Oliver Viaduct, Ellicott City

Looking up Main Street showing the station, Oliver Viaduct in lower right hand corner, and Turnpike in upper left.

 Looking up Main Street showing the Oliver Viaduct that carried the B&O over the Baltimore and Frederick Turnpike

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: Old Main Line

Westbound CSX train rolling by Ellicott City

The second most frequently asked question at Ellicott City Station is, “Do trains still come by here?” Yes, freight trains still do roll by just like they have for over 180 years.

Construction of the railroad began with a grand groundbreaking celebration in Baltimore on July 4, 1828. Since no one had built a railroad through such difficult territory before, construction proved very costly. Civil engineers had to invent new techniques as they built west, such as using wooden crossties instead of stone sills to lay the rails. The line reached Ellicott's Mills in  

                                                                                                        May 1830.

In 1835, the B&O opened the Washington Branch to provide service to the nation’s capital. The line being built to Wheeling then became known as the Main Stem. After 24½ years of difficult labor and litigation, the Main Stem finally opened for service to Wheeling on January 1, 1853.

In 1873, the B&O completed the Metropolitan Branch northwest from Washington to join the Main Stem at Point of Rocks, MD. The section of the Main Stem between Relay and Point of Rocks then became known as the Old Main Line. It is still in use today as the Old Main Line Subdivision by CSX Transportation freight trains.

The original route the line followed caused many operational issues later on. At the time the route was surveyed, steam power was still in its infancy. The directors of the B&O chose to go with horse drawn cars, which were small and lightweight. As the horses gave way to steam locomotives in the mid 1830’s, it became apparent that the tight curves of the line would be problematic. As traffic increased, locomotives and the cars they pulled became larger and unable to safely run on the line. Over the years, the track was relocated in many areas to allow higher speeds and safer operation.

In the early 1900’s, the B&O began a major reconstruction project. Several tunnels were bored through the granite hills of the Patapsco Valley to provide a modern track alignment. The section in Ellicott City is still in the original surveyed location.

CSX continues the traditions of the B&O railroad. Coal is still transported from mines in West Virginia to Baltimore to be loaded on ships for export. If you travel through Baltimore on I95 and I895, just outside of the north tunnel portals is one of the coal piers. Trains consisting of special cars called auto racks carry new automobiles and trucks from factories in the Midwest to distribution yards in Baltimore and Pennsylvania. Near the north side of the I895 steel bridge is one of the Baltimore auto unloading yards. And mixed freight trains carrying all kinds of products continue to pass through Ellicott City in both directions. Today, most freight trains do not operate on a fixed schedule. A train could appear at any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The Pioneer outside the station

On display at Ellicott City Station is a replica of the Pioneer, a small wooden car that would be pulled by one horse at a time when the line first opened in back in 1830. If you’re lucky, you might get to see a 20,000 ton coal train pulled by several locomotives, producing over 12,000 horsepower rumbling by! Or one of the many other trains that pass thorough. We just don’t know when the next one might be.

(To answer the #1 FAQ, restrooms are in the Gift Shop!)

Who came through.....

Former General Robert E. Lee as he appeared as President of Washington College in 1869

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On two occasions, following the Civil War the Ellicott City Station played host to former General Robert E. Lee. During his post-war tenure as President of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, Lee saw a critical need for a railroad connection to Lexington. When a visitor to Lexington once asked Lee about the best route to travel out of the town Lee replied: “It makes but little difference, for whichever route you select, you will wish you had taken the other.”

He and a delegation from Virginia came to Baltimore on April 20, 1869 to visit with John Work Garrett, president of the B&O and the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to seek support for a rail connection. Three years prior, the B&O had summoned Col. James Randolph to survey possible routes down the Shenandoah Valley.

