In April 1942, less than six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a group of Elkridge residents established a new volunteer fire department. The new fire department was one of many initiatives in U.S. cities and towns encouraged by the Office of Civilian Defense at the outset of World War II. Elkridge residents worried that their town’s location between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, as well as the town’s proximity to several wartime industrial sites, made them a possible target for an aerial bombardment.
The founding of the department was a grassroots effort from the beginning. A group of local women led the initial fundraising campaign. The B&O Railroad Company donated the fire bell. Using second-hand parts and donated equipment, volunteers took a dilapidated 1934 Brockway Ford (dilapidated from years sitting idle in a cow pasture) and transformed it into a fully operational fire truck for just $500.
Operating out of a one-bay garage in a former Ford Automobile dealership, the first few road tests for the new truck did not go smoothly. A tire blew out on the first trip and the engine dropped a rod on its second trip. Nonetheless, the volunteers managed to get the truck fully operational just seven months after the formation of the department. The volunteers named the truck “Daisy.”
The Federal Civilian Defense Organization officially recognized the department as part of national preparedness and declared Daisy the “best homemade fire truck in America.” The volunteers’ efforts were even dramatized and broadcast live on a national NBC radio show.
It was a challenge to fully staff the department during World War II because so many local men were fighting overseas. To compensate, the department struck a deal with the local high school. The school agreed to allow the older boys who maintained at least a C grade average to skip class in order to help fight fires.
While only men and boys were allowed to fight fires, women volunteered as dispatchers during the department’s first few years. Women volunteered on the ambulance from the beginning and, in the early 1970s, the department changed policies to allow women to enlist as firefighters as well.
The original building underwent several renovations over the last seventy-five years. The fire hall on Old Washington Road was renovated and expanded in 1948. Today, the Elkridge V.F.D. operates out of a new, larger location, built to accommodate the growing needs of the community. Built in 2014, the new facility on Rowanberry Drive encompasses more than thirty-five thousand square feet, houses twenty-three firefighters—both paid and volunteer—and cost more than sixteen million dollars. The department’s original building is currently being repurposed as a community center.
The handsome Victorian on Elkridge’s Main Street now known as the Brumbaugh House was built around 1870 and began serving as a doctor's office in the nineteenth century. The home’s most famous resident, Dr. Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh, started his own sixty-year-long career working and living at the house in 1919. Dr. Brumbaugh served thousands of Elkridge residents over the decades and the house continues to tell his story today. Since 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society has operated the house as a small museum to share the long history of medical care in their community.
Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Brumbaugh graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School with degrees in both pharmacy and medicine. When the United States entered World War I, Brumbaugh enlisted as a doctor for the U.S. Army. He was stationed at Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County where three infantry divisions trained before deployment to Europe. Brumbaugh tended to many of the 400,000 servicemen who passed through Fort Meade during the war.
After his discharge the military at the war’s end in 1918, a former advisor from the University of Maryland shared the news that Elkridge needed a temporary doctor. The town’s regular practitioner Dr. Ericson had suffered a stroke and was unable to work. When his predecessor passed away two months later, Dr. Brumbaugh took over the practice permanently.
For nearly fifty years, Brumbaugh worked alongside his wife, Miriam Smith, who was herself a doctor’s daughter up until her death in 1958. Over much of that time, Dr. Brumbaugh charged just $2 for an office visit or ​$3 for a house call. Over the years, Dr. Brumbaugh (or Dr. B as many of his patients called him) became something of a local celebrity with an office full of patients from the early morning to late evening. He did not raised his fees until 1969—but then it only went up by a dollar. In a 1970 Sun interview, Brumbaugh explained:
“I’d rather treat them for free of charge than have them think I’m overcharging. I was never out for the almighty dollar. I work just to keep alive, not for what I can get out of it.”
That same year, the community recognized his fifty years of service to the Elkridge community. Nearly four hundred neighbors and long-time patients pooled $3,900 in donations to buy the doctor a brand-new Mercury sedan. Howard County even changed the name of a road off Main Street to Brumbaugh Street in his honor.
Dr. Brumbaugh served three generations of Elkridge residents and continued working until he was ninety years old. By one resident’s estimation, he brought “thousands” of Elkridge babies into the world. Dr. Brumbaugh never kept count but reportedly delivered ten children for one family alone. There are many area residents who still proudly call themselves “Brumbaugh Babies.”
The year after Dr. Brumbaugh’s death in 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society and local Rotary Club bought the home to preserve the doctor’s office and waiting room. A group of volunteer residents helped turn the second floor into an apartment to help pay the mortgage on the new local history museum. Fortunately, their efforts have preserved Doctor B’s story for residents and visitors to continue to appreciate today.
The Maryland School for the Blind (MSB) was established in 1853. Formal education for blind people in the U.S. and western Europe was still a relatively recent invention. In 1765, Henry Dannett established the first school with this mission in Liverpool, England. The first school in the United States to follow this model was the New England Asylum for the Blind, now known as the Perkins School For the Blind, established in March 1829.
In Maryland, the new school was established thanks to the efforts of David E. Loughery, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, and Washington County native Benjamin F. Newcomer, a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist. Together, they were able to generate enough interest in creating a school for the blind that the Maryland General Assembly incorporated the school in 1853. David Loughery was appointed the school’s first superintendent.
