Now let me tell you about the most famous camping trip that ever happened right where you're standing — because back around nineteen eighteen, and again in twenty-one, the tents pitched by these falls belonged to some of the richest and most famous men who ever lived.
They called themselves the Vagabonds, and it was a peculiar little club: Henry Ford — yes, THE Henry Ford, the automobile king; Thomas Edison — the inventor of the light bulb and a thousand other things, the most famous genius in the world; and Harvey Firestone, the tire magnate whose name is still on tires today. Three of the most powerful industrialists in America, and every summer these friends would load up a caravan of automobiles and go camping — roughing it, more or less, out in the wild country, cooking over fires and sleeping in tents, getting away from the empires they ran.
And one of the spots they chose, right here in western Maryland, was Muddy Creek Falls — this very waterfall you just stood beneath. Picture it: Edison and Ford, two of the men who quite literally built the modern world, sitting on these rocks by this old waterfall, in the shade of these ancient trees, just listening to the water like anybody else. There's a plaque here that marks it. I love that story — because it means the smartest, richest men in America, who could go absolutely anywhere on earth, chose to come HERE, to sit by these falls in this old forest. Same as you did today. Turns out a beautiful place in the woods is worth more than all the money in the world — and they'd have known, if anyone would.
Photo: Bohemian Baltimore · CC BY-SA 4.0