Following several meetings and affairs in Baltimore Lee took an afternoon train on April 28, 1869 from Camden Station to Ellicott City Station to visit relatives. From the station he took a carriage out the Frederick turnpike west of town to see Mrs. Samuel George or “Ella” as he called her. Ella was the daughter of Lee’s first cousin Charles Henry Carter. The next morning he was ushered back into Ellicott City, up Maryland Avenue on the heights above the railroad to the estate known as “Linwood” the home of Major Washington Peter. Major Peter was the first cousin of General Lee’s wife Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee.

"Linwood" the estate of Major Washington Peter as it appears today. The former mansion is now the Linwood Children's Center

Linwood, which still stands, was an imposing stone mansion originally built approximately 1835 and enlarged several times. Lee spent the morning with Major Peter before going down the hill to Ellicott City Station for the mid-day Baltimore-bound train.

Lee would return to “Linwood” about three and a half months prior to his death. On June 30, 1870 Lee arrived in Baltimore alone to consult a leading physician Dr. Thomas Hepburn Buckler concerning his failing health. Following various medical examinations he left from Camden Station on July 4, 1870 for Ellicott City Station to stay with his wife’s cousin Washington Peter. This time he lingered quietly in the countryside at the beautiful estate and on the morning of July 14^th he took the early train from Ellicott City to Baltimore and then South to Lexington as General Robert E. Lee would cross the Potomac River for the last time. Lee passed away on October 12, 1870.

Courtney B. Wilson

Executive Director

A Rare Peek Into the Past

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Rare 19th century photography, portraiture, and fine art affords historians an opportunity to gather a glimpse of many aspects of American life. Presented here (with reference numbers added) is the earliest known photograph of the Ellicott City Station and the surrounding buildings and structures in Ellicott's Mills. While the photographer is unknown, this view was taken atop the roof of the Gambrill Flour Mill once located on the Baltimore County side of the Patapsco River roughly where the large concrete Washington Flour Mill stands today (built in 1918 as The Patapsco Flouring Mills). The Gambrill and Carroll family bought the Ellicott's mill in 1832 and operated it for nearly 100 years.

The image has many charactertistics of either a Daguerreotype (invented 1839) or an Ambrotype (invented 1854) but this view was re-published by E&HT Anthony of New York (1862-1902) as a stereoview. Stereoviews were popular throughout the mid to late 19th century as a form of home entertainment. They were two side by side paper photographs mounted on cardboard (often with a descriptive narrative printed on the reverse) and designed to be seen through the use of a stereopticon. When placed in the view, the image appears in 3-D.

Stereopticon

Let’s take a rare peek into the past and see if we can gather some clues that might date the photograph!

Ellicott City

1) The B&O Railroad Ellicott City Station (1831) is seen here with its long roof and cupola but without the long trackside overhang and the addition of fancy timbered eaves that were added when architect E. Francis Baldwin designed and installed decorative additions to modernize the Station in 1880.

2) The Patapsco Hotel (1830) with its multi-storied piazzas actually served as the second railroad passenger station in America (the first was at Mt. Clare). The Ellicott City Station (1) was designed by the B&O Railroad as a freight station. This hotel, located directly across Main Street had a second floor passenger waiting rooms and a trackside platform for boarding. The old hotel served passengers until the Ellicott City Station was remodeled by Baldwin in 1880. In 1887 the building became the printing plant for the town's newspaper. By 1912 it was a warehouse for ice when the B&O locomotive de-railed and structurally damaged the building in 1925. Abandoned after the accident, the hotel collapsed in April 1926 and was re-built in its current form.

3) In the foreground of the images is Jonathon Ellicott's home (1790). One of three large stone residences at the mill built by George and Jonathon Ellicott, it was severely damaged in the 1868 flood (along with the Gambrill Mill and many of the other houses seen in front of the Ellicott house) and completely destroyed by Hurricane Agnes in 1972.

4) Perched in the distance atop the hill is Howard County Courthouse (1843). Construction began in 1841 and was completed in 1843.

