I just walked in from Garrett County, poorest in the state of Maryland and thus the wealthiest in West Virginia if it were annexed. Which it could have been. Garret County forms the panhandle of Maryland, a Neverland of the Free State high in the mountains. Every place up there proudly sells crabcakes, the state food., though the crabs all arrive by truck.

Garret County was formed by a bottleneck at the Cumberland Gap and spilled west along the southern border of Pennsylvania. They have a slogan contest going up there. I heard one as the ground got higher and the snow cover thicker on the ground. “Pennsylvania! It’s not just a rectangle.”

The gateway to Garrett County is Cumberland, where the dream of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal ended. It is the continuing rise of vertical elevation that stopped the canal diggers. It is the Eastern Continental Divide, and the Potomac has its headwaters here. Further to the west, toward Keysar’s Ridge, the water all flows west and south to the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the mighty Ohio.

The hardy Scots and Irish who flowed west from Philadelphia and Baltimore are still up here, at least for now.

They are being edged out by people like me. We are buying up Garrett County like hotcakes, or crab cakes anyway, and the lakefront property prices have gone through the roof. Everyone talk s about it.

To the south of Denny’s Garrett County is West Virginia. They sell liquor there on the weekends. They do not in Garret County. This is were the roof of eastern America rises..

Garrett County was created from Allegheny County in 1872, the last Maryland county to be formed. It is shaped like a shard of glass, jagged edge down and running along the border of West Virginia. The northern border is as straight as the Amish whose Pennsylvania it presses against, and the Western border is a vertical slash across the mountains.

The County was named for John Work Garrett (1820-1884), railroad executive, industrialist, and financier. Garrett served as president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from 1858 until his death. In the 2000 census, the population was counted at just under 30,000 souls. That is an increase of nearly 10% since the previous head count back in 1990. I think it is a lot more than that now.

Garrett County has eight municipalities, and I intended to have a beer in each one. They are Accident, Deer Park, Friendsville, Grantsville, Kitzmiller, Loch Lynn Heights, Mountain Lake Park, and Oakland. The oldest of them is Oakland, the county seat, incorporated in the first year of the War of Union Aggression in 1862. Thereafter, municipal government formed at Grantsville (1864), Deer Park (1884), Loch Lynn Heights (1896), Friendsville (1902), Kitzmiller (1906), Accident (1916), and Mountain Lake Park (1931).

But the history of the County goes back a lot further than that. This place is a gateway to the history of the westward expansion, a crossroad of Colonial America, this poor county on the west side of the Big Ridges. It was over these bony ridges that lay the Ohio valley and the fertile plains. But there was already a power to the West. The French were there with their Indian allies. Their empire was one of trade and association with the local Indians. The British model was to slash down the trees and begin to plant. They were incompatible business models.

Garrett County is about tobacco, like everything else in Colonial America. Not that the Tidewater plantation owners could drag their slaves up here and grow the weed in the thin rocky soil. But the Planters were burning the of nutrients by the James River and the Irish and Scots immigrants continued to flood into the coastal cities. To accommodate them, and to add to their wallets, a group of influential Virginians and several London merchants formed the Ohio Company in 1749. They received a grant for 200,00 acres far across the mountains with provision for an additional 300,000 if they built a fort and brought settlers.

This syndicate included the luminaries of the time, like Thomas Lee (ancestor of Light Horse Harry Lee and Robert E. Lee), George Mason of Gunston Hall, and John Carlyle, the prosperous merchant of Alexandria, Virginia. The list included Lawrence Washington, George’s older half-brother. Thomas Cresap, a prosperous frontier merchant and trader living at Oldtown, Maryland, was the member who was the frontier contact for the company.

Several London merchants looked out for the company’s interests at Whitehall and at the Court of Saint James. They were not the only ones, but I need to stay focused here.

There was little actual knowledge of the vast Ohio area, so the Company commissioned frontiersman and surveyor Christopher Gist to explore the region and seek out the most fertile land. He made two extensive journeys to the great watershed, bringing back exotic flora and fauna and tales of the vast river complex and rich soilHe was a model for Lewis and Clarke fifty years later.

The French saw the British pressing against them and did not like it. They determined that a reminder of sovereignty was in order.

In 1750 the English and their Colonial partners sponsored a trading post at the mouth of Loramie Creek, near the present Piqua, Ohio. La Demoiselle was the Miami Indian who built it, and based on his fondness for the English they nicknamed him Old Briton. His village was known as Pickawillany. Old Briton had been warned about this support to The Ohio Company, but the Chief continued to back the English side. He was visited by representatives of the Colony of Pennsylvania, since he seemed to be the vanguard of the English expansion. In 1752, French Indians under Langlade of Wisconsin attacked the town. They captured several traders, and boiled Old Briton in a large cook-pot. According to the Journals of William Trent, they ate him when he was done.

The path through Garrett County began the avenue to support the growing war in the West. A a path was blazed in 1753 on the authority of The Ohio Company by a Delaware Indian named Nemacolin. George Washington and General Braddock passed through in 1755 on their punitive expedition against Fort Duquense. One of their camps was at Little Crossing, near present-day Grantsville. They passed that way on their retreat, too, though they were able to travel faster, if lighter, having left their cannon and General behind.

Little Crossing connects me, riding on I-68, with Alt-U.S.-40 which is beneath it, and the National Road, which meanders in turn beneath that.

