What Happened to Florence Wingate of Crapo?

Her baffling disappearance had such an effect on people of the area that many parents would warn their children, “You’d better behave, or you’ll end up like Florence Wingate.” More than seventy years since the event, it remains one of the most baffling unsolved mysteries on the Eastern Shore.

On the morning of August 7, 1953, 66-year-old Florence Wingate returned to her weather-beaten home from spending the night with her friend Mollie Kirwan. The ground was still soaked from the rain that had fallen for days upon the marshy village of Crapo, an isolated cluster of houses in lower Dorchester County where fewer than 100 people dwelled. Florence made breakfast for her family, consisting of brother Miles, his spouse Ruby, and Harvey Wingate, who was either her distant cousin or common-law spouse (or both).

Then this kindly, hardworking woman, who carried water buckets down the road and watched cartoons with neighbor children on Saturdays, decided to go out and pick figs from a tree visible from her kitchen window.

She never returned.

Later in the day, Florence’s relatives told the police she had gone for kindling, visited a friend, gathered figs, or picked daisies. These contradictory statements confused investigators, who wondered how a healthy woman who knew the area well could lose her way within sight of her own house.

By evening, Crapo was full of alarm. State police and 150 volunteers slogged through the muck and quicksand of the surrounding marshes, which were known locally as “World’s End.” They were assisted by pilot Ralph Harris, who made an aerial inspection of the Blackwater Migratory Bird Refuge in his spotter plane. There was no sign of Florence.

The area searched for Florence.

A week later, Judge W. Laird Henry, Jr., of Cambridge convened a grand jury to question witnesses and attempt to solve the disappearance. It came to nothing.

In October, a small notice was placed in the newspaper by Miles and Ruby:

To my sister and sister-in-law, Florence Wingate, who has been missing since Aug. 7.
The world may change from year to year
And friends from day to day
But never will the ones we love
From memory pass away.

Over the following years, the people of Crapo invented their own explanations for the vanishing. Florence wandered into the swamp, drowned in quicksand, suffered a heart attack, fell afoul of a murderer, or was abducted by aliens. While some whispered of money, jealousy, and political cover-ups, others recalled the lingering smell of decay in the Wingate chimney. Whatever it was, the locals weren’t going to talk to the police about it, so much did they cherish their insular natures. No one wanted to get involved.

Almost no one, anyway. Florence’s granddaughter, Martha Edge, told the Salisbury Daily Times that her family never stopped blaming one person: Harvey Wingate. “All I know is that he threated my mother [Birdle]. He said he’d do to her what he did to Florence if she didn’t do what he told her.”

It wasn’t until 1968 that someone else spoke up. On her deathbed, Ruby Wingate claimed that Florence had died of heart failure and, on Harvey’s order, been dumped into an abandoned well to avoid funeral costs. State’s Attorney William Yates II used that statement as a reason to reopen the investigation. A site near the Wingate property was bulldozed to uncover a well, but it contained only animal bones and broken glass. The disappointed Yates tried to be optimistic by saying that it was one less place to look among the several abandoned wells nearby. However, the case soon went cold once more.

Reporters came back around to the story in the 1990s because it still drifted like fog in the local marshes. As one Crapo resident told The Dorchester News, “It scares me . . . to think you can vanish without leaving a trace.”

Florence Wingate’s disappearance still baffles people on the Eastern Shore.

Thanks to Hal Roth, Brice Stump, Mindie Burgoyne, and an anonymous Redditor for valuable information.