Buried Pirate Treasure in Curtis Bay?
Long-Lost Story Describes Fortune Seekers Digging Deep in Hawkins Point
Pirates and privateers were a staple in the waters off Baltimore Town in the late 1600s and early 1700s. But did the legendary Bluebeard bury the spoils of his pirate conquests off the shores of Curtis Bay? Some turn-of-the century fortune seekers thought so and brought their shovels to find out.
The Curtis Bay–Bluebeard legend is buried in a lengthy June 6, 1910 article in the Baltimore Sun. In a story describing the “hive of industry” forming in Anne Arundel County’s Hawkins Point, the article discusses the area’s huge, but as-yet unrealized industrial potential, pointing to a newly erected sugar refinery, the bustling canning factories at Wagner’s Point, and the then-fast-growing empire of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Midway through that story is a reference to fortune seekers “who dug in Anne Arundel for the treasure of a pirate,” the Sun explained. “The bold, bad buccaneer was called Bluebeard, and he was reputed to have hidden his treasure on a farm of the Chappell estate, near where Fort Armistead now is. All the digging was done late at night, and a number of candle ends was found on the spot.
“The treasure seekers dug long and hard and deep,” the story continued. “So deep that they undermined a giant holly [tree] and it fell down in the hole. The farmer on the place lost a cow by death and threw it down in the hole and covered it with the disturbed earth. The fortune hunters came back and dug down to the cow, got some kind of fright and never came back again.”
The passage in that story was clearly a bit of color injected into an otherwise dry industry story, but it begs the question: Is there buried treasure near Fort Armistead? Perhaps, though it is unlikely. First, any reference to Bluebeard can be easily dismissed since the dreaded pirate was just a French folk legend that the Brothers Grimm adopted into a fairy tale in 1812. More likely, whoever tipped off the Baltimore Sun’s reporter to a pirate legend may have meant Blackbeard, the nickname for fearsome pirate Edward Teach, who terrorized ships from the Carolinas to the West Indies from 1716 to 1718.
The Bluebeard reference might also have been a mistaken nod to Captain William Kidd, known simply as Captain Kidd, who was a Scottish pirate known to have traveled up and down the North American coast in the late 1600s. He buried some treasure on Gardiners Island in New York and was rumored to have buried treasure on Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia as well, so his reputation suggested a fondness for treasure burying. Baltimore Town, Jones Falls, and Fells Point were all founded between 1730 and 1760, so the area was still just emerging as a shipping port, and Patapsco River was not yet a heavily traveled waterway. As such, it might have served as a logical, out-of-the-way place to hide treasure from the English navy and privateers.
But more likely, the story was started by the cantankerous Thomas C. Chappell, who owned the sprawling 665-acre property at Hawkins Point just south of where Fort Armistead is today. Chappell was a New York attorney, but he had a number of business interests in Baltimore. He was something of a pioneer in the fertilizer industry, and his company, Chappell’s Fertilizer and Agriculture Salts, was one of the first chemical companies in the region. But he drew the ire of local businesses when, as the charter holder of the first Curtis Creek bridge, he chose not to construct a bridge, supposedly as a favor to the B&O Railroad, which thought a span across Curtis Creek would hinder shipping near its coal piers. Chappell also famously battled with Baltimore’s Lighthouse Board over the Hawkins Point lighthouse, whose beacon shone across his land without his consent. Chappell was frequently in the newspapers over high-profile lawsuits of the day, including his own divorce, where he accused his wife of hiring private detectives to shadow him.
If there was treasure buried on the former Chappell estate near Fort Armistead, it likely would have turned up by now. The land was acquired in 1926 by Richard McSherry, a Baltimore developer, with the intent on selling it to industrial interests. It stretched from the border of Fort Armistead southward to Swan Creek and Brandon Shores in Pasadena. Much of that land is now industrialized or part of the wastewater treatment plant, though a portion of the land between Kembo Road and the Swan Creek wetlands remains undisturbed. But adventure seekers and treasure diggers be warned; the area is fenced off and is private property. Some treasures are best left to legend.
