The Elkton Historic District Committee met with the mayor and commissioners to discuss the review board’s recommendation ”that the town’s two-decades-old historical district should be eliminated,” the Cecil Whig reported Aug. 15. The standards the committee should operate under “are contained in a 200-page document that is incredibly detailed and restrictive in scope, down to the very minutiae of using period replica hardware,” the Whig quoted Josh Brown as saying. Another member, Mark Clark, was reported to have said “that the historic district is hard to enforce, because Elkton has been ‘swiss-cheesed’ through the years. There’s a bunch of holes where people tore buildings down for parking lots . . .” Brown said to the elected leaders, “Do you want to actually preserve history or do you want to commestically preserve it” he asked as he suggested that perhaps the town should consider adopting less detailed regulations that encourage citizens to be sympathetic to historical standards, through other avenues such as the municipal building and zoning code.
Reflections on Yesterday — Cecil County History