“And in almost every cottage, a slave,” Trollope observed. Every home she visited seemed to subsist on four staples: pork fat, salted herrings, cornbread and whiskey. Farmsteads were ramshackle affairs, hardly reflective of the fabled land of opportunity. She saw fields worn out by years of tobacco, lying fallow and unproductive. If the natural landscape was captivating to Trollope, though, the human landscape was not. Yet it was a great delight to sit upon a high and jutting crag, and look and listen.”
“The dark deep gulf which yawns before you, the foaming, roaring cataract, the eddying whirlpool, and the giddy precipice, all seem to threaten life, and to appall the senses. “The falls of the Potomac are awfully sublime,” Trollope wrote. She and a small party trekked two miles through the woods from the manor house to get there, where she beheld a spectacle unlike any seen in England. Strawberries in full bloom, violets, anemones and wild pinks covered the ground.īut it was the Great Falls of the Potomac River that made the biggest impression. Cedars, tulip poplars, junipers and tall, ancient oaks shaded the paths that wound throughout the estate. It “perfectly astonished us by the profusion of her wild fruits and flowers,” she later wrote. Immediately, Trollope was taken by the beauty of the Montgomery County countryside. She had come to summer at Stonington, a friend’s Potomac estate near Great Falls. In 1830, Frances Trollope-a petite Englishwoman whose acidic wit would later earn her the sobriquet “Old Madam Vinegar”-arrived in Montgomery County, Maryland, with three children in tow.
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