title: My River Speaks: The History and Lore of the Magothy River
author:  Marianne Taylor 
description: Marianne Taylor has lived along the banks of the Magothy River for more than 30 years. In the midst of her 22-year career as an English teacher, she served as a docent for the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was there she discovered her passion for history.
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  ![](Images/image00134.jpeg)
  
  >  _I have felt many times there a sense of place as powerful as if it were
  > visible and walking and could touch me._
  
  > —Eudora Welty, _Some Notes on River Country_
  
  | PROLOGUE |
  
  One summer night in Natchez, the old Mississippi river town that once boasted
  more millionaires than anywhere else in America, I walked past antebellum
  mansions and moss-hung trees to a Victorian house on a side street. The fr