UNCOVERING THE HISTORY OF HOWARD COUNTY’S OLDEST COMMUNITY
Elkridge, the oldest settlement in Howard County, can be hard to pin down. It’s not the shiny, new Columbia, nor the quirky-but-sophisticated Ellicott City. Its community identity and traditions require a bit more digging to figure out.
Author Elizabeth Janney, who published Images of America: Elkridge last summer, quickly found that out when she created a local news website about Elkridge for Patch.com in October, 2010.
Elkridge, she says, “doesn’t have a community center like other parts of Howard County,” she says. However, Janney soon learned that what scrappy Elkridge lacked in county facilities, it made up for in heart.
“The people are just so rich with history and information,” she says. “They care so much about where they live and create a sense of community themselves.”
Janney’s job as a Patch reporter in Elkridge was challenging. Says Janney, “People weren’t really covering it because it was overshadowed by other communities in Howard County.”
Even so, her work attracted the attention of the publishers of Images of America, a series of historical books (Columbia and Ellicott City also have books in the series), and they asked her to take on the project.
Finding out about the history of Elkridge, settled in the 18th century, was difficult. “Historically, there wasn’t a lot of information about it,” says Janney. But she began to unravel the legacy of the community on the Patapsco River, learning of the Union soldiers who crouched in the hills to protect the Thomas Viaduct railroad from the Confederacy, of Elkridge women taking over the shifts at a grenade factory when men went off to fight World War II.
But still, she says, “there were a lot of question marks.”
“I think the book is kind of a starting point for the history of Elkridge,” Janney says. “Hopefully it will be continued.”
