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Baltimore County:
Historical Reflections and Favorite Scenes
INTRODUCTION
Baltimore County holds an abiding fascination for me. The calm of the lush green horse country in the north, the lapping waves and the faintly salty, ozone smell of the bay in the east, the ever-changing vistas of the rolling farm country and mill towns in the west, and the haunting bleakness of the industrial yards in the south, offer an endless variety of experiences. I grew up in Baltimore City and County, and my radiology practice has kept me engaged with the county for the last 25 years. But my attachment to this place goes deeper. My ancestor William Cockee [sic] began farming here in the latter part of the 17th century, in what was then a wilderness. Among his children by his second wife Sarah Underwood were three sons, Edward, Thomas, and John. Edward was a sea captain and settled on Kent Island on Maryland's eastern shore, where some of his descendants live to this day. Thomas lived in the Limestone Valley, where Cockeysville eventually grew up. My ancestor John had farms in Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties, with his principal residence in the Greenspring Valley near what is now Brooklandville. John served on the first commission to lay plans for the town of Baltimore in 1720. In the next couple of generations, there were some cousin-cousin marriages, which may be why we Cockeys are a little peculiar; but thereafter, the lines diverged. Like other early settlers, they found a land rich in natural resources.
Blessed with mineral wealth in the form of iron, chromium, and copper ores, limestone and marble, and with enough water flowing down the Piedmont to power all sorts of mills, our county became a center of industrial activity in colonial times, even as farming operations spread through the rich river valleys and flat coastal plain. Plentiful timber provided fuel, building material, and charcoal for iron smelting. Easy access to shipping spurred all of these activities, and roads fanned out from the port of Baltimore to carry goods overland.
On our eastern border are the broad waters of the Chesapeake Bay, just salty enough to support the famous blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), and deep enough to bring ocean-going vessels up the Patapsco River. At the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, the rushing waters from melting glaciers carved a great canyon for the Susquehanna River as it flowed to the Atlantic. Then, the coast was 200 miles farther east, and sea level was 200 feet lower than today. As sea level rose over the succeeding millennia, water filled the bay to its present level. In colonial times, these well-scoured channels could still carry ships up to Elk Ridge Landing on the Patapsco and Joppa on the Gunpowder River. But silt from farming has long since reduced the South Branch of the Patapsco to a shallow stream. Marsh grasses wave where tall ships once rode at anchor at the vanished port of Joppa, the county seat of Baltimore County from 1712 to 1769. As reminders, we still have the names of Rolling Road, where oxen rolled hogsheads of tobacco south to Elk Ridge, and Joppa Road, where the same kind of goods moved from west to east.
When the county was formed in 1659, it extended from the disputed Pennsylvania border in the north to the Delaware River in the East (taking in part of what is now the state of Delaware, as well as Harford and Cecil Counties in Maryland), to below the Patapsco River in the south, and well into western Maryland, with a poorly defined frontier that encompassed present-day Frederick and Carroll Counties.