The Strike That Changed Maryland’s Wilderness County

The Strike That Changed Maryland’s Wilderness County, by Len Shindel (Brooklyn, NY: Hard Ball Press, 2025)

Len Shindel loves Garrett County.  Located in western Maryland within the Appalachian Mountains, this region steadfastly maintained a conservative Republican political orientation since its creation in 1872.  Despite this history, from  April to November 1970 it served as the site of a successful strike of 139 members of its Public Roads Department. The settlement that followed included union recognition and wage increases.  A historic roadside marker will forever commemorate the event.  

In The Strike That Changed Maryland’s Wilderness County, Shindel, a retired steelworker union member and official, offers a meticulously detailed account of this battle.  His work is primarily an oral history, but it also features a profile of the county since the eighteenth century, with numerous interviews of individuals on both sides of the recent labor dispute. However, reading the entire story requires patience and dexterity as it appears in two parts.  The first half is in a conventional format, but the second is accessible only through the book’s website or a QR code.

Shindel describes a county that is overwhelmingly white, settled originally by German Amish and Mennonites, and later founded by English and Irish inhabitants.  In addition, there were enslaved Africans, who provided construction as well as agricultural labor.  Two contrasting locales would reflect future tensions: Cumberland, an emergent manufacturing center, and Oakland, a town that remained distinctly rural and resistant to change.  After the Civil War largely rural Garrett County, the home of Cumberland and Oakland, became a Republican Party stronghold, distrustful of government and opposed to business regulation and labor organizations, with an especially profound distaste for public service worker unions.   This antipathy continued into the 1960s as anti-union employers dominated the economy.

As that decade began, Garrett County gained attention that would challenge that control.  During the 1960 presidential election campaign John Kennedy visited Appalachia and promised aid for rural education and infrastructure.  Following his presidential inauguration Kennedy, along with several senators, received telegrams from three Garrett County commissioners advising him of poverty and fifteen percent unemployment in their midst.  They pleaded for federal aid, but none was forthcoming.  Nevertheless, social and economic wounds were exposed and the county experienced a decade of turbulence paralleling events elsewhere in the nation.  Conservatives were aghast at the idea of “outside” government assistance to heal economic problems. They contended that such aid would create “a culture of dependence.”  When road workers were fired after they demanded food stamps that charge was hurled at them and there was no peace.  Issues mounted, including continued pressure for union recognition, rural aid, teachers’ salaries, and the establishment of a community college.  The county and nation were changing, but the conservatives who ran Garrett County held firm.  Then, in 1968, a tragedy occurred in Memphis, Tennessee.  Sanitation workers, members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) went on strike for union recognition.  They won that battle, but the event was marred by the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had marched with them.

Inspired by the activism of the Memphis service workers, the road workers of Garrett County renewed their own demands for recognition.  Under the banner of AFSCME, they won a favorable settlement after a bitter, eight-month fight.  Garrett County had indeed changed.  Permanent peace was not established, but, as one official noted, it was now being brought “into the twentieth century.”

Though this book offers an abundance of valuable interviews, it would benefit from an enhanced narrative component.  So typically American are the people of Garrett County, and so relevant is the strike to today’s polarized society that additional description and analysis are a necessity, as well as a book that is complete in a single volume.

Reviewed by Robert D. Parmet, York College of The City University of New York