In York County, Neil King Jr. wrote, fences coming down and memories freed

When Neil King Jr. walked through the towns of York County, he was on a 330-mile journey to discover what matters in life.

Part of that 2021 walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City was a quest for personal renewal in the years after his initial bout with cancer.

He strolled into York County with questions about this region’s sometimes troubled racial past. And in his three-day journey along urban streets and rolling countryside, he grew to appreciate that concerned residents and particularly the history community are on a quest to dig into this past, understand it, learn from moments of failure and apply those lessons going forward.

In 2023, he put his outsider’s view of what’s happening inside York County onto the pages of his best-selling book “American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal.”

Neil became a friend to me and many others in York County, and it was a sad day to learn that in September he died from cancer at age 65.

Doing his homework

York County, with its proximity to Washington, D.C., and other big cities, has been a favorite destination for visiting journalists and historians over the years. Some hit and run, and end up characterizing York as a hardscrabble river town, wrong on both accounts. York is far from barren and is a good dozen miles from the Susquehanna.

Many seek briefings in advance, and I send them links to stories that I believe do a good job of explaining the county. It’s not always apparent that they have read them when I meet up with them.

York County is a hard place for those parachuting in to capture, as numerous consultants over the years have found in trying to brand or give an identity to our complex border county.  We are west of the Susquehanna and north of Baltimore without a marquee historical moment or compelling product to tout. You know, like chocolate or the Amish.

We’re both a Northern county with a Southern exposure and a Southern county with a Northern exposure. Before 1800, the county’s 65-mile border represented about 30% of the Mason-Dixon Line, and today that wide border measures 40 miles.

When I received the first email from Neil about 2020, I sensed his inquiry was authentic. For starters, he had already done much research about our county. He wanted to know more, so I sent him my usual assortment of background links and added a few more to sate his deep curiosity.

And he actually read them.

When he and I first met in person during his walk, I had prepared a PowerPoint to frame our conversation, which he later poked at in a good-natured way in “American Ramble.” He had his own set of questions, and several slides in, he considered it unnecessary to review more. He already had done his homework.

Before he closed the latch of his Washington, D.C., home’s gate and headed north, he had asked me about York County memory keepers whom he should meet. I suggested Samantha Dorm, part of a team restoring the historically Black Lebanon Cemetery in North York, and Paul Nevin, a York countian expert on Indian rock carvings in the Susquehanna. Neil was interested in those river petroglyphs from the beginning.

I also suggested Michael Helfrich, York’s mayor and a historian. Helfrich would later gain Neil’s nod as the most striking person he met on his journey, a mayor “who lived a life saturated by the minutiae of the 18th century while also wrestling with the endless complexities of governing today.” Helfrich, Dorm and Nevin appeared in the roughly three chapters of “American Ramble” devoted to York County and the Susquehanna.

I also suggested Newberrytown resident agricultural historian Jamie Noerpel as a memory keeper to engage with, and he later appeared on “Hometown History,” a YouTube series that Noerpel helps direct.

One of Neil’s greatest gifts was his ability to win the confidence of those he talked with, likely honed from long years covering Europe for The Wall Street Journal. An important skill in that regard is to take a genuine interest in the topic and the people you engage with.

Neil came to understand the three corners of York County and its 900-plus square miles. He did the work.

‘Memory Boom’ underway

I would compare Neil’s budding influence on York County with that of another outsider, David Rusk, the noted urban planner who wrote three reports designed to, really, encourage county residents to think differently.

Rusk’s influence changed traffic patterns in York to route motorists into the city rather than flee it and initiated thinking about York Academy Regional Charter School, thereby involving York city, York Suburban and Central York school districts. And his idea to devote 1 mill of York County taxes, in part, for farmland preservation to address sprawl was adopted by the county commissioners, though at a reduced rate.

