Pasadena’s Oldest Buildings Offer A Glimpse Into The Past

Before the farms became neighborhoods, before the dirt roads were seeded with asphalt to create fertile ground for thousands of daily commuters, and before each passing year brought a new crop of strip malls, shopping centers and developments, Pasadena was a simple tapestry of small communities – some of the first to sprout up in the rural land south of Baltimore’s busy port.

The days of expansive farmland and dirt roads have long ago disappeared, but a few relics of Pasadena’s earliest days still remain. Amidst all the new development, a handful of anachronistic buildings stubbornly remain in place, just as they were more than a century ago.

Hancock’s Resolution is the lone local holdover from the 18th century. Stephen Hancock Jr. built the property’s original house in 1785, and it is the only surviving stone dwelling of that period in Anne Arundel County history. In 1975, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Most of the earliest non-rural development in Pasadena began along Mountain Road, which existed even before the advent of the automobile. The oldest nonresidential building still standing today is a tiny wooden structure that sits just a couple feet off Mountain Road where it intersects with Armiger Drive. It was there in 1855 that Addison Johnson built a general store, which temporarily doubled as a post office, and served the community for many, many years. For a sense of just how old the structure is, Johnson’s store stopped functioning as the area’s only mail center when it was replaced by a dedicated post office in 1872, after it had already been in business for nearly two decades.

Many churches have withstood the test of time better than any other local structures; some of the same places of worship for farmers and families of the late 19th century are still in use today. Magothy Methodist Church is likely the oldest of Pasadena’s historic churches. The parish was originally founded in the mid-1700s, making it one of the first Methodist societies in Anne Arundel County. The church was built on its present site in 1859, and though fire destroyed the original structure in 1886, it was quickly rebuilt one year later by parishioners.

Mount Carmel United Methodist Church offers another holdover from the 19th century. According to Isabel Shipley Cunningham’s “Between Two Rivers” and “The Pasadena Peninsula” – the two definitive works on local history – Wesley Linthicum gifted an oak grove to Jefferson Cook in 1884, which Cook cleared in order to build Mount Carmel church. Worshippers often came by boat to the country wharf (now Green Gables) and walked to the church from there.

Mount Zion United Methodist Church was founded in 1859 by local African Americans, who bought land south of Mountain Road from James and Elizabeth Williams for one dollar. The church, which moved to its present site in 1883, attracted so many parishioners from miles around that the peninsula’s first bus service was created so that worshippers could make the then-hours-long journey from Baltimore to attend Mount Zion’s services.

Pasadena’s oldest commercial buildings were primarily founded along Mountain Road as well. John Wilson opened an Amoco service station on Mountain Road in 1934 and moved it a short distance down the road to its present location in 1937. The station became a gathering place for Lake Shore residents, who could purchase fruits and vegetables straight from the Wilsons’ garden.

George Schmidt began selling fruits and vegetables in 1927 at what is now the intersection of Mountain Road and Route 100 in 1927, according to his son, Henry. In 1933, the elder Schmidt built a small stand at the site which is still there today, though it is no longer in use.

In 1923 Samuel and Marie Angel opened an 8-by-15-foot summertime refreshment stand on Mountain Road in Lake Shore, where they sold homemade bottled drinks, cookies, candy, bread and other snacks to locals and vacationers alike. In 1924, they opened a year-round grocery store, which they called Angel’s, and moved to its present location a few years later. The original building burned down and has since been replaced, but the name and location have not changed since 1928.

Finally, Gustav and Samuel Kurtz opened Kurtz’s Pleasure Beach in 1933 and built an octagonal dance pavilion near the waterfront. According to “Between Two Rivers,” the Kurtz brothers saved money during the Great Depression and used it to buy the property, but so many of their friends came to visit that they decided to open a resort. While there were many such resorts built along the water during the 1920s and 1930s, the Kurtz pavilion is the sole survivor of the dance halls of that era.