Travel on an old road can connect us to a different time . Facingpage, a section of West Old Baltimore Road survives unpaved where it fords Tenmile Creek.

West Old Baltimore Road StevenLubar

NOT LONG AGO county road crews paved a gravel road under the interstate: a meeting not only of two roads but that runs near my house. This is progress, I guess: less dust, of two eras, two ways of looking at the world. Driving on faster travel, less chance of getting stuck when rain turns the interstate, you see an engineered world: road, cars, the road to mud. But something is lost when a road is buildings. On the gravel road, driving at ten or twenty paved, something more precious than the few minutes miles an hour, you see natural things, things invisible at gained by not having to dodge potholes. higher speeds. The road recently paved is West Old Baltimore Road. The road thus becomes more than simply a place It runs, the bits and pieces of it that survive, from where between origin and destination, a means to an end. It wins I live, in Barnesville, , east toward Baltimore, attention for itself. Unpaved roads force you to slow down about forty miles away. Barnesville is at the western edge and look around. West Old Baltimore Road fords Tenmile of Montgomery County, about thirty miles northwest of Branch. It climbs steep hills, twists through sharp turns. Washington, D.C. The southern edge of the county, where No self-respecting highway engineer or bulldozer operator most of the population lives, touches Washington. That is would follow so closely the contours of the land. Today the the Montgomery County most people know, a suburb crooked would be made straight, the high places made low, becoming a city. The western edge is rural, becoming the stream hidden out of mind in a culvert. Putting on the exurb and suburb. A commuter train takes some of the brakes down a steep hill or around a sharp curve reveals people who live here to work in Washington, and many the unevenness of the landscape. We are accustomed to more drive the interstate to jobs in the city. There's no easy technology smoothing nature's rough edges for us, and way to get to Baltimore, even though it's not much farther. so old roads surprise us with their irregularities. The very The roads don't go that way. But the name of the old road shape of the road recalls a time when engineers and suggests that once upon a time, this corner of the county county road budgets could not so easily subdue nature, was connected, not with Washington, but with Baltimore. but had to compromise with it. You certainly could not commute to Baltimore on West Old roads, following the topography, become part of Old Baltimore Road, though it heads in the right direc- it. Paved roads draw lines through nature. Because they tion. For one thing, you couldn't go fast enough. Gravel shed water, they require curbs, visible boundaries. They are roads make you slow down. You can't speed along at fifty hard edged, definite. They separate us from the landscape miles an hour. The turns are too sharp, the road too we pass through. A gravel road has softer edges. Blending narrow. At one point, West Old Baltimore Road passes gently from road to roadside, it partakes of the country- - side. Daylilies, in profusion along the banks of the road, spread into the road . Growing in the gravel, they reclaim the road for nature. When you drive on an unpaved road, you too become a bit closer to nature. That can be taken literally-the dust-but also in a broader sense. Driving slowly, you can recapture some of what Edgar Anderson, writing in Landscape, remembered of driving a horse and buggy over roads at the turn of the century: "Impact it had and a very sharp and constant one. You couldn't be unconscious of the terrain over which you were traveling. The road recurringly thrust itself upon your senses; there were vibrations, sounds, and smells. The wheels commented almost constantly about the roadway. There was a soft even purr as they pulled slowly through the sand, anguished crunches in sliding over the edges of big stones, a taunt, almost musical, vibration when they whirled along on good gravel." Gravel roads are artifacts of horse-and-buggy travel. Paved roads came with the bicycle and the automobile, high-speed travel. Unpaved roads are old-fashioned, paved roads "modern." A paved road merely connects two places. An unpaved road connects us to a different time. Unpaved roads are roads back into history. They remind us of the people who traveled the roads, and tell us about why they traveled, because old roads were not designed by state highway departments. They were not professionally planned, for the most part, but were built in a mile-by-mile compromise of market forces, travelers' desires, and the shape of the land. When the road was built, it connected places people wanted to travel between. But the reasons for travel must have changed, or an alternative route become possible, for when bicycles and cars demanded smooth pavement, the road was not important enough to be paved. So an unpaved road speaks of social, economic, and demo- graphic change. It is a historical riddle. It is a riddle that contains its own answer, because old roads are textbooks of history and geography. West Old Without modern engineering road building Baltimore Road tells the attentive traveler about a part compromised with nature. of the county's past that is almost lost, not reflected in historic buildings or in histories of the area. That the road was unpaved calls attention to its age, provokes our inter- est. The road itself-its name, its shape, its route-gives clues to the riddle. Old maps show vanished towns. Aerial photographs show a palimpsest road network. Documents, memory, and the landscape itself help answer the ques- tions old roads raise. Names often disclose something of the history of roads. West Old Baltimore Road is a toponym. Parse it backward: it is an odd name for a road in western Mont- gomery ounty, forty mil fr m Baltimorer . Most road · in th e parts Lak their name fr m Lh p p l who Jjv d on th m, or Lhe I ca l mi ll, r th · next town al ng the road, rarely more than four or five miles away: Price's Distillery Road, for example, or Barnesville Road. A road with

