Window on Cecil County's Past

In today’s Cecil Whig a column examines an issue members of Elkton’s historic and Architectural Review Committee (HARC) initiated when they met with the town board and discussed eliminating or reducing regulations protecting Elkton’s surviving cultural resources.  As a result of all the fuzz about “preserving stately homes, procedures for demolishing old buildings, and enforcement of historic building…

Elkton Town Hall – August 31, 2011 – After dispatching a Historic and Architectural Review Committee (HARC) decision involving signs on a physician’s office downtown, the panel kicked around concerns about impressions that were created during the Aug 10 workshop with elected officials. The meeting with the mayor and commissioners got off to a track I…

Elkton Town Meeting, August 27, 2011 – Weeks ago the commissioners were told by some members of the historical and architectural review committee (HARC) that the special district protecting old structures in a few neighborhoods in Elkton should be eliminated or its area should be reduced. The regulations are far too restrictive and the county seat…

Local historian Audrey Edwards will talk about colonial Charlestown’s historic buildings, artifacts and the stories behind its historical markers.  Step back in time to the days of the American Revolution! North East Branch Library, 106 W. Cecil Ave., North East, MD. 21901 410-996-6269 Tues. Sept. 27th, 2011 at 6:30 pm

The Gilpin Falls Covered Bridge, that relic from another era, is no stranger to hurricanes and it just endured another one.  Tropical storm conditions battered Cecil County over the weekend as Irene passed just off the Maryland Coast.  That blast dumped over 7-inches of rain on an already soaked county as wind gusts up to…

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…

Last week the Mayor and Commissioners of Elkton heard that the burden associated with the town’s historic district outweigh its benefits. Members of the appointed group overseeing the special zoning area, the Historic and Architectural Review (HARC) Committee, aired those concerns, saying the “restrictive requirements” are “like Monticello” and put HARC in charge of “maintaining to…

On this rain-swept Sunday afternoon, about 30 people gathered to formally dedicate a memorial to the 53 people who died in 1947 when Eastern Airlines Flight 605 plummeted into a Cecil County woods.   The crowd assembled on a Principio Road hillside near Jackson Park Road, including a passenger’s son, a sailor who rushed to the…

For years the Society has worked to build a large collection of yearbooks as these volumes, which call up memories from decades ago, make valuable research resources for individuals working on a family or local history project.  Cover-to-cover there are portraits of each student, plenty of anecdotes, brief essays, highlighting specific memories, advertising, photos of…

Concerns about enforcement of Elkton’s historic district ordinance were put on the table for the Mayor and Commissioners at the monthly workshop.  The matter came up as the last item of business on an unusually long three-hour session jammed with developers bringing up other extremely technical regulatory issues related to a Planned Unit Development (PUD)…