Lutherville’s first public school is for sale. It’s going for $199,500. It doesn’t come with desks anymore. From the looks of its listing on Long and Foster’s website, it comes with a lot of knotty pine paneling and built-in shelves, all of which look country-cottage and none of which look scholastic. It’s been a private residence for about one hundred years now, and for more than the last 50, it’s been lived in and cared for by the Bowie family. Washington “Wash” Bowie V and his wife, Mary “Macky” Bowie, married in 1946 and raised their three children in the home at 1508 Bellona Ave, before …

Wikipedia needs to brush on Lutherville-Timonium’s history. The York and Timonium Road location of yesteryear’s Ameche’s Drive-In was not listed on their website, but the Dundalk, Pikesville, Towson and Glen Burnie locations were. So Patch fixed it, because there was definitely an Ameche’s on the southeastern corner of that intersection, in the 1960s. Chip Noon, 66, remembers being a teenager at Ameche’s, the drive-in, fast-food burger joint of Timonium. “What I remember most were the bright lights of the place. This warm orange glow, lots of colors, lots of activity,” said Noon, who now …

Editor’s note: Click here and here to read Parts I and II of our Orchard Hills Series.   Sharon Patterson Denitto felt she never really got to say goodbye to Orchard Hills. She spent a childhood on Warwick Drive in the 1950s and 60s, but was flabbergasted, while attending college in Texas in 1966, to learn her family had sold the house and moved to Florida. Orchard Hills was no longer the neighborhood she’d ever come home to. She didn’t come back again until 1986, and when she did, she felt a bit like an oddball. “I had never, ever gone back to the house,” said Sharon, who now lives with her …

Editor’s note: Click here to read Part I of our Orchard Hills Series. When Loretta Vandenburg moved to Orchard Hills with her parents in 1955, she was in high school. Her parents were the first ones to live on the street, Warwick Drive. But rather than having lots of space to park the moving truck, they had the opposite problem -- the movers didn’t want to drive to the house. “When we moved in, the movers didn’t even want to come up to our house to deliver our stuff, because we had no roads,” Loretta said. “We had nothing but rocks. They had sidewalks, and the houses were built, but no paved …

Editor's Note: You can read Parts I and II of this exclusive Then & Now series here and here. Susan Gelston Mink’s mother, Jeanne, was playing bridge in the late 1960s with a friend who drove her home one day. Jeanne was pointing where to go, and the driver pulled up near her home, the Gelston House, the Greek revival, formal brownstone mansion at 1603 Francke Ave. It does not match the more whimsical Victorian cottages that Lutherville is known for. “I think this is the ugliest house in Lutherville,” the friend said, not realizing they had arrived. “So mother had her drop her off at the next…

Editor's Note: You can read Part I of this exclusive Then & Now series here. Oak Grove is haunted. All good, old houses should be haunted, don’t you think? The oldest house in Lutherville is no exception. Susan Gelston Mink told me she doesn’t know who the ghost is, but the ghost must have been old. She was wearing old-fashioned clothes when Mink’s mother saw her, sometime in the early 1950s. Mink spent the early part of her childhood growing up at Oak Grove, from age 3 until age 9, and nothing about it spooked her except the occasional bat that made its way inside. But both her parents saw, …

“Memory Lane” is not a street in Lutherville, but it might well be once you get Susan Gelston Mink started on her stories about her life on Morris, Francke and Seminary avenues.  I met Mink for lunch last week, hoping to pick her brain for some mid-century nuggets about the old fire department parades and the soap box derbies in Lutherville for my “Then and Now” column.  I ended up in her car, trespassing at Oak Grove, slouching down in her passenger seat while she parked in the driveway, got out, and walked around the yard.  “I keep waiting for someone to come out and yell at me,” I …

“Forever and to the end of the world” In 1709, an English teenager and King George loyalist named Henry Sater sailed to America. He purchased some land in today’s Lutherville, off Falls Road, called Chestnut Ridge. He farmed tobacco. He was a slave-owner, and a Baptist, and by all accounts a hard worker, according to the Baptist Convention of Maryland. He did not marry until he was nearly 40 years old, but his wife soon passed away. He waited 10 years to marry again, this time to Dorcas Towson, with whom he had six, late-in-life children. By then, he had been deeded much more land by the …

Editor's Note: You can read Part I of this exclusive Then & Now series here, and Part II here. “Deereco Today” Mail carriers bear witness to so many people’s lives when they keep the same route through much of their careers. They see the residents’ newborn babies brought home from the hospital, and they watch them grow up. They mourn the passing of their elderly customers. They watch the houses change hands. Jeff Davis, a longtime Lutherville-Timonium mail carrier, has attended several weddings of customers on his route, having watched the new bride or groom grow up from infancy to adulthood…

Editor's Note: You can read Part I of this exclusive Then & Now series here.    “The Day of the Move” It was a Saturday in 1987. All the mail carriers are clear on that. They’re also pretty sure it was Sept. 23. Lutherville-Timonium had officially burst at the seams, and the day had come to move the Lutherville post office to its new home—the big, old John Deere building on the eponymous Deereco Road, in Timonium. The building seemed huge. It covers 197,000 square feet of space. The roof is a pre-cast concrete plank roof and is supported by 1½ inch-thick steel cables, tied to concrete anchors…