Between 1811 and 1818, the National Road, the first federally funded highway. It was most heavily traveled in the 1840’s, and there the 19th century equivalents of Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons lined the trail. Some of the old stone buildings are still there, though only some are still taverns.

Cassleman bridge was built at Little Crossings in 1813 to carry the load of the National Road. It is a handsome stone arch of eighty feet that in its day was the largest single-span bridge on the continent. Colonel Bijou, the miniature poodle with the moustachios resembling a field officer of the Second Empire, could see the bridge from my lap. He is a remarkably intelligent dog, but perhaps because of his small volume of his brain, he has a tendency to overload himself in exactly the manner of a French Staff Officer and commence quivering uncontrollably.

The bridge was reportedly made longer than it needed to be in hopes that the planned Chesapeake and Ohio Canal would pass under it. It is said that the builder worried about its collapse and sneaked down to the worksite to remove the timber supports to see if it would collapse. To the amazement of many, the bridge did not fall.

Little Crossings became a center of commerce and transportation. Stagecoaches, wagons, horsemen and foot travelers crossed the bridge headed west, and raw materials and produce headed back east. There is a store that remains from that day, and an inn known as the Penn Alps that dates from the 1840s.

The advent of the railroads in the 1840s resulted in cheaper travel. The national Road went into eclipse but it was revived in the early 20th century when federal aid was diverted by crafty politicians for road development to accommodate a newer means of transportation – the automobile. Cassleman Bridge continued in service until the 1903’s, when U.S. Route 40 also became an important east-west artery, following the terrain of the National Road

Colonel Bijou settled down as the bridge passed behind us. We left the course of the National Road at Route 219, the north-south artery of Garrett County. We were headed for Deep Creek Lake, a body of water created by daming the stream. It is a hot destination for Pittsbughers, Washingtonians and Terrapins of all stripes. They boat and ski and play gold here and enjoy the magnificent views. There was a time you could have the land in this poor county for a song, but that was several verses ago. The new homes are worth millions.

To get to Deep Creek Lake you pass through the city of Accident, which exists as a municipality due to surveying error. The Chrysler Dealership there is appropriately named The Accident Dealership, and it does excellent work and comes highly recommended. Further south is Annie’s Family Restaurant. If it is possible to get a better hot meat loaf sandwich, I am unaware of it. Annie is a bluff blonde woman with a squadron of trim younger blondes working for her. There is not a lot of ethnic diversity here.

Nothing intentional. It is just how it worked out.

I looked at the real estate section of the local paper. John W. Garret’s charming Victorian house is for sale for $400,000. If I wanted to buy a gigantic new roof and a heating plant for an eight bedroom house, I’d buy it.

They drink a fair amount in Garrett County, at least Monday through Saturday. After hurtling down Wisp Mountain enough times for my knee to balloon up, I found myself at JG’s Bar. It is a warm blue-collar place with a NASCAR theme. Denny and Barbara were at the end of the bar. Denny was wearing a USA hat as bright orange as the alert condition. We talked about the county, about what was happening at the Pawn Run Inn, the relation between Boo Boo and the owner, and the curious situation of the deer fawn who lived in her house and slept in her bed.

That is illegal in Garrett County, although it is not in West Virginia.

We talked about that, and why Boo Boo is always just drinking at the bar and we talked about how the County is changing. Denny and Barbara have a two acre piece of the County, with their house set back exactly 197 feet back from the big road. Denny says he would have build it further back still, except the boulders of the spine of the County stuck out too far. He had a hell of a time with the well. He got water at the same level that his house is set back from the road. It wasn’t good water and he had to put in a filtration system. Cindy the Realtor was there for a Diet Coke. She was a woman with a magnificent bosom and a Chevy that was too small to take prospective customers around. She sipped her drink with a sigh. She said it was a holiday weekend and the cops were out in force. There were a lot of tourists in town and this was one of the weeks the County could supplement its operating budget with fines.

Denny said he was prepared to sell his acreage and take some of the profits that came with the real estate boom. Cindy told him he could do that, all right, but he couldn’t buy anything to replace it here. If he sold, he would have to buy somewhere else.

Cindy was a lot like Denny and Barbara, sons and daughters of the hardy Irish who have to leave the County to stay here. Denny mentioned with some precision that he has two years, five months and fourteen days to retirement from the construction company where he works. They do monumental concrete work. For eleven years, he has been pouring concrete in the District of Columbia. He built the Green Line into Maryland at Naylor Road. He had to close the Suitland Parkway each morning to do it. That is not a good part of the District and his people were often attacked. They would find bodies at the construction site Monday morning.

Each week he leaves his two acres in Garret County and drives down the mountains to Washington. In eleven years he has not spent a full weekend in the District, even when he works six days a week.

He said he needs to get back to Garrett County. It is where he is from.

Denny had another Bud Light. He was thunderstruck by his latest job, literally incensed. His company has won the contract to make permanent the closing of the broad avenue in front of the White House. It is a little ironic that he will start work on Pennsylvania Avenue, considering we were sitting ten miles from the border with the Keystone State. He said that the President’s people have decided the terror threat is too high to re-open the broad avenue and they are going to have him rip up the asphalt and install marble curbs and pink pedestrian pavement in front of the White House.

He is very uncomfortable with that. He thinks it is too much, color wise, a little over the top. He thinks the First Lady had something to do with it. He put down his beer and said they had to go back to the homestead. In order for him to stay in Garrett County, he had to get up at one o’clock in the morning, and drive the three hours down to Washington.

It is what you have to do, to live in the County. Work somewhere else.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra