DORCHESTER COUNTY, Md. — Chances are, you cannot remember your Sunday school teacher. They can on Smithville Road in Dorchester County.
It was Bo Bo. Deborah Pugh introduced us to her incredible family that grew up on Taylor’s Island.
Her entire family is out to make us all remember this family’s history.
Luther Cornish walks out of his house using three legs, one of which is a cane. The only time he takes his hand off of it, is to show us how big the can was that he stuffed with the catch of the day out of the water from the Blackwater Refuge.
“I forget fast,” said the man approaching an age we can only dream of. He says plain and simple, “don’ throw history away.”
Mention Smithville Road around these parts and you will get a gush from a grown woman acting seven again. The road looks like an autobahn now, but was once a dirt road, upgraded to a gravel road and now it’s a pave road.
It has produced Four Star Generals, business executives and pastors.
But the one symbol that keeps this community together is the church, New Revived United Methodist Church.
.
Even though the family built the church, rebuilt the church, they do not own the church. The trust clause in the United Methodist Church (UMC) states that the UMC owns it and that is the way it has been for years.
Pugh and her brother General Larry Ellis are now doing the paperwork to put the church on the National Registry so that the church is protected forever and ever.
This family wants to preserve their history of Smithville Road.