20 Baltimore in its name was at one time an important road, a road to Baltimore. Most of them are closer to Washing- going all the way to Baltimore. ton-more importantly, in the early days, to Georgetown- From Baltimore to where? The name makes clear that and farmers look to the nearest marketplace. A straight this is the western end of the road. But there is no town to road is a regional road, designed not to serve local needs anchor this western section, to balance Baltimore on the but rather regional needs. It is a road for people who need east. It's not, say, the Baltimore-Barnesville Road, though to get somewhere quickly and directly, and are willing to Barnesville is the town nearest the end of the road today. pay the money to build it. Barnesville was never more than a small town, a roadside Another road with an old-fashioned name gives the stop, certainly not deserving of a direct connection to clue to the road's western terminus: Mouth of Monocacy Baltimore. Road still survives, paved, but its route a mystery: today it is Indeed, this road doesn't seem to go through any mostly used as a short cut to the Chesapeake and Ohio major towns. Though twisting to follow the contours of the Canal National Park. But if you trace the road on old maps land , on a map it takes a fairly straight shot through towns and examine aerial photographs with a magnifying glass, whose names are known only to the people who live in allowing some leeway where highway engineers have them-Cracklin Town, Unity, and Hilton-before arriving squared things up, you can see how the roads connected. in the mill town of Ellicott City and then the eastern West Old Baltimore Road is a piece of the road that ran terminus in Baltimore. It was not a road for local traffic: between Baltimore and the mouth of the Monocacy, the none of these towns would create enough traffic to deserve place where the flows into the Potomac.

Some sections of West Old Baltim ore Roa d have kept closer pace with progress.

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MARYLAND

Lea ..burff •

VIRGINIA

LEGEND R.oads

Cana/3

II II l I I I I I

Based on A New Map of Maryland an d Delaware. Old maps label the place Spinks Ferry and show a ferry Thomas Cowperthwait and Company, 1850. across the Potomac. Why did anyone want to travel from Baltimore to the mouth of the Monocacy? Why, in any case, a direct route? There was some industry along the Monocacy near the Potomac, a glassworks and iron furnace and forge long disappeared, but not enough to demand a road to Balti- more. There wasn't enough agriculture here to pay for a good road to a city forty miles away. This was no local road. Rather, it was a road to bring the products of Baltimore to the West, and the products of the West to Baltimore. The Potomac was an important trading route to the West. Goods brought down the river could continue on to Georgetown or Alexandria, or they could be unloaded from the boats at a convenient place and carried overland to Baltimore. The Potomac jogs east where it joins with the Monocacy, and so that was the point most convenient to Baltimore, the best point for transshipment. It is very shallow there, too; in the summer, sometimes, you can walk across it. So even before the ferry was established, horses and wagons could ford the river there and continue to western and beyond, into Ohio and the Midwest. (Barnesville was named after William Barnes, a Baltimore

