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John W. Garrett

Maryland Historical Society

Garrett County (estimated population 2005 29,909) is the westernmost of Maryland’s counties and the second largest at 648 square miles. It was created in 1872 from a section of Allegany County.  The county was named for John Work Garrett (1820-1884), then President of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad, which was crucial to the area’s economic development.  At the time Garrett County was formed, the town of Oakland was chosen as the county seat.

Major population centers in the county are Oakland, Mt. Lake Park, McHenry, Accident, Friendsville, and Grantsville.  Friendsville has the distinction of being the oldest of this group, founded in 1765 when the Friend family purchased land from the Indians on the Youghiogheny River.

Geography
The county is located in the Allegany Mountains of the Appalachian Mountain chain.  The highest elevation in the Maryland is on Backbone Mountain.  Named “Hoye Crest” for Garrett County historian Charles Hoye, it rises 3,360 feet above sea level.  Triangular in shape, the county is bounded on the north by Pennsylvania, on the west and south by West Virginia, and on the east by Allegany County.

History
During early 1700s, this part of Maryland was the “Western Frontier” inhabited by members of the migratory Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo tribes of Native Americans.  On the whole, the native peoples were friendly with white men who came into the area as hunters and trappers.

The Lords Fairfax claimed the area as part of a grant to them from the Crown and, in1736, Lord Fairfax sent Benjamin Winslow to map his holdings. His report, in which he noted the presence of “stone coal” near the mouth the Savage River, was the first mention of the mineral resources, which were to prove so important to Garret County’s development. Ten years later, another survey party marked the source of the North Branch of the Potomac River with the “Fairfax Stone,” a landmark which ever since has served as the starting point for the western boundary of both Garrett County, in particular, and Maryland, in general.

The northern part of Garrett County experienced elements of the French and Indian War.  In 1753, George Washington was directed by Virginia to tell the French that they were trespassing on English territory and should leave the northern part of the Allegheny River basin.  The French ignored the order.  In 1754, Washington was sent with the Virginia militia to drive out the French.  Washington was defeated by a combined French and Indian army at Fort Necessity and retreated to Little Meadows in Garrett County.

In 1775, Washington returned with militia and British troops under the command of the British general Edward Braddock.  Braddock’s engineers cut a road through Maryland and into Pennsylvania and were only seven miles away from Fort Duquesne on the Ohio River when the troops were ambushed by the French and Indians.  Braddock was mortally wounded in the fight and Washington took charge of the troops, bringing them back to safety in Maryland.

Eventually, the French were expelled and settlers began coming into the territory that is now Garrett County.  At first there were only single cabins; then settlements like Friendsville began to grow.  During this period, other settlers were moving westward into the Ohio River Valley.  The road which formed part of their route was the one which Braddock’s engineers had cut out for his ill-fated expedition: it is still called “Braddock’s Road.”
 
Early Industry and Travel
The early settlers devoted were subsistence farmers.  However, trade with coastal areas was soon established by means of the Braddock Road and other wagon routes to the East. Eventually, the Federal Government recognized the need for a good road west to the Ohio Country and authorized the building of the National Road, which passed through the northern part of Garrett County on its way to the Ohio River at Wheeling.  The road was under construction from 1806 to 1818 and fostered a population increase and an expanded economy for the northern part of the Allegany County. 

Early in the 1800s, settlers found deposits of iron ore along Bear Creek in the Friendsville area.  The Allegany Iron Company was incorporated in 1828 and built an iron furnace near the deposit.  Pig iron from the furnace was transported over the National Road to an iron foundry in Brownsville, Pa.

Settlers and Religious Influx
The first European settlers of Garrett County were English, Scottish, and Irish, who moved in as the Indians moved out. The period from 1820 to1850 saw an influx of German settlers from Pennsylvania.  They settled in the Grantsville and Accident areas, where there was fertile land for farming.  Included among the German settlers were Amish and Mennonite farmers.  Shortly before the Civil War, younger Amish and Mennonite families moved to farm land south of Oakland.  A majority of the descendents of the original families still live near where their great-grandparents settled.