Taking all of this evidence and information about the structures depicted into account, we definitely date the photograph before the 1869 flood and after the invention of this type of photography (1839). Characteristics of the original image (present when copied to a stereoview) show some discoloration, and scratching that is typical of Daguerreotype and Ambrotype photographs that used silver emulsion on the surface of a glass plate. This type of photography was most prevalent in America from about 1850-1865. Short of a miraculous discovery of a dated specimen, we will probably never know the exact date the unknown photographer climbed atop the Gambrill Mill to take this picturesque view. But we can be confident that it was taken in the decade preceding the Great Flood of 1868.

Courtney B. Wilson

Executive Director

A Notable Neighbor

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John Pendleton Kennedy

A Notable Neighbor and Railroad Passenger in Ellicott’s Mills

--> Spending many of his summers in a small cottage perched on the hillside high above The B&O Railroad Station in Ellicott’s Mills, John Pendleton Kennedy was the scion of a cultivated Baltimore, Md., family. Born in 1795 he graduated from Baltimore College in 1812 and served for 2 years in the Maryland militia. In 1816 he began practicing law. It is said he disliked practicing law, however, and by 1829 (thanks to a generous legacy from a wealthy uncle) he was able to withdraw from the courtroom and begin a long literary and public career. Early on Kennedy contributed sketches and satires to various publications. In 1832 he published his first book, Swallow Barn, a series of sketches depicting plantation life in Virginia, written under the pseudonym Mark Littleton. Under the same name he published his most successful novel, Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835).
With regular passenger service between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills well established, Kennedy purchase a small plot of land and built a neat little summer cottage above the B&O Station down on Main Street. Throughout his creative career, he lodged in his small retreat in Ellicott’s Mills far away from the dismal, humid Baltimore summer. No stranger to the B&O Railroad or Ellicott City Station, Kennedy rode back and forth to Baltimore on a regular basis maintaining a household in the City for business and winter lodging. On several occasions, Edgar Allen Poe debarked the B&O on Main Street and made his way up to Kennedy’s summer retreat.
Kennedy was also a friend of B&O Railroad director and general counsel John H.B. Latrobe. On an evening in October, 1833, three of Baltimore's most discerning gentlemen were gathered around a table in the back parlor of Latrobe’s house. Fortified with “some old wine and some good cigars,” John Pendleton Kennedy, James H. Miller and John H. B. Latrobe poured over manuscripts submitted in a literary contest sponsored by the Baltimore Sunday Visitor. Their unanimous choice for best prose tale was “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a curious and haunting tale of annihilation. The fifty dollar prize was awarded to the story’s heretofore unknown and, at the time, penniless author; Edgar Allan Poe.
In 1838 he not only produced another novel, Rob of the Bowl, but was also elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Whig. He lost and regained the seat several times. During this period he began to turn from fiction to more overtly political writing. A close friend and colleague of Edgar Allen Poe, many letters between the two are preserved at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1840 Kennedy's satire on Jacksonian democracy was published. In 1843 his Defense of the Whigs attacked John Tyler's defection from party policy on assuming the presidency after the death of William Henry Harrison. Kennedy produced his last important literary effort, a two-volume biography of the great lawyer William Wirt, in 1849.
In 1852, now a well known figure in America, Kennedy was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Millard Fillmore. During his 8-month tenure he helped organize Adm. Matthew Perry's expedition to Japan and dispatch the search party trying to find the missing explorer Sir John Franklin and his expedition.
At the outset of the Civil War, Kennedy, who had fought secession on the one hand and republicanism on the other, finally cast his lot with the Union. At the end of the War he published Mr. Ambrose's Letters on the Rebellion, in which he pleaded for compassion toward the fallen South. Occasional Addresses, Political and Official Papers, and At Home and Abroad (all 1872) were published posthumously. He died peacefully in his sleep on August 10, 1870 and is buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore.
Courtney B. Wilson, Executive Director

FLOOD!!

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Flood!