The thing that separates Rusk and Neil from outside branding experts who have tried to assess York County is that they looked at its formation — what a dry-eyed assessment of what worked and needed work. A parade of marketing consultants have unsatisfactorily focused on performance — image and brand and the like — that overlaid an often shaky community foundation.

Neil’s influence is less project oriented than Rusk’s, but more aspirational and hopeful. Two challenges for York County in Neil’s work immediately come to mind, the first of which I took to heart.

Neil was intrigued by the community decision-making and politics behind York’s surrender to the Confederates and that 1863 moment’s legacy.

Most 21st-century historians who have studied the Civil War believe the town’s fathers twice seeking out the Confederates to surrender was unnecessary and cost the town its honor. That loss of honor, I believe, caused the York area to bury public memory of the Civil War for most of the 20th century.

With the Civil War absent, so was meaningful dialogue on a related matter: We did not come to grips with our troubled racial past.

In conversations on his walk, Neil found that some area leaders still believe York was justified in seeking out the enemy to surrender in a theater of war. The problem with those holding to this idea 160 years later is that they are inadvertently justifying the town’s Civil War-era sympathy with the Confederates. The enemy, after all, was in force on county soil in the fight to maintain the institution of slavery.

Since Neil’s visit, I’ve started from scratch in exploring the self-interested actions of some behind the surrender decision in 1863. For example, certain key leaders surrendered York but did not pay the subsequent demands for money from the Confederates when many of lesser means shared scarce funds.

And I promoted Civil War historian Scott Mingus’ research that shows that York was the only town in the Confederate path in the North whose leaders traveled through enemy lines to surrender. As I told Neil in an email, when it came to Civil War studies, his visit “kicked the skunk,” and that was me.

On the right path

The most important observations from Neil in “American Ramble” provide an encouragement that the county is on the right path in seeking to bring its past to the public square in search of understanding.

“York is in the midst of a memory boom now. It is shaking off its long amnesia,” he wrote, “and is digging up and chronicling and remembering and depicting and translating into art and murals every imaginable aspect of its past, good and bad, comfortable and uncomfortable.”

This is not a nostalgia, he writes, for some great time in the past. Think the opposite.

“It is an active and aggressive confronting of the past, both the paved-over scars but also the unheralded heroes and forgotten giants,” he wrote. “Some national version of this, I thought, would be so good for the national psyche.”

A well-informed outside voice, thus, holds up York County as a national model.

Fences coming down

In the big picture, “American Ramble” shows that Neil, in his pilgrimage, discovered a sense of what really matters most in life through the spiritual life and testimony of a Mennonite group in Lancaster County.

As for York County, Neil told me that he hoped to return someday to walk the Mason-Dixon Line that so fascinated him. I don’t think he was able to make that trip. I’m sure that if he had, his observations would have been equally valuable.

And likely with some degree of encouragement about what’s going on in the county.

He ended his chapter about his visit to York city with a story.

He had written an essay about a field on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where abolitionist Frederick Douglass had a famous brawl. After its publication, the owner of the land nailed “No Trespassing” signs to fence posts to keep away the curious.

“Here in York,” Neil wrote, “the opposite was happening. Fences were coming down and the memories freed.”

Sources: Neil King Jr., “American Ramble,” Amazon.com; William Ecenbarger, “Walkin’ the Line”; YDR files.

Public events

James McClure will speak about “York County at 275: Telling Stories about the Stream of History — and Its Banks,” with stories about Marquis de Lafayette, New Freedom Heritage, 7 p.m. Oct. 10, Scout House, Veterans Drive. Also, he will do his “York County at 275” talk at the Dillsburg Library, 6:30 p.m. Oct. 28.

He will present on “Fascinating things about Mount Wolf and its region,” 6 p.m. Oct. 15, at the Northeastern York County History in Preservation’s museum, York Haven Borough Office, 2 N. Front St. These presentations are free and open to the public, and he will sign his books as part of the event.

Jim McClure is a retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com .

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: In York County, Neil King Jr. wrote, fences coming down and memories freed