemed to go to sleep. Upon his being so very still she investigated and found Grandfather had gone to the happy country beyond. She gently folded his hands across his breast and then retired to bed and slept as though nothing out of the ordinary had taken place." .......the Friend family discovered a hill about seven miles south of their home on which ginseng, whose medicinal roots had been highly prized by the Chinese for centuries as a restorer of waning vitality and virility, grew in abundance. They named the bluff Ginseng Hill, but the stream at its base became known simply as Sang Run. John Friend discovered the cave now bearing his name, John Friend's Cave, in the vicinity in 1765. At the same time, he found the remains of Indian cornfields in the area and watched buffalo graze in the local glades. His brother, Augustine, settled along Sang Run in the late 1700's before moving to the Big Boiling Spring at Buffalo Marsh. Another son, John, Jr., settled in the Sanging Ground in 1796. Two years later a party of federal surveyors presented John Friend, Jr., with a two-hundred acre parcel of land at the mouth of Sang Run on the Youghiogheny in exchange for food and shelter. Friend was pleased with the bargain and named his tract Friend's Delight. The tract later became known as The Green of Sang Run; today it is simply referred to as The Community Park.