Later, with the building of the railroads, a number of Irish families moved into the southern part of Garrett County.  The development of the coal industries in the early 1900s saw Italian, German, and other Europeans move into the coal mining towns and communities of the county.

In 1881, a group of men from Wheeling developed a community called Mountain Lake Park. Embracing 800 acres of land between Oakland and Deer Park, the site was devoted to Methodist Church activities on the Chautauqua model. Successful from the very beginning, in 1901 a 5,000 seat amphitheater was built.  Upon President William H. Taft’s visit to the amphitheater in 1911, over 7,000 people packed the building with overflow grouped outside.

Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
The B&O Railroad was gradually built across Maryland, arriving in Cumberland, Maryland in 1842. The work pushed westward, finally coming to Oakland in Garrett County in 1851.  Its arrival in Cumberland and subsequently in Oakland produced an economic boom in several different ways.  The northern part of the county, the National Road, became the route for cattle, and agricultural products headed to cities near the East Coast.  Access was shortened by weeks because goods could be shipped by railroad cars from Cumberland; the same was true for products coming to the mountains from East Coast cities.  This intensity of traffic on the National Road continued until the railroad reached Wheeling in 1853.

Lumber Industry
The railroad’s arrival marked the start of the lumber industry in southern Garrett County.  The great forests of the county provided a bountiful supply of oak, chestnut, and evergreens.  Soon the woods were crisscrossed with logging railroads that moved the lumber to saw mills and to rail sidings of the main line railroads. Today, lumbering is small a part of the county economy; as a large scale industry it faded after the beginning of 1900.

Coal Industry
The construction of lumber railroads throughout the county gave access to the many coal veins in the hills of Garrett County.  Beginning with small companies producing coal in all parts of the county, the coal industry peaked during the middle of the 1920s.  It stagnated until World War II, when the sudden demand for coal led operators to replace many small mines with “strip,” or surface, excavations. After 1945, this type of operation disappeared from the Allegany region.  

Today, coal mining centers on deep mining of large veins of coal along the Potomac.  Mechanical mining machinery of one mine can produce more in one day than
the daily output of all county mines combined during the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Summer Resorts
The arrival of the railroad in Garrett County, attracted people from the Washington and Baltimore area wanting to get away from the summer heat. A small hotel as well as an assortment of boarding houses opened in Oakland.  The B&O Railroad built a large resort hotel at Deer Park in 1873 and one in Oakland in 1875.  Within 15 years of the Oakland hotel’s birth, almost a dozen smaller hotels appeared for eager visitors.

However, the growth of auto travel greatly diminished the resort hotel business and the Oakland Hotel was torn down for its lumber in 1909, followed by the Deer Park Hotel during World War II.  But the resort business got a new lease on life when Deep Creek Lake was completed in 1925.  Its 65 miles of shoreline was ideal for

Deer Park Hotel

Maryland Historical Society

summer vacation cottages.  This encouraged boating on the lake, fishing, and new restaurants and night clubs.

Recreation and Culture: Winter and Spring
Today, 50 years after its opening in 1956, the Wisp resort is host to thousands of people on major weekends from January to March.  The modern winter resort business has brought with it food markets, restaurants, and motel and hotel accommodations.  New winter cottages are constantly being built around Deep Creek Lake.

Oakland and the community of McHenry and Grantsville are the primary places of recreation and culture in Garrett County. The Museum of the Garrett County Historical Society and the renovated Oakland Railroad Station are located in Oakland.  At McHenry there is the Wisp recreation complex, Garrett College, and the Garrett County Fair Grounds.  The Wisp and Garrett College share a number of cultural activities; the College hosts the summer Chautauqua sponsored by the Maryland Humanities Council the first week in July.

Grantsville has the Casselman Hotel (built 1842), several antique shops and a small museum.  East of Grantsville is the unique Penn Alps complex preserving the crafts of the Appalachian Mountains.  A white water company in Friendsville rents kayaks and rafts for supervised trips down the Class 4 rapids of the Youghiogheny River.

The Maryland State Park system in Garrett County provides several thousand acres of public land for hiking, camping, and backpacking in the summer; cross country skiing and snowmobiling in the winter.  Several of the State Parks have some form of nature programs June through September.

—John A. Grant

Oakland, Md.