Grantsville

Maryland Historical Society

Situated on U.S. 40 (the old National Road) and beside Interstate 68, Grantsville is 26 miles west of Cumberland, Maryland in Garrett County, and one mile south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It is bounded on the east by the Casselman River, and on the south by Interstate 68. One-half mile to the west is Shade Run, the site of a camp set up by Gen. Edward Braddock and his soldiers in 1755 during the Seven Years' or French and Indian War. Grantsville is the center of an agricultural and light industrial community, and its current population is 650..

History
The name "Grantsville" comes from a small community surrounding six lots laid out by Daniel Grant. At first the community was called Grant's Settlement, then Grant's Town, and finally, in 1846, it was named Grantsville.

Daniel Grant (1734-1816) was a Baltimore businessman and innkeeper who came into the area about 1795. While still living in Baltimore he had purchased over 1,000 acres of land between the Casselman River and Shade Run, and in time a small community grew up around six building lots he had laid out on the land where the Braddock Road passed through the area. For a short time he was one of the area's wealthiest men before, in 1804, financial reverses in Baltimore forced him to sell his property. In 1811 he returned to Baltimore.

In the 1780s this area of western Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania changed from the "Western Frontier" into a stable farming region. One mile east of Grantsville, is a grist mill built on the Casselman River in 1797. In the 1750s, the Casselman River was called the Little Youghiogheny River, and the ford over the river east of Grantsville was called "Little Crossings." By 1817 enough people had moved into the area for a new election district to be formed, called, "Little Crossings District."

The National Road
After the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson recognized the need for a good road to the west. At his urging Congress in 1806 passed legislation for building the National Road. The new road, the construction of which began in 1811, went through the center of the settlement that eventually became Grantsville, and as a result the town flourished from the traffic passing through it.

Stores, taverns, and a stage coach stop developed to accommodate travelers on the road. The road's heyday came between 1842 and 1853. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad reached Cumberland in 1842 and this part of Maryland had access to the eastern markets of Baltimore and Washington. Soon herds of livestock and wagon loads of agricultural produce passed through Grantsville over the National Road, as a constant stream of settlers moved westward. Local historians quote one "old timer" as saying, "As far as the eye could see east and west, there was continual movement over the road."

One of the taverns that came into being was the Starner House, built in 1842. After a series of name changes over the years, it is now called the called the Casselman Hotel. Still in operation, it is the oldest building in Grantsville.

As settlers moved west, new residents came to the Grantsville area. These were Amish, Mennonite, and other people of German origin who migrated from Pennsylvania and brought with them the excellent farming practices that stimulated the local agricultural economy. Those who had emigrated most recently from Germany wrote glowing letters back to their families and encouraged them to come to western Maryland. One area southeast of Grantsville had so many new settlers that it became known as New Germany.

In 1851 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built through the southern part of Garrett County. The town of Oakland began to grow as Grantsville had grown when the National Road was built, and the area prospered. At the time the region was part of Allegany County, but residents began they to think should be able to manage their own affairs rather than have them mandated by people living in Cumberland. The General Assembly recognized a petition to separate the area from Allegany County, and in 1872 an election was held to decide the matter. The new county was called Garrett County, after John W. Garrett, president of the B&O. The 1872 election also decided the new seat of county government. Chief contenders were Oakland in the south and Grantsville in the north. Oakland won. Grantsville's bitterness over the loss gradually disappeared with new economic development in the area.

Lumber and Coal
Following the Civil War, the demand for lumber increased as towns and cities grew throughout the United States. For years, water-powered sawmills in Garrett County had filled the limited local need for lumber. But in the early 1880s new technology was introduced into the lumber business that included sawmill machinery and lumber railroads.

At the beginning of this new era, lumber cut in the Casselman River valley was transported by wagon to the B&O sidings in nearby Pennsylvania. Then, in 1898 the Jennings Brothers (Worth and Cortez Jennings) built their Casselman River railroad from Pennsylvania into the Casselman River valley. For the next 20 years lumbering fed the economy of Grantsvlle. Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, the lumbering era all but ended in 1910.

But as the demand for lumber diminished, American industry increased its demand for coal, and coal mining became the next industry to support the economy of the Grantsville region. Soon, railroads that had transported logs and cut lumber were hauling coal from mines in the hills around Grantsville. During World War II, deep mining gave way to surface mining because many of the coal veins were near the surface and it was profitable to strip away the dirt on the surface to get to the coal deposits. In the late 1940s the demand for coal also declined.

Smaller industries-bricks, maple syrup, fine furniture, cut stone and meat packing-gradually helped the economy of Grantsville recover from the loss. The largest single stimulant to the local economy probably was the Interstate Highway System in the mid-1970s. New roads, trucks, and automobiles brought economic progress to the area in the same way that the National Road had a century and a half before. Today, a small industrial park along Interstate 68 is slowly developing to handle manufactured products on a nationwide basis.

To the east of Grantsville, on the other side of the Casselman River, is a new development, Penn Alps, with a restaurant and a series of artisans' shops reproducing crafts of the Appalachian Mountains. The 200-year-old grist mill located there is once more offering grain products for sale. A prominent feature of Penn Alps is the 1811 stone bridge. Constructed as part of the National Road, it carried traffic over the Casselman River and was at the time it was built the largest single-span arch bridge in the United States.

Schlosnagle, Stephen. Garrett County: A History of Maryland's Tableland. Oakland, Md.: Garrett County Historical Society, 1989.