Standing at the at the corner of Main Street and Maryland Avenue a visitor to Ellicott City Station can gaze up at a wooden post supporting the walkway across the B&O Railroad’s Oliver Viaduct and see markings documenting the height of various floods through the Patapsco River Valley. The greatest of them all, rising 21.5 feet, came roaring down the evening of July 24, 1868.

In the memory of many, however, is the Great Flood of 1972 (marked on the post just below the cross beam) that rose to 14.5 feet. Pounding rain washed over Maryland on the morning of June 21, 1972 as Hurricane Agnes crept up the East Coast. Throughout the morning the Patapsco River rose at a relatively moderate rate. The rain kept coming, however, almost with a vengeance until the River began to spill over its banks. Tributaries throughout the valley began to fill fields and low lying areas adding more and more water to the Patapsco. Between about 8 PM and 9 PM that sultry summer evening the river rose more than 10 feet reaching its crest sometime in the early morning hours of June 22^nd. The waters would nearly reach the main waiting room of the Ellicott City Station at track level.

Ellicott City Station and its adjacent bridge positioned at the junction of the Patapsco River and the Tiber River flowing down Main Street witnessed a backwash of water filled with dangerous debris that would threaten the Station that had survived the devastating deluge of 1868. Eight people would die that night-swept away by the raging waters. Automobiles, trucks, large chunks of buildings, telephone poles and twisted railroad track would wreak havoc on anything in their path. Years would pass before Ellicott City and the other communities in the Patapsco Valley would recover.

Two interesting outcomes of the 1972 flood, silver linings to dark storm clouds, have left legacies of B&O history. Rushing water across the railroad tracks entering and leaving Ellicott City Station unearthed some of the B&O Railroad’s early engineering. Granite stone stringers that supported iron strap rail from the 1831 rail bed construction were exposed to the light of day for the first time in more than 125 years. Examples of these along with pieces of original iron strap rail were extracted and brought into the Museum’s collection while others were left in their original position.

Still in occasional use by the Chessie System Railroad as a freight depot, the flood damaged historic station was under threat of sale and/or demolition. In 1974 a group of local preservationists led by Roland and Enalee Bounds gathered up the resources to take possession of the Station, restore it and open it to the public as a museum. They established an organization named Historic Ellicott City Inc. that operated the The Oldest Railroad Station in America for more than 30 years and has tackled numerous important preservation projects in the old town.

Courtney B. Wilson

Executive Director

Newspaper accounts revealing the devastation left by the flood of 1972.

1831 iron strap rail unearthed by the flood waters

Crossing Over

The 1931 steel railroad bridge and one remaining arch of the historic Oliver Viaduct

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Crossing Over

Today as one drives into or out of Ellicott City on Main Street there is an historic intersection of roads and rails. Immediately west of the Ellicott City Station is a steel bridge and one granite stone arch that carries the B&O ‘s old main line over Frederick Road once a part of the National Road. A symbolic crossing where America’s first railroad met a major wagon route to America’s interior.

The B&O built three major stone viaducts between Mt. Clare in Baltimore and Ellicott City Station. The current steel bridge, erected in 1931, was a nod to an expanding town, a trolley system that once operated up Main Street and the dominance of the automobile. A stately triple arch viaduct, designed by Caspar Wever and constructed in 1829 once spanned the National Road here. It was named after Robert Oliver, one of Baltimore’s “merchant elite” and a founding director of the railroad and was built in 100 days at a cost of $21,830.00.

The dedication occurred on Saturday August 28, 1830 when Robert Oliver, along with a distinguished company of compatriots, the press and citizens listened to B&O President Philip E. Thomas say “The noble edifice of which we have just witnessed the completion, I have been instructed to designate by the name of a fellow-citizen…distinguished for his liberality, public spirit and generous support of the magnificent enterprise in which we have embarked. This structure will accordingly thereafter be distinguished by the name of the Oliver Viaduct.”

One of the original three stone arches remains in place spanning the Tiber River just before it spills into the Patapsco. On the west side of the steel structure at the base of the stone wall is the original cornerstone dated “AD 1829.” Immediately above is the inscription “AL 5829” a traditional calendar date used by the Freemasons who believed that the world was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ.

