People

Dr. Sprecher was mayor in 1910. He served two terms and was elected unanimously to his second term.

He grew up in Jefferson in Frederick County, where his father was a professor and highly regarded teacher. Dr. Specher tried teaching, but didn't like it, so he switched to medicine.

He graduated with honors from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Baltimore in 1881. 

He worked well over 20 years as a surgeon for the B&O, but he was most important, serving the town of Sykesville as a doctor. He delivered countless babies around the area, and he was one of the few doctors of his time who would treat both black and white patients equally. 

He had a home and an office in an old Brown's cottage at the very bottom of Oklahoma Hill. There are still a few remnants of the old house, a railing, some bricks, maybe the beginning of his front steps. 

He did house calls. Warren Dorsey remembers him coming up Oklahoma Hill to where the black people lived with his horse and buggy and little bag. 

He was an elder in Springfield Presbyterian church and married one of the Beach sisters, who did the teaching at the Springfield Academy right across from the church. 

When Wade Warfield's old mill lit up the dark sky with fire on a cold winter night in 1920, the doctor's house, which was just across from the blazing mill and in direct line of the flames and floating cinders, was in immediate danger of burning. People from all over the neighborhood helped him evacuate everything from his house so that if it burned, he would still have his possessions. 

The mill burned down to nothing but crumbling black wood. The doctor's house survived, and the neighbors helped him fill it up again long after midnight.