“Plenty of Room in the New Place!” In the cramped and crowded old Lutherville-Timonium Post Office in 1985, the mail carriers developed a catch phrase. Every time they bumped into each other or knocked something over—an increasingly common event—they’d say, "Plenty of room in the new place!” The “new place” was a yet-to-be determined building where they’d have plenty of room to do their jobs. In 1985, the working conditions were beginning to feel sardine-like, and everyone knew a move was imminent. Lutherville and Timonium neighborhoods had developed rapidly into growing suburbs since 1957, …

In 1977, a very young Glenn Haug was a kid customer at the Fairgrounds Inn in Timonium. He and his sister would hang out in a booth on weekends, sipping on homemade cherry sodas and tying straws together, while their dad enjoyed a beer and watched sports at the bar. The Fairgrounds Inn was a cozy neighborhood bar, where locals could go and see their Timonium neighbors. Twelve years later, an older, still local Haug considered the place to be a favorite, comfortable spot, but he’d upgraded his childhood cherry sodas to beers. “It was kind of like a Cheers to us,” said Haug, who's now a manager…

From homemade milkshakes, to local crab cake sandwiches, to imported Korean cars — that’s a broad history for one small corner of York Road and Bellona Avenue in Lutherville. Decades ago, the Maple Rest Tea Room was a mom-n-pop soda counter where Lutherville students caught the bus to Towson High School and availed themselves of the milkshakes, sodas, candy and newspapers sold within. Bud Cornell, a Lutherville resident for most of his 79 years, remembers the Maple Rest well. “They had at least one pinball machine,” recalled Cornell. “My experience with it was primarily going there after …

Cookies? Check. A friendship song? Check. A pledge, a lesson, and a contribution to society? Check, check and check. Sounds like nothing has changed in the Girl Scouts between the 1940s and today. The Girl Scouts were founded by Juliette Gordon Lowe in 1912. Maggie Burke, 10, a current Lutherville girl scout in Troop 4461, is an expert on this, as she did a report on Lowe last year when she was in third grade. “They learned the same things as us, like being helpful. And they had snack back then, too,” she said. Snacks are important. But more important is Lowe’s vision of what the girl scouts …

Heaver Plaza has been a Lutherville landmark for 40 years. Looming about the rest of the York Road skyline, the Heaver Plaza rooftop shines its square perimeter of lights above the surrounding neighborhoods every night when the sun goes down. Those lights are festive, as we neighbors know—in December, they are green and red for the holidays, and during football season, they glow purple in support of the Ravens. It’s not magic—it’s a fearless maintenance staff. Carolyn Norwood, vice president of Columbia Bank inside Heaver Plaza’s first floor, said, “The guys go up on the roof, and they …

Red dragon, golden ivory and blue pearl royale—all are color names of granite countertops at the Lutherville Tile & Marble Showroom. But in the 1920s through 2001, customers entering that same building at 1610 York Road would have had different items to choose from: shave and a haircut, for example. That's because back then it was Otto Gross' Barbershop. Otto Gross died three years short of achieving his goal—100 years of family barbering. In 1904 his father began cutting hair at another location on York Road. And in 1928, he moved into the location now occupied by Lutherville Tile, according…

In 1869, the Methodists in Lutherville got fed up with the Lutherans. More precisely, they objected to sharing a single church building and alternating Sundays. This annoyance, and their own industriousness, sped them through the construction of a new church, that was all Methodist, on Seminary Avenue. By May of that same year, the foundation had been laid, and by September it was completed. The new two-story wood-framed church became the original St. John’s United Methodist Church on September 12, 1869. (The Lutherans remained in the original church, no longer having to share it – it’s known…

To think of what one young lady’s cigarette could do. Of course, in 1911, the young lady with her cigarette was probably in the height of fashion, smoking in her dorm room.  Chances are she wasn’t breaking any rules by smoking at school.  Quite possibly, she was in good company with her equally fashionable roommates. Or maybe she was alone in her room, studying for an exam while she smoked.  It was just past Christmas, already January, and the Maryland College for Women would have been gearing up for a new year, having just put 1910 to rest. Long before our scholarly young turn-of-the-century…

On July 21, 1852, the Baltimore Sun ran the following ad:  “TWO DOLLARS REWARD - Ran away from the subscriber on the 17th. BENJAMIN BOWIE, aged 14 years. I will give the above reward for the delivery of said boy to No. 100 York Road. ELIZABETH BOWIE.”  Elizabeth Bowie wasn’t offering a $2 reward for the return of a teenage son named Benjamin—she was trying to get her runaway slave back. The residence she advertised, 100 York Road, is now right down the street in Towson. It’s now the site of businesses like All State Plumbing, Doctor Windshield, Carpet Consultants and ABC Phones. There is no …

It's no secret that Timonium is synonymous with the State Fair.  When people ask me where I work, their second question (after "what's Patch?") is usually something having to do with the annual event that draws tens of thousands of people from around the state.  I'm not surprised.  Lutherville-Timonium Patch launched in accordance with the State Fair in August and we've been reporting about events that have taken place there ever since.  It's interesting to note that while the fairgrounds have evolved other the years, expanding and incorporating new exciting events and attractions, president …