Many people in Cumberland recognize the name Shriver. It’s a neighborhood and a street, and Thomas Shriver was a 19th-century mayor of the city. However, Thomas Shriver was also one of the driving forces in Cumberland’s early development.
“If any of our old citizens deserve more than a passing notice, it is Thomas Shriver Esq. to whom the town is indebted, more than any other man, for bringing it out of its ashes, and mud, and when I look back, and see the old streets, almost impassable in wet winters, see the cows driven home in the evening to be milked before the different doors and there quietly rest until morning, I think of him,” H.D. Black wrote in the Cumberland Daily Times in 1885.
Shriver was a Carroll County native. As an adult, he worked in Baltimore where he could have been called a real estate developer.
“And at that age when we are disposed to look on the bright side of the future, began laying out a summer resort near the city, built cottages, houses, clear lakes and crystal streams; but he was a quarter of a century ahead of the Baltimoreans, who could not comprehend how an investment of that kind would pay. I presume, today the grounds are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Black wrote.
Shriver moved to Cumberland in 1833, where he opened a store at the corner of Baltimore and Liberty streets. He also purchased building lots along South Centre Street, which Black described as “a trysting-place for cows.”
With the type of vision he displayed in Baltimore, he began clearing out the street. Then he built homes and other buildings on his lots. Soon, he had developed two blocks of the street, and it became known as one of the finest areas of the town.
During his building spree along South Centre Street, he had trouble getting lumber from mountain sawmills in the area, so he opened his own lumber yard.
Once the United States Congress had repaired the National Road and turned various sections over to the states it ran through, Shriver was appointed superintendent over part of the road in Maryland. During his time as superintendent, it was noted that the road was kept in fine order.
He also became a manager and stockholder of the Good Intent stagecoach line from Baltimore to Wheeling, West Virginia. In this position, he displayed a bit of inventive genius when he patented a new type of spring for stagecoaches called a “bow.”
“It was much lighter than the old ones used in stages, but had the disadvantage, that when it broke it had to be carried to a wagon maker, as well as a blacksmith for repairs but any country mechanic could repair the old ones,” Black wrote.
He also planned out and completed a plank road to West Newton, Pennsylvania, which gave Cumberland a second stagecoach route.
Shriver also had a political side to his personality. He served as the mayor of Cumberland from 1843 to 1849 and then again from 1850 to 1851.
For the Whig political party convention for Gen. William Henry Harrison and John Tyler in Baltimore in 1840, he built a large hollow ball 12 feet in diameter. Then he and a group of citizens rolled the ball all the way from Cumberland to Baltimore, attracting a lot of national publicity for Cumberland along the way.
“I guarantee that not one of the hundred thousand conceived the idea until they saw this light and airy and fanciful colored monster rolling down Baltimore street at the head of the great procession,” Black wrote.
Years later, when he was mayor of Cumberland, Shriver and a party of local leaders went to Ohio to escort Zachary Taylor part of the way to his inauguration as president of the United States. This gave Shriver a chance to talk about Cumberland. It was also said that Taylor was very impressed by the Narrows as the group passed through it on the National Road.
He only reluctantly left Cumberland to move to New York to operate a partnership with his son Walter.
He died in Manhattan in 1879 at the age of 90.