DESPITE WIND, RAIN, AND TWO HUNDRED YEARS, KAMERER’S OLD STONE FORTRESS SURVIVES
By David Cottingham
Ludwig Kramerer was not a house-builder by trade, nor was he either a carpenter or a mason. Like most of his contemporaries on Maryland's western frontier in the 18th century, however, the lack of experience is building did not make him falter in his purpose. He tried to recreate, as well as his memory served him, the sturdy structures that he had seen and known in his native Germany.
With broad-axe and adz he shaped the logs that were to become the sub-floor of his house's first floor. They were massive=six inches thick by perhaps 16 inches wide=and he chinked between them with mud mortar. Unfortunately, they'd have been much stronger had they been smaller and placed with their greater dimension vertical. The floors must have started to sag soon after the house was completed as each puncheon bowed longitudinally from its own suspended weight.
He built his chimney centrally in the house, as was the German custom, so that fireplaces at various levels could share the service of that lone, raked, brick draft chamber.
Frontier houses in this area built in the same period by English settlers invariably had chimneys located on gable walls at either end of the structure.
The basement of the Kamerer house is divided into two rooms, one embracing the spring, with adjacent area for food storage: the other a kitchen dominated by a nine foot wide stone fireplace and arched bake oven. A steep winding staircase connects this room with the first floor, which has a small entrance hallway similar to that in the Hager House. Another steep staircase leads to the attic level, which is divided into small rooms by wide-board partitions.
The initials chiseled into thick mortar on the tombstone style date plaque of this house attest to the plight of German surnames in the official record of an English colony -even long after its colonial status had ended. When Luke Kamerer finally sold his homestead to Elias Brumbaugh, in 1815, the deed of conveyance list the original owner's name as "Camerer" with a "C" Whether he liked it or not, since he probably spoke little English, Ludwig Kamerer's name had become anglicized
Early in its history, the Kamerer property had become known as "Buck Spring Farm" presumably in reference to the spring over which the house was built. Many traditions have been handed down regarding the house, including the supposition that a windowless room on the attic level had been designed as a "slave Pen" This is highly, unlikely, since the religious scruples of German immigrants precluded their owning slaves. But a windowless room = an ideal place for storing apples and potatoes = is almost inescapable in a partitioned attic which has only two gable windows and no dormers.
Only four families have owned Buck Spring Farm. The Brumbaugh and Hartle families owned it from 1805 until 1961 when the Cloppers bought it from the Hartle heirs.