Story by Bob Allen
Originally published in the Baltimore City Paper in 1986.
To read the entire story, buy the book here.
Sykesville in 1986
— Excerpt —
Farther north in Carroll County, where the glacier-like expansion of the greater Baltimore-Washington area’s suburban corridor has not yet reached, there are many towns like Sykesville — small towns, their vitality sapped by changes going back as far as the decades immediately following the Civil War, when many of them were in their cultural and economic heydays; sleepy, antediluvian towns, which seem as much propped up by the forces of memory and nostalgia as by the crumbling mortar and brittle wood in their sagging foundations.
But the case for Sykesville is a bit different, located as it is a mere 20 miles west of Baltimore and 36 miles north of Washington, D.C. Situated amidst the rampant, hurly-burly suburban development that has wiped much of the rest of southern Carroll County clean of whatever sense of history and traditional continuity it might once have possessed, and flanked to the south by the urbane prosperity of Howard County, Sykesville is like a slumbering little piece of the past. It is a rustic, if slightly decayed little town of 2400 people, mysteriously marooned in the sluggish backwaters of time. It is struggling almost desperately to make some vital reconnection with the late 20th century, which, by and large, has passed it by.
The town’s more recent struggles are not readily obvious to an outsider who might pause to survey its little domain, carved out of a riverside ravine. The town is without even a single stoplight. There’s not even a blinking light at its once significant downtown intersection. Its aesthetic centerpiece is a small, slightly dilapidated, old B&O train station that has not been in use as such for more than a few years.
— End of Excerpt —
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