At first glance, Finksburg is a blur of gas stations and car lots with a red light or two between Westminster and work. But there is a handful of residents who can look beyond the intersection of Routes 140 and 91, and recall the days when a two-lane toll road wandered along bucolic farmland drained by Beaver Run, Roaring Run and the North Branch of the Patapsco River, through a village held together by a strong sense of community.
The first itinerant inhabitants of the area were bands of Patapsco, Powhatan and Susquehannock Indians who were attracted to the flint deposits along the Patapsco River. According to historian Steve Davis, they used the stone to make arrowheads and spear points. The same source of flint near what is now a satellite of New Jersey’s Congoleum Corporation was mined in modern times and milled to a fine powder for use in the glass and ceramic industry.
The first land grant in the area was issued in 1750 to Thomas Hooker. Situated in the vicinity of the Finksburg Shopping Center and Beth Jacobs Cemetery on Route 140, Hooker’s holding of about 181 acres was called “Hooker’s Meadow” according to Carol Hackney, who grew up on nearby “Cold Saturday Farm.”
Resurveyed in 1763, Hooker’s Meadow grew from 181 to 461 acres, was renamed “Hooker’s Meadow Enlarged” and granted to Richard Hooker, according to Dr. Linda Frazier Kohl, who grew up in Finksburg.
Several years after the first Hooker grant, a survey team authorized by King George III was trying to survey the area. “It was snowing and very cold, on this Saturday, January 12, 1765,” Hackney said. “They wrote the king and told him they were going back to Baltimore because of the cold. When it was eventually surveyed, George III named the tract ÔCold Saturday.’” Construction on the stone manor house at Cold Saturday began in 1785.
The village of Finksburg did not start to take shape until 1810, when Richard Hooker sold off 15 acres of his holdings to Adam Fink. Fink built the first home on the property along the old wagon road used primarily by hucksters hauling produce and dairy products to market in Baltimore. Fink also kept a tavern in the same building, which no longer exists, but he still remains the namesake for the village. Three years later, a man named Quigley, who was a contractor for the new Chambersburg Turnpike laid out what would become Finksburg, according to Scharf’s History of Western Maryland.
Soon to come was another tavern, hotel, stables, blacksmith shops, a variety of stores, a schoolhouse and even a coppermine on land near the end of the old road–where today it meets eastbound Route 140 heading to Baltimore.
The village had three churches, two of which were separated more by politics and the Civil War than by religious differences. On the corner of Old Westminster Pike and Route 140, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, built in 1896, is the only one of the three that remains. It provided a focus for community life throughout the rest of the 19th century and most of the 20th.
Ed Armacost, the unofficial mayor of Finksburg, remembers his father telling him about the construction of Mt. Zion Church. “My Dad, with a six-horse team, hauled all the stone for that foundation from down in the valley. And then with a four-horse team, he hauled all the brick for the church from Westminster.”
When Ed came along, the family progressed to a Model T Ford. “It ran half the time, so on Sunday morning we walked. We’d all get together and walk down to Mt. Zion Church. Then half of Finksburg would be back here after church, pitchin’ horseshoes, playin’ baseball or some of us’d walk the railroad tracks to Westminster”–11 miles away.
At 91, Armacost probably has more memories of Finksburg than anyone. Except for his six-year hitch in the Army during World War II, he has lived in the same mid-19th century farmhouse all these years; 62 of them with his wife, Anne. Their house stands along the Old Westminster Pike and looks out over the four lanes of Route 140.
Until those four lanes were completed in the 1950s, Finksburg was considered hinterland. Armacost remembers that before the Depression, the “city folks” loved to come out to the country–especially for the fresh eggs and buttermilk from the Armacost farm.
“Well, they came on Sunday, too,” said Armacost, “Dad didn’t like sellin’ on Sunday, but he would never say anything. So my brothers and I thought of a way to discourage those folks. We set big-headed nails on each side of the seat in the privy, then attached a wire to them and ran the wire up to the blacksmith shop generator. They’d go to sittin’ on that seat and we’d crank up the generator. They yelled and that stopped the Sunday sales.”
