B & O rail road sites in Howard County 1857

"Ellicott's Mills, fourteen miles from Baltimore, covering the bottom and slopes of the steep hills with dwellings, and their tops with churches and other public edifices." From excerpt below. Click on images to enlarge.

Rebecca Garrett 'freed', then retaken 20 years later

Rebecca Garrett's mother was freed by Sarah (Cord) Anderson in her 1805 will.  Later, Rebecca spent about 20 years living free in Baltimore with her freedman husband William Garrett and ten children.  Thomas Anderson and son Isaac reclaimed Rebecca and some of her children in 1849.  She was freed by a Baltimore County court, but on appeal, was returned to the Andersons.

Lime kilns at Marriottsville

Two kilns remain in the woods to the west of Marriottsville Road between the B&O railroad and the bridge over the Patapsco. The front wall of the one on the left had collapsed, but the 20 foot tall kiln to the right (west) is fairly intact and part of Patapsco Park.  The limestone was quarried nearby. During the colonial and federal period, lime was used with sand to make mortar and plaster, whitewash, and as a fertilizer. A lime kiln can be seen on Browns Bridge Road, Highland

Waverly, Jacob Bromwell's wheat fan and Poe's uncle

George Howard at "Waverly" hosted a timed test of Jacob Bromwell's patented fan - it cleaned 26 1/2 bushels of wheat in 7 1/2 minutes. That year, 1819, Bromwell moved to the growing city of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he started a company which is still producing exquisite tin, copper, wire-woven and wooden old-style kitchen tools HERE

Waverly Jumbles

Governor George and Prudence Ridgely Howard named the home and lands that his father, Col. Howard, gave them "Waverly" after the enormously popular 1814 Sir Walter Scott novel Waverley. His brother Benjamin's wife, Jane Gilmor Howard, included a recipe for the rose water flavored cookie in her charity cookbook Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen in 1873.

The Dairy - at Waverly and Doughoregan Manor

Gov. George Howard's (1789-1846) large stone dairy was built c1822 according to an early sketch of his "Waverly" buildings and payments to a stonemason. The second story window on the front has been changed into a door, but the side windows look like the sketch. His wife Prudence Ridgely Howard (1791-1847) had been raised at "Hampton" (north of Baltimore) which operated a large dairy operation making over 5,000 pounds of butter in 1822. Howard's neighbor Charles Carroll's lovely dairy at "Doughoregan" was much smaller.