The top picture shows fox hunting hounds and horses crossing at White’s Ferry on the Potomac near where I frquently bike and hunt.
No date, but very early 20th Century is my guess.
White’s Ferry crosses the Potomac between Leesburg, Virginia (the center of fox hunting in America) and Poolesville, Maryland.
The second picture is of the more modern ferry, which was shut down five and a half years ago (2020) over a landing dispute on the Virginia side. A great deal of effort and money has been put into solving that dispute, but the land owner on the Virginia side is wealthy and quite recalcitrant.
I, for one, have never been very sympathetic to the family that owned White’s Ferry until it was shut down and sold.
Why is that?
Look at the name of the ferry, pictured below, the Jubal Early.
Jubal Early was a confederate general who threatened to burn Frederick, Maryland — the city closest to the ferry — to the ground if he was not paid $200,000 in cash — the equivalent of $5.2 million today. See >> https://www.visitfrederick.org/civil-war-trails/attack-on-washington/frederick-ransom/
What’s going on? Why name a ferry after a Confederate general? Simple: the former owner of White’s Ferry, R. Edwin Brown, was reputed to be a Ku Klux Klansman.
For certain, he was a supporter of the negationist “lost cause” nonsense put out by the Confederate States of America and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Naming the ferry after Jubal Early was his way of proudly and loudly flying a KKK flag — a bit like a German putting an 88 license plate on his Tel Aviv taxi.
After losing case after case in court over legal landing access on the Virginia side, the Brown family sold White’s Ferry in 2021 to Chuck Kuhn, founder of JK Moving, now the largest independent moving company in the US (he founded the company when he was 16!).
Kuhn, a very civic-minded philanthropist and conservationist, has offered to give White’s Ferry to Montgomery County, Maryland, if Loudon County, Virginia, will take possesion of the Virginia side so the ferry can actually operate.
In April 2025, Montgomery County offered a $3 million subsidy to acquire property rights and purchase equipment for the ferry.
What’s next?
My guess is that the Virginia landing side of the Ferry will eventually be seized by the state under eminent domain. In my opinion, it’s long past time for that to happen.
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