In Tiny Md. Town, Everyone Has a Say

Her next-door neighbor, village Treasurer Jerry Volman, admitted that he was the one who proposed abolition in 2002, when the town voted to retain itself.

"We meet as needed once or twice a year. We don't have any employees. We don't have an office. We don't have a phone number. We don't even have a post office box," Volman said. "As for politics in Port Tobacco, there isn't any."

Last year, the town did manage to collect $22,683 in revenue sharing from state income tax, along with a token town tax. Although the single largest expense, $1,375, went to pay the accountant to prepare the annual report. Funds have also been used to pay for mosquito spraying, garbage pickup, streetlights and new gravel on Cheapside Street.

The village still operates under a charter from 1888 that doesn't allow women to be elected officials, imposes a $1 tax on every dog ($5 for a female dog) and prohibits any person from allowing "his swine to run at large within said village."

"We've never officially changed any law," Hyde said. "We just don't enforce them."

At one time, Port Tobacco rivaled Williamsburg and Philadelphia among the ports of the colonies, said Jay Lilly, president of the Society for the Restoration of Port Tobacco. English explorer John Smith is said to have visited the site around 1608 and mingled with the Potopaco Indians. (Residents say the town did not get its name from tobacco, the popular Southern Maryland crop, but from corrupting the name of the Native American tribe.) But by the 1790s, silt from neighboring farmland had filled in the river and made the port unreachable for large ships.

Fire struck the fatal blow. In 1892, the courthouse was burned, but not before town documents had been stacked on the lawn. Suspicion flew to neighbors in La Plata, who had been angling for more power since they acquired a railroad. If it was arson, it was not prosecuted, and in "the half century that followed," wrote James Barbour in a booklet of town history, "the historic village became a ghost town which almost completely buried its past."

What remains is idyllic. The impeccable Colonial homes are landscaped with weeping willows, spirea shrubs and cherry trees. Great blue herons flap slowly over to the creek, and the silence is disturbed only by the gobbling of wild turkeys. In 2000, the average age was 55 and the median income surpassed $100,000. The county provides the firefighters and police officers, although no one can recall a crime, and everyone seems to be friends.

"Oh gosh, yeah, we talk to each other all the time," said Cathy Compton, 55, a piano teacher who is married to Village Secretary Calvin L. Compton Jr. "We all like each other a lot. We all have a lot in common: gardening, flowers. . . .

"I'm the old-fashioned type. I love to can. I love to bake. I do handicrafts. I like the home arts -- that's my thing," she said. "We're pretty happy with the way things are. I think the biggest dispute was, 'Why did you plant roses when I didn't?' "

As the mayor of a place where nothing much happens, Hyde has developed a certain single-mindedness for what he wants to accomplish. This philosophy, he admitted, conflicts with his occasional absent-mindedness.

"Before I became mayor, I wasn't paying attention" to the town, he said. "I'm hardly paying attention now."

Hyde's big project is to restore what is known as the Catslide House, a circa 1720 two-story building with a steeply slanted back roof that was renovated in 1984 and used as a children's museum for some time. It has since fallen into paint-peeling decrepitude. Raccoons root around it, and visitors peer through the dusty windows at the old spinning wheel and iron tools.

"I think a new Catslide House would do a lot to ignite interest in our town," Hyde said.

Lilly, of the Society for the Restoration of Port Tobacco, said that a contractor is lined up and that if work gets underway soon, as planned, it could even be an accomplishment Hyde could campaign on.

It's about that time. The charter calls for elections every two years in April, but with the courthouse being painted, there was talk that it would be moved to May.

But come to think of it, Hyde isn't really sure when the last election took place. The Charles County Board of Elections doesn't keep records on the town. Volman, the treasurer, said that his town files are somewhere in his house but that he just doesn't know where. The last election is a distant memory for him, too.

"I don't have a clue when the last time it was, but it's been a long time," he said.

If nobody minds much, Hyde said, he would probably just keep being mayor. What with everyone being so busy and all.