Armacost has handled lot of nails in his lifetime. He and his brother Charles were known throughout central Maryland–even as far as the Eastern Shore–for their craftsmanship in building hundreds of quality homes in the region. More recently, Armacost is remembered for his beekeeping and honey. He has cut his hives back to one these days, but he still handcrafts beekeeping equipment in his wood shop.
Back down Route 140, behind the original village of Finksburg, 80-year old Joe Frazier walks around piles of locust logs left by his chain saw. He has been thinning out several groves of locust trees. His is land going back to the founding of Finksburg (his ancestor, Daniel P. Frazier, bought a parcel from Adam Fink in 1841) and it is home for Frazier. He was not born and raised there, but his best boyhood memories go back to trips from the city on weekends and summers to vist his Uncle Samuel and Aunt Agnes Frazier in Finksburg.
Frazier has a collection of good memories, too, about Ed Armacost’s older brother, Claude: “I remember when he was 70, ole Claude would gather up a whole carload of kids from Finksburg and go over to Sportsman’s Hall, and this old man would roller skate with the best of them.”
On the other side of Frazier’s locust grove is the eastern boundary of Cold Saturday Farm. Frazier’s grandfather, George Frazier, worked the farm when it was a dairy operation known as Clover Hill. Joe’s mother, Mary Gill, was born in the tenant house there. That was in the 1890s.
In 1932 Carol Hackney’s parents bought the farm and used the name of the original land grant, Cold Saturday. “Mother liked the story about the cold survey team,” she said.
Carol Hackney likes to tell about Cold Saturday’s connection to the Civil War: “We found cannonballs in the fields when we were plowing. There were definitely skirmishes at Cold Saturday before the Battle of Gettysburg.”
After Gettysburg, the house was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers–“Union and Confederate,” Hackney said. “Up on the second floor, there’s a bookcase. If you remove the books, and push a certain board up you could access a place where they would hide soldiers.”
Today the history of Finksburg is hidden among the abandoned homes and storefronts along the Old Westminster Pike, behind the Jiffy Mart gas station and convenience center.
Mt. Zion Church still reminds passing motorists about its worship service and spaghetti suppers. Joe Frazier’s legacy is there in the machine shop he started in 1956. His son, James, runs the place now. Joe Frazier’s daughter, Linda, was the town historian when she was a high school student, before she went West to become a physician in Kansas. Tony Richardson has been the Lawn Doctor in town at the corner of Old Westminster Pike and the Old Gamber Road since 1982.
But Finksburg is not withering away in the dust of history. With its proximity to major arteries of transportation, its industrial base is growing.
Two major industrial parks are located there, along with two asphalt plants. The C.J. Miller plant alone produces more than 300,000 tons of asphalt a year.
A new shopping center is planned for the corner of Dede Road and Route 140. Private education is thriving with the new Gerstell Academy, which projects an enrollment of 205 students for the fall of 2007.
A Finksburg branch of the Congoleum Corporation is still turning out rolls of felt backing for its flooring products. And greater Finksburg, which takes in the vast 21048 zip code area, is seeing a growth in the number of horse farms.
Like much of Carroll County, Finksburg is increasingly a bedroom community for the larger cities around it. According to a recent survey by the Carroll County planning office, there are 5,196 owner-occupied housing units in this area, 14 of which are valued at over $1 million.
The State Highway Commission says an average of 46,700 cars pass through Finksburg every day. Ed Armacost recalls his brother-in-law counting cars one Sunday afternoon before the new road was built. “Shoot,” Armacost said, “he counted 450 cars on the old road, and they were goin’ slow enough that he wrote down the make and year of each car.”
Armacost just shakes his head and chuckles at the growth of Finksburg. “But, you know, It’s been a wonderful life here.”