Frederick Douglas Morrison, a national leader in his profession, began his forty-year tenure as superintendent in 1864. He had a lasting impact on the school for several reasons. He was instrumental in the founding of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind; he moved the campus to North Avenue in 1868; and officially changed the name to The Maryland School for the Blind. He also founded The Maryland School for the Colored Blind and Deaf in 1872 and served as the superintendent of both schools. The practice of segregated education for black blind and deaf students continued up until 1956.
John Frances Bledsoe became superintendent in 1906 and two years later relocated the school in 1908 to the present campus in northeast Baltimore. During his thirty-seven years at the helm of the school, Dr. Bledsoe oversaw its expansion and professionalization. It was during this period when the school began its residential program with the construction of four cottages and Newcomer Hall. The latter was named for Benjamin F. Newcomer who was one of the founders of the school and who served on the board of directors for over forty years.
The Baltimore Manual Labor School for indigent boys, also known as the Arbutus Farm School, was established in 1841. The school emerged from of a larger social movement developing in urban Victorian society at the time. Amidst the energetic fervor of the Second Great Awakening, white, middle-class Americans began actively participating in a reform movement to change the lives of the poor, inner-city population. Industrialization in the early nineteenth century brought extreme population growth to urban centers. In Baltimore, the population grew six fold between the years of 1820 and 1860. Specialized private and federal institutions formed to battle a rise in young people living in poverty. They began working to relocate children from what they saw as unpromising home environments to more positive atmospheres.
The school provided a, “Free Boarding School for indigent boys, mostly sons of poor widows who are unable to feed, clothe, and train their boys during the years that they should be acquiring an education, to enable each to attain a position of self support.” The School opened its doors in 1841 with fifteen “destitute and orphaned boy[s].” By 1843, the Baltimore Manual Labor School had taken into its care a total of forty-two children.
By applying the boys to a rigorous program centered primarily on physical labor, the school intended to mold the character of these young men, while at the same time supplying them with applicable work skills, effectively generating productive members of society. In 1893, directors of the Baltimore Manual Labor School wrote:
“the best occupation we can train our boys up to, is that of a farmer. It is perhaps almost the only calling which is not overcrowded, and the one most likely to produce an honorable and independent livelihood for the boys who have no capital, but health and energy.”
The types of farm work included tending to the orchards, vegetable gardens, green houses and livestock. The boys attended educational classes including writing, reading and math. They also attended the Catonsville Methodist Church on Sundays and engaged in daily religious exercises. However, education and religion took a backseat to manual labor which required of a six hour daily shift from each child, even for young boys. The school admitted boys as young as five.
In 1922, Spring Grove Hospital purchased the land following a devastating fire in 1916. The Stabler family owned the property and helped to run the school. Family patriarch Edmund Stabler held the position of superintendent from 1884 to 1904. Interestingly, the hospital used the farmland for a patient agricultural rehabilitation program. The state incorporated this and adjacent tracts of land in the early 1960’s in order to create UMBC. The Stabler home was used by Dr. Albin O. Kuhn, UMBC’s first Chancellor, during the construction of the campus and the Albin O. Kuhn Library now occupies the site where the home stood.
Constructed of tooled Indiana limestone, glass, steel, concrete, and granite, the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery is at the center of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus both literally and figuratively. Since the library first opened in 1968, it has served as a focal point of the campus and UMBC students’ academic lives.
In 1982, the building was named in honor of Dr. Albin O. Kuhn, the first chancellor of UMBC. Chancellor Kuhn helped to found and plan the University of Maryland campus in Baltimore County and took part in the early administration of the new campus. In 1965, Chancellor Kuhn hired his first full-time employee—the university’s first librarian, John Haskell, Jr. Haskell was only 24 at the time, coming to work straight out of graduate school and a few months of active duty in the Army Reserves. He spent many of the early months leading up to UMBC’s opening ordering books, hiring new employees, and creating a catalog ordering system. The campus master plan from that same year also noted the importance of the library:
“The building will be viewed on axis from the main approach drive, appearing unquestionably as the major building on campus.”
In its early years, UMBC housed the library collections in different locations throughout the campus. Chancellor Kuhn’s house served as the catalog center for the library’s 20,000 volume collection while other collection materials were held within Academic Building I. As the university’s holdings continued to grow, the UMBC administration began plans for the construction of a specifically designated library building, which would later become known as the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery.
Campus architects designed the library to grow with the university, making plans to build it in three phases. Phase 1, in 1968, brought all of UMBC’s library collections, which had previously been scattered across the campus, together into one central location. The new library Brutalist unfinished concrete exterior contrasted with an interior of brightly colored walls and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pond. Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects recognized the design with their highest honors in 1975.
Phase II opened in 1975 adding the library’s Special Collections department and a select collection of state and federal government documents to the library’s collection and continued the university’s efforts to expand its holdings. Phase III, the Library Tower, opened in 1995, increasing the library’s capacity further to 1,000,000 volumes.
As the library has sought to grow and maintain its holdings, the building has also grown as a student-centered space. This role expanded with the completion of the Retriever Learning Center (RLC) in 2011. Student organizations, like the Student Government Association and the Graduate Student Association, advocated for a central group study space as early as the 1980s. The university administration responded by creating the RLC, a space open to UMBC students for collaborative learning and group study. As described by UMBC President Dr. Freeman Hrabowski in 2011, the RLC is “another example of UMBC’s innovation in teaching and learning.”