Forgotten history of Ellicott City & Howard County MD

The first ride of a carload of dignitaries behind the Cooper steam engine was on August 28, 1830 from Baltimore to Ellicott mills on the Ba...

Gassaway Watkins (1752-1840) fought in the Revolutionary War, and later as a Colonel in the War of 1812. He lived at "Richland" ...

Ross Winans ( 1796-1877) was born in NJ and moved to Md in the late 1820s as the B&O railroad was starting. He invented the friction wh...

At the start of the Civil War, a bullet proof "steam gun" was patented by Charles Dickinson and worked on in Ross Winans foundry i...

A Reip metal wall oven still exists in a privately owned historic home, Hickory Ridge, in Howard County.  Elizabeth Ellicott Lea, daughter G...

Rebecca Garrett's mother was freed by Sarah (Cord) Anderson in her 1805 will.  Later, Rebecca spent about 20 years living free in Balt...

Summer homes outside of Baltimore gave respite from the "inferno in Summer" but the ride on the B & O railroad train was ...

The Baltimore writer H. L. Mencken (1880-1954) spent a couple of summers as a child in a Civil War era home on the hill across from the Pa...

Decatur Dorsey (1836-1891) was an enslaved African American in Howard County when he signed up in 1864. He would become a Sergeant in the ...

Union Mills just north of Westminster, Md. was built in 1797 on Oliver Evans plans, which incorporated details from the Ellicotts mill wor...

Before the first railroads in the 1830s, huge Conestoga wagons hauled by 6 horse teams brought wheat from Pennsylvania to the Lea mills alo...

Mills were dangerous places and could catch fire for many reasons.  Oliver Evans and Thomas Ellicott's The Young Mill-wright and Miller...

Thousands of barrels of flour passed through Baltimore by large Conestoga wagons and railroad cars then onto ships to American and foreign...

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 ...

The Ilchester Hotel/Home/Tavern that Ellicott built in the early 1830s was sold in 1866 to the Redeptorists for $15,000.  The walls had w...

Gray granite from 'Ellicott and Company' quarry was taken by large wagons with "nine yolk of oxen" on the Frederick road...

The Catholic Cathedral and many homes and business in early Ellicott's mills were built with Ellicott City granite from nearby quarrie...

Tonge or Tongue Row was built in the 1840s, with one duplex completed each year by a widow, Ann Tonge.  The three lovely stone buildings r...

Lily or Lilly Tyson (1852-1924) was a descendant of two prominent Quaker milling and merchant families – the Tysons of Jericho Mills north...

Once part of the vast lands of Charles Sterrett Ridgely's Oakland mansion HERE , the stone home "Old Oakland" was the farm c...