Volume 1 — Sleepy Hollow

Story by Bob Allen

Originally published in the Baltimore City Paper in 1986.

To read the entire story, buy the book here.

The old Sykesville train station after it was abandoned and before it became a restaurant
By 1986, Sykesville’s old railroad station, designed by the Baltimore architect, E. Francis Baldwin over 100 years earlier, and completed in 1884, was abandoned and slowly falling apart.

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 —

 

Sykesville Town House, dated 1972
The Sykesville Town House, circa 1972, during the days, when on occasion, the police chained prisoners to the radiator before transferring them to Westminster. It was once home to John McDonald, but other families lived there over the years, including the Ridgelys. Josephine Ridgley was one of Wade Warfield’s daughters.
Raising the lights at Eldersburg's most famous intersection many years ago.
By the time they raised the first traffic light at the corner of 32 and 26 in Eldersburg, Sykesville was already in the throes of decline and Eldersburg was about to explode into the congested place it is today.
Thirty years after the lone Sykesville fire truck failed to save Main Street, Sykesville's volunteer fire department on Main Street was hard-pressed to save itself, as the station, along with two fire engines and most of the equipment, burned.
Thirty years after the lone Sykesville fire truck failed to save most of Main Street from fire in 1937, Sykesville’s volunteer fire department was hard pressed to save itself, as the station, along with two fire engines and most of the equipment, burned.
The Duke's Place just across the river was one of the two dangerous bars at the edge of town.
The Duke’s Place just across the river was one of the two dangerous bars at the edge of town, where the drinking got out of hand, guns went off, and one day a young man was killed in the parking lot outside the bars.
The bank building covered with an ugly grate.
For awhile, one of the town’s most beautiful buildings was hidden behind ugly metal grating in a strange attempt at modernizing the place.

 

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*