Muddy Creek Falls, Where Ford and Edison Went Camping
Near Wisp, Maryland
Swallow Falls State Park holds the tallest free falling waterfall in Maryland. Muddy Creek Falls drops about fifty three feet in a single white curtain into a rocky gorge, and the trail to reach it winds through something even rarer than the falls. This is the last stand of old growth hemlock and white pine left in the state, with some of the trees more than three hundred years old, shading the path just as they did before Europeans ever reached these mountains.
In the summer of nineteen twenty one, three of the most famous men in America came here to camp. The automaker Henry Ford, the inventor Thomas Edison, and the tire magnate Harvey Firestone pitched their tents in these woods for several days at the end of July. They jokingly called themselves the Vagabonds, wealthy industrialists who liked to escape into the wilderness together with a fleet of cars and staff.
They chose this spot on the west bank of the Youghiogheny River, about nine miles northwest of Oakland, because even then it felt like the wild edge of the country. Stand under these ancient trees and you are sharing shade that once fell on Edison.
