‘The Sun’ shines on Market Day
Last winter, I discovered in the Cylburn mansion house a treasure trove of canceled checks and bills of sale — and a shelf of scrapbooks that held yellowed newspaper clippings, most from The Baltimore Sun. For hours, sitting in a shaft of morning sunlight, I paged through announcements, news articles, profiles and op-ed pieces by writers like Isaac Rehert, Amalie Adler Ascher, Francis Rackemann, Stephanie Shapiro and the incomparable Jacques Kelly.
A harsh light has been cast on journalists since the 2016 election, calling into question how the media construct our world as they capture our world. I read daily newspapers these days with dark unease. The scrapbooks warmed my heart.
Many of the articles focused on Cylburn Market Day, a day begun 50 years ago this month when — rain or shine — folks flock to the Cylburn Arboretum in Northwest Baltimore to buy plants and wildflowers, native and rare, for their spring gardens.
In 1968, Market Day (inspired by Mrs. T. Frederick Mulvenny, president of the Cylburn Wildflower Preserve and Garden Center) was clearly something “new” — a bold initiative to raise funds for nature study for adults and children from across the city. The newspaper coverage was ample and enthusiastic.
As this annual event became old news, year after year The Sun still found Market Day newsworthy — even though the paper had been covering life at Cylburn for a century. The stone mansion was built in 1863 by Jesse Tyson as a summer home for his widowed mother. She died before it was completed, leaving her son to live a bachelor life until, at 61, he fell in love with a 19-year-old Baltimore debutante, Edyth Johns. Truly newsworthy! So was their May-December marriage in 1888 when Jesse’s sister-in-law died the morning of the wedding and a huge reception was canceled. As the couple lived happily ever after, the wealthy Tysons (the family’s fortune made in chrome) filled the society pages of The Sun as did Edyth and her second husband, Bruce Cotten.
The Cylburn scrapbooks hold glowing accounts of 50 Market Days with only occasional suppression of fact — no one reports that there were mud puddles at 9 a.m., that marigolds sold out by 10, or that women wore ridiculous hats. But readers never shook their heads over “fake news,” either.
Cylburn did pose a greater challenge for reporters when, during the 1970s and ’80s, the city proposed first to build Coldspring Newtown and then to expand it. The Sun provided full, factual and fair-minded coverage. In an odd coincidence, a current debate over proposed development next to the Bare Hills land at Lake Roland that belonged to Jesse Tyson has set another high bar for journalistic integrity.
In “News of the World,” Paulette Giles recounts a time in the wild West when a traveler with a packet of newspapers set up in a public spot and read to avid listeners. As I page through the tattered Market Day scrapbooks, I wonder why, after 50 years, Cylburn Market Day is still considered newsworthy — but perhaps a penchant to read each spring about Cylburn has less to do with “new” than with “renewal.”
Every April spring arrives anew. Market Day anchors civic ritual, a way to share relief at recurrence, to count on the cycle of seasons. Baltimoreans celebrated the solar eclipse at Cylburn last summer with equal fervor. We saw only a partial eclipse, but it was dramatic enough to make one shiver as the world grew dark — and to rejoice as it again grew light.
The masthead of The New York Times promises “all the news that’s fit to print.” The Washington Post’s says “democracy dies in darkness.” The Baltimore Sun’s masthead reads “light for all.” Across the city, for its readers, The Sun’s daily news illuminates; it unfolds as inevitably as grass and green leaves, emerging as spring beauties spread like sunlight along the Cylburn walks and trails.