The next time you visit ponder this crossing for a moment. While wagons still plodded their way across a muddy arduous path below a new technology, literally, flew over.

Rare 19th century view of the Oliver Viaduct as originally constructed. The Fredericktown Turnpike or National Road passes through the two arches later replaced by the steel span.

A Monumental Inconvenience

The hot summer of 1830 saw the end in sight for the final stretches of track being laid between Mt. Clare and Ellicott’s Mills. Great stone viaducts had been constructed and earth carefully moved to perch the railroad’s right of way on a shelf above the meandering Patapsco River. Immediately beyond Ellicott’s Mills, where the Oliver Viaduct crossed the Frederick Turnpike (Main Street) and construction had begun on the B&O’s first purpose built depot (Ellicott City Station), lay a giant rock.

Considering the incredible tasks performed by teams of laborers to get the railroad this far one might consider getting past an outcropping of rock might not be too much of a challenge. This steep incline leading down to the river bed, however, had a virtual wall of hard granite protruding nearly perpendicular to the face of the hillside, blocking the right of way with no way around. We can only imagine the schemes plotted to remove this obstacle. In the end the engineers and laborers chose to get through the great rock by excavating a vertical slice out of it leaving a monumental tower of granite on the river side of the tracks. The result was a curious spectacle that attracted much attention and even became a tourist attraction of sorts for many years.

This unusual piece of engineering handiwork was named Tarpeian Rock after a steep cliff on the southern summit of Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum in Ancient Rome. The Roman rock was used as an execution site. Murderers and traitors, if convicted by the courts were flung from the cliff to their deaths and many who had a mental or significant physical disability also suffered the same fate as they were thought to have been cursed by the gods. While, hopefully, no one was ever flung to their death off this rock it was a notable feature of the landscape on the B&O described in some mid-19^th century travelogues and depicted in the accompanying engraving. It stood for almost thirty years before the railroad removed the entire granite pillar to make way for a wider track bed.

At about 2:00 o’clock PM on August 28, 1830 a group of the B&O Railroad’s luminaries were poised to watch director Robert Oliver ceremoniously lay the keystone of the viaduct about to be named for him. Attending were Philip E. Thomas, president; John H. B. Latrobe, counsel; a reporter and Peter Cooper who had transported the dignitaries from Baltimore behind his little steam locomotive that, on this day, set record breaking speed at 18 miles per hour. Philip E. Thomas presided over the ceremonies congratulating the contractor for his performance and the town citizens for their patience. What Thomas failed to mention that day was that a several laborers had been killed three days earlier when a car full of excavated stone from the Tarpeian Rock rolled off the end of temporary track onto the workmen below.

Courtney B. Wilson

Executive Director

Mark Twain Visits Ellicott City Station

It was that on the 10th of June, 1909 after traveling from New York on the B&O’s Royal Blue and transferring to a local train at Camden Station, that Mark Twain found himself walking through the Ellicott City Station. Passing through the Main Waiting Room, down the narrow stairs and out to the street he met a carriage dispatched to transport him up to Catonsville where he would be the guest speaker at the commencement exercises for
Saint Timothy’s School for Girls.

His address that day was short, to the point and typical Twain:

“I don't know what to tell you girls to do. Mr. Martin has told you everything you ought to do, and now I must give you some don'ts.

There are three things which come to my mind which I consider excellent advice:

First, girls, don't smoke--that is, don't smoke to excess. I am seventy- three and a half years old, and have been smoking seventy-three of them. But I never smoke to excess--that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.

Second, don't drink--that is, don't drink to excess.

Third, don't marry--I mean, to excess.

Honesty is the best policy. That is an old proverb; but you don't want ever to forget it in your journey through life.”

This was to be Mark Twain’s last public address. He passed away 10 months later.

Courtney B. Wilson

Executive Director