When hundreds of black cats escaped a Chesapeake Bay fur farm

The notices appeared in small Eastern Shore newspapers in the late 1840s: Black cats needed.

The cats could be taken to Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay, or to a mainland general store, where the shopkeeper would pay "8 cts, a piece, on delivery," the ads proclaimed.

It was the enterprise of Charles Carroll III, a wealthy businessman and grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He dreamed of filling the island with black cats, letting them birth a bounty of black kittens, then killing and exporting their silky pelts to Asia.

Very Cruella de Vil. Very ill-fated.

Carroll hired a local fisherman to row out to the island to feed the cats each week. But then a cold snap froze the bay solid. The fisherman couldn't get out to the island for a month. When he returned, no cats came padding out.

What had happened to them?

Baltimore artist Katherine Fahey was transfixed when she first learned about The Great Poplar Island Black Cat Farm, as it's called in William Cronin's encyclopedic 2005 book, "The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake."

"Pretty much from the time I heard this story, I thought, 'I'm just gonna start making cats,' " Fahey said. "And I just made cats, like all year, I was just making cats."

Fahey also researched the story, traveling to Talbot County to pore over original historical records and interview local historians and fishermen. She visited Salem, Massachusetts, and learned how cats — especially black cats — were persecuted for hundreds of years because they were associated with demons and witchcraft.

Back in the workshop of the art-filled Pigtown home she shares with her partner, artist Dan Van Allen , Fahey began working in her favorite medium, creating a crankie — a handmade, hand-powered animation and performance piece — about Black Cat Island.

Fahey leads classes in crankie-making, performs at workshops across the country and has taken part in the Baltimore Crankie Festival for the past decade. She will be performing her Black Cat Island crankie at Garden Glow at Ladew Gardens later this month.

Fahey cut hundreds of cats from thick black paper, conjuring a quivering whisker or inquisitive eye with a few flicks of her X-acto knife. Then she assembled the cats, along with intricate cutouts of lighthouses and loons, ferns and fir trees, on a long paper scroll attached to two wooden rods and fastened to a frame in front of a bright light.

Assisted by Van Allen, and accompanied by musician Georgia Beatty , Fahey performed the crankie for a team of Baltimore Banner journalists on a golden September afternoon.

Fahey unlatched an ornate carved wooden case, then began to crank the scroll of paper and tell the story of Poplar Island.

Beatty bowed on her fiddle the plaintive notes of a piece she composed to accompany the work.

Fahey turned a wooden handle to continuously unfurl images as she spoke.

"Stories, like islands, change with the telling, the tides of listening and sharing shaping them," she began. "The waters of the Chesapeake seem to hold as many tales as fish."

Van Allen, wearing a shabby top hat, sat behind the screen manipulating shadow puppets that flashed across the scrolling paper. A yellow film evoked the beam from a light house. A sheet covered with small holes made a snow storm appear.

Fahey recounted Carroll's greedy plan, imagined the cats lolling about the island on warm days and the surprise of the fisherman when he discovered the cats were missing.

Then she revealed the fate of the felines.

When the waters froze solid, the cats simply skittered across the ice to safety.

"It must have been quite a sight to see hundreds of black cats making their way to the mainland and other islands," Fahey said. "I like to imagine people peering out their windows to see so many inky felines stark against the white winter landscape."