The other day, I stumbled on the land records for the farm we had in Western Maryland, about fifty years ago. And a few days later, my wife Jane Mahaffie, out that way exploring with my sister Margaret Church and their friend Amy Wolverton, decided to pass by the place, and Jane took a couple of pictures. One is below.
Most of our family won’t remember the farm, having not been yet born. It was 101 acres near Boonsboro, Maryland, at 20406 Benevola Church Road, straddling Little Beaver Creek in Washington County. It was farmland typically, back then, used for corn and cattle.
The couple we bought it from, William and Linda Poffenberger, presumably couldn’t make the farming life work there–they had only owned the property for a few years. They moved elsewhere in the area.
Mom and Dad bought the farm in November 1970. The deed helpfully explains that they purchased the farm “with all of that tract of land, together with the improvements thereon, and all the rights, ways, privileges and appurtenances thereunto belonging or in anywise appertaining.” I have fond memories of all those appurtenances that appertained!
A plat map from the deed at purchase, is below.
Mom, Dad, the dogs, and us seven kids spent summer weekends and some whole summer weeks there in the early-mid 1970s. Dad set up a big vegetable garden and bought a small tractor for mowing.
The other day I asked my Mom, Judy Mahaffie, why she and Dad bought the farm and she said, “your father wanted a vegetable garden, and our yard was too shady.”
So we got a 100-acre farm. And Dad grew lots of vegetables; corn, zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, peppers, and others I don’t remember.
Dad had a 2-acre pond dug, and he filled it, per county or state regulations, with a slow pipe feed from Little Beaver Creek which ran through the farm. The feed valve was a plastic ice cream tub that fit over the pipe-end.
While the pond excavation was under way, one of the “Little Kids” (Mom says it was Bob), managed to start an enormous earth mover’s engine, and we had to call the contractor on a weekend to find out how to shut it off. (The answer was to cause it to stall.)
My older brother Jim Mahaffie and I built a bridge over Little Beaver Creek with 2 x 12 lumber, so we could drive the tractor across, and for easy access to the pond. Like a lot of projects Jim would undertake, it seemed implausible he could just build a bridge because he decided to, but it came out strong, level, and durable. When Jim declares a goal, he generally gets there.
When a storm and flooding creek washed our bridge out, Jim and I towed it right back into place with the tractor.
The “Big Kids” target-shot with a 22 rifle at the farm, aiming, per Jim’s idea, at the rim of the then-steel beer cans so that the can would go spinning off into the grass.
Boots and Joey, our dogs, used the farm as a hunting ground. There were always groundhogs to try for, and with Joey’s hunting savvy, and Boots’ enthusiastic help, they bagged one from time to time. Joey was a natural-born hunter, and Boots was a go-along-to-get-along dog, an able assistant.
The dogs would leave the dead ground hog somewhere to ripen, and find it the next visit a week or two later, and roll in it to acquire the smell. We would then have to drive home with the smelly dogs.
Joey bested this once when he decided to investigate a skunk. Dad’s tomato juice bath cure didn’t get all that stink out.
Mom remembers when our friends Dick and Loretta Wertheimer and their kids visited and the tenant’s cattle got loose from their pasture. Dick, being city-oriented, sat on the grass laughing at the spectacle. Others among us had to decide how to shoo the cattle out of Dad’s vegetable garden.
The farm had an 1841-built red brick house on it, in the classic Pennsylvania German traditional style. It had a big barn also of the sort common in the region, painted red. There was a cinder block milk house and a corn crib. There was a chicken house and a small orchard of apple and cherry trees, as well. A spring supplied the water. The family there now calls their farm, “Hidden Spring Farm”.
Lou Church, before he married Marg, lived at the farm for a time in the mid-1970s, working a job in the area. He may be the only one of us that stayed there alone, and knows how haunted the place might be. It was plenty spooky when Jim and I stayed their on our own as teenagers.
The barn, from what I can see in Jane’s picture and Google Maps, is gone. Later owners had expanded the house, but based on the aerial view on Google, it looks like the original 1841 house is incorporated in the larger house that is there now.
From a recent time when the property was for sale, we learn that the home is now:
“5 bedroom 3 and half baths, a Great kitchen, 4 fireplaces, Heated floors, Wood floors, Heated Pool, Loft Sitting room, Great Views a wonderful place to enjoy peace and quiet, a true family play ground, over 5ac. of irrigated lawn, fish pond, fields for horses, Riding/Walking trails, and so much more.”
While we had the place, Dad had several tenants use parts of it for cattle and corn. One of those tenants, Ray and Doris Hoffman, bought the place from Mom and Dad in 1980. I recall Dad gave the Hoffmans generous terms — they were local farm people, not city folks looking for a retreat. Other owners have had the place since. Jim had seen the extensive additions to the house some years back. The current ones operate Talley Longhorns there, raising and selling pure bred longhorn cattle.
The Google Earth image (below) shows the old Barn’s foundation still in place as of this year.
In the end, the beach won out over the country, which isn’t too surprising, since Dad had been going to the Delaware shore all his life, interrupted only by his years in the Navy. He set up a vegetable garden in Bethany, managing to grow tasty vegetables in what is mostly sand.
I’m thinking of sending the Talleys a few of these old pictures. Maybe they’ll enjoy seeing the place from 50 years ago.
NOTE: Many of the 1970s snapshots here are by our cousin Vickie Farrar, who documented a lot of our family life during the time she lived with us in Bethesda, and lived nearby as a young adult. She did not learn to drive until years later, when she lived in Nevada.