22 merchant who went on to found a second town of Barnes- ville in southwestern Ohio, his life confirming evidence of the trading patterns that left us West Old Baltimore Road.) Mouth of Monocacy, today unsettled parkland, thus became an important place in the early road network of what was then western Maryland. A longtime Indian encampment, it was a transshipment point at least as early as 174 7 when Barnesville was settled. The Maryland Assembly, in its 1790 act "to straighten and amend the public roads in the several counties" mentions three public roads in Montgomery County and two of them terminate at the mouth of Monocacy: the Georgetown-Mouth of Monocacy Road and the Montgomery Court-House [Rockville]-Mouth ofMonocacy Road. In 1815 the state chartered a company to "make a turnpike road from the mouth of Monocacy, through Montgomery County, to intersect the Baltimore and Frederick turnpike road at the Poplar Springs, in Anne Arundel County" about twenty-five miles west of Baltimore. (The account books for the road, an ad in the local paper mentioned, were "open at Barnes Ville.") At the same time the Virginia Assembly chartered the other half of the road, Older houses stand close to the road that was from Snicker's Gap at the crest of the Blue Ridge Moun- once their most important link to the world. Exurban preferences place stables, barns, and tains "to the confluence of the Monocasy and Potomac," houses at the end oflong driveways. along with a ferry to cross the Potomac at the mouth of the "Manoquasey." Apparently neither turnpike was ever built, possibly because no one could agree on how to spell the name of the river, but more likely because of economic hard times and the decline of early trading patterns that had made mouth of the Monocacy important to Balti- more's trade. (Mouth of Monocacy seems to have had no direct connection with Frederick, the nearest city, only fifteen miles north. The road network flows south and east from the mouth of the Monocacy; Frederick's connections to the Potomac and to Virginia are to its north and west.) So trade was the reason to build this road, trade between Baltimore and the Appalachian West. That trade continued for a long time, but when the time came to pave roads this one remained unpaved. Indeed, as early as 1882 it was called "the old Baltimore road." Why was this road not enlarged and paved when other roads were? Part of the answer can be found on the road. Walk Mouth of Monocacy Road to its end and you cross the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks and approach the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. First the canal made it easier to ship goods to Washington than to Baltimore. Then the railroad took freight off the Potomac entirely. The road became technologically obsolete. Today the main line of the Baltimore and Ohio follows the Potomac to Washington, but when the line was first built (it connected Baltimore with Cumberland, Maryland, in 1852), the route cut away from the Potomac to Balti- more at Point of Rocks, a few miles upstream of the mouth of the Monocacy. The railroad, its route slightly to the north of the road, intercepted trade from the West. The towns along the old road lost the business that travelers

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and freight shipments had brought. They were out of houses are in bad shape, many of them former tenant the mainstream of commerce and became strictly of local houses for farm workers. Most of the occupants are black. importance, market towns for nearby farmers. Its role While they were the only residents, the county could get usurped by the canal and the railroad, Baltimore Road away with minimum upkeep, waiting perhaps for the day became Old Baltimore Road . Pieces of it were abandoned, when they would move out and the road could be aban- and the surviving pieces given prefixes. Thus, West Old doned altogether. (One of the houses _is a shell, gutted by Baltimore Road. a fire that might have been put out if the road had been West Old Baltimore Road was a local road that became paved and fire trucks had been able to get there more even more local when the roads that paralleled and quickly.) crossed it were paved, and it remained unpaved. Travel But there are more new houses now than old ones, on the gravel road took longer so the only cars on it were expensive ones, the houses of people moving "out to the those of folks who lived on it. And not many people did. country." (The interstate highway lets them get to work After all, it had been built not for locals, but for long- fast, or would, if it weren't for the traffic.) The suburbs, distance travel. That demand removed, the road sank into expanding, have overtaken West Old Baltimore Road . obscurity . A new park along the road attracts people to the country Why, after all these years , was the road paved? The for day trips; a paved road means better use of the county houses on it reveal some recent changes. The few old investment. More traffic meant that the road required Farms and pasturelands along West Old Baltimore Road are giving way Lo suburban and exurban settlement. Some of the new residents, in an effort to preserve the character of the landscape, fought to prevent the county from paving the road. An earlier era succumbs to th e new, wh ere the interstate crosses over West Old Baltimore Road. more upkeep. Several times a year graders and gravel present. Following a road into history can tell us about trucks had to be sent to fix washouts and washboarding. more than just the road. Tracing the road into the past lets The county department of transportation decided in us understand features of the cultural landscape that do 1984 that it would pave all roads in the county. No more not make sense until we have deciphered the mystery of gravel roads. the road. Settlement patterns follow roads: the lines of Or so it thought. The gravel roads were one of the demarcation of, say, German barns built by settlers coming things that the•new country folks liked, one of the things south from , and English barns, built by that set their new homes apart from the suburbs. On West settlers coming west from Baltimore and the Eastern Harris Road, another gravel road just a mile or so from Shore, make sense only when the roads are firmly fixed on West Old Baltimore Road, the residents put together a our mental maps. petition, went to the county council, and stopped the Indeed, roads can be more than history books, asphalt trucks. They will keep their gravel road for a while because like old buildings or the objects in museums, they longer. A member of the county council, concerned that a reach out not only to our minds but thrust themselves on piece of the county's heritage was about to be paved under, all our senses. Following old roads leads us into history. We managed to keep a small part of West Old Baltimore Road should save them and savor them. As]. B.Jackson writes, unpaved-much to the disappointment of the transporta- we should "rejoice in their survival." D tion department engineers. These roads now have a new history lesson to teach, a lesson in political history to All photographs are by Eri c Long, 1988. add to their lessons in economic history and historical geography. For old road are history books. They can tell us something of the past and raise questions about the 111111