A History of St. Charles, Maryland: Portrait of a New Town

By William K. Klingaman

"A History of St. Charles, Maryland: Portrait of a New Town" is an account of an often perilous journey in the creation of a town from the ground up, starting with the assemblage of the large tract of land by one colorful Congressman Frank Boykin of Alabama, who offered the parcel as a contender for the site of Dulles International Airport, through exploitation by several tenant farmers, loggers and would-be developers, ultimately into the hands of a serious, experienced businessman who entered into partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1970, making St. Charles the second New Town under the federal New Communities Program, only to be abandoned by HUD when the Program was abruptly ended by a new Administration. By viewing the development of this new community from a historical perspective, one can accurately assess the diverse forces that shaped its growth over several decades. Building upon the history of the Southern Maryland and Charles County, the early years (1968 - 1990) of planning and development of St. Charles, Maryland established the vision, foundation, and framework that launched the new town on its successful path and later would assure its prosperity. Above all other considerations, success was largely due to the tenacity, resourcefulness, and personality of the developer, James J. Wilson, captured by Author William K. Klingaman. Klingaman conducted a series of oral-history interviews in the mid-1980's with Wilson and a cast of personalities from HUD, FHA, state and local government officials, local businesspersons, and members of the development team, and had unrestricted access to the files of HUD and the developer. These experiences and revelations can well serve as a textbook for developers, builders, and local authorities to consider when facing a panoply of obstacles, including dealing with squabbling government agencies, obtaining the financial resources needed to stay afloat, struggling to maintain the vision in changing markets, and complying with pyramiding new government regulations…and above all, a sense of the leadership it takes to keep propelling the vision forward. The history is conveyed through an enjoyable read, in a non-technical manner, with human interest episodes throughout the volume, capturing the roller coaster ride of events and relaying this amazing true story. The added 2020 Epilogue, punctuated with photographs, plans and illustrations, captures what St. Charles has accomplished and looks to its future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098358280

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Footnotes

INTRODUCTION

The Long Hard Road

This is the story of the development of a new town. It is a story of hopes and plans, of dreams and disappointments, of conflicts and crises. In the end, it is also a story of success.

For nearly three centuries after the halcyon days of tobacco plantations in the late seventeenth century, Southern Maryland—Charles, Calvert, and St. Mary’s counties—remained a sleepy, rural region dominated by the force of tradition. All that began to change in the late 1950’s, when developers from outside the area first made serious plans to build vast new tracts of housing between the towns of Waldorf and La Plata in Charles County. By their own admission, developers usually are not popular among the established residents of a community because they represent an intrusion into the comfortable status quo, portending over-crowding, the destruction of natural resources, and an invasion by outsiders who may not fit into the established mores of the community.

But developers who are truly concerned with the health and welfare of their projects and the surrounding area are also vital to the future well-being of society, since this nation will never stand still. Americans constantly need new housing, new outlets for commercial and industrial ventures, and there can be no growth without disturbing the status quo in some way.

In 1968 and 1970, Congress responded to the need for improved quality in residential development by passing legislation that established a New Communities program in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the first projects approved under the terms of that legislation was St. Charles Communities. Unfortunately, the federal program soon began to founder for a number of reasons which will be examined herein on the basis of evidence drawn directly from the archives of HUD itself. By the early 1980’s, the New Communities program had been terminated.

St. Charles, however, has survived and prospered. This is an account of its often perilous journey to the present. Only by viewing the development of this new community from a historical perspective, leaving aside sociological theories or models of bureaucratic behavior, can we accurately assess the diverse forces that shaped its growth over the course of several decades. From the time Arthur Desser first announced his plans to build Linda City in 1958 to the time James J. Wilson negotiated a settlement with HUD in 1983, the development of the community lurched from one crisis to the next. A successful outcome was never certain.

Much of the material for this study came from a series of oral-history interviews I conducted in 1984 and 1985. I would like to acknowledge my appreciation to those who agreed to share their experiences with me: William Nicoson, Lessley Wiles, William Sorrentino, and James Dausch, all of whom served with HUD in the New Communities program; Alfred H. Moses, Esq., of Covington and Burling; James Wilson, Charles Stuart, and Edwin Kelly of Interstate General Corporation, the developer of St. Charles Communities; Lykes Boykin; Hamilton Boykin, Esq.; Thomas Shafer and Kenneth McCord of Whitman, Requardt and Associates; Maryland State Senator James Simpson; Charles County Commissioners Eleanor Carrico and Loretta Nimmerrichter; Reed McDonagh; Earle Palmer Brown; Robert O’Donnell of Harmon, O’Donnell and Henninger; Judge James Mitchell (retired) and attorney Thomas Mudd; J. Blacklock Wills of Southern Maryland Oil Company; and Will Harnett and Lawrence Brenneman of Washington Homes.

I was granted unrestricted access to the files of both HUD and Interstate General Corporation; the correspondence, memoranda, and notes from those two entities proved extremely helpful. I want to express my appreciation to both HUD and Interstate for their assistance.

Documentary sources have been identified in footnotes at the end of the text. Virtually all material not otherwise identified comes from the oral-history inter-views. For these quotations I found footnotes generally superfluous; when the text says, Tom Shafer recalled that ‘the sky was blue that day’, the reader may assume in the absence of a footnote to the contrary that Shafer’s comment came from my oral history interview with him.

PROLOGUE

The Land

We turned our course to the north to reach the Potomeack River…. Never have I beheld a larger or a more beautiful river…. Fine groves of trees appear, not chocked with briers or hushes and undergrowth, but growing at intervals as if planted by hand of man, so that you can drive a four-horse carriage wherever you choose, through the midst of the trees.

—Father Andrew White,

Jesuit missionary

Between the Chesapeake Bay to the east, and the Potomac River to the south and west, lies the peninsula of Southern Maryland. It is a relatively flat, low-lying land, laced with an extensive pattern of rivers and creeks. Many of the hardwood forests that covered the area before it was settled by European colonists have long since disappeared, their place taken by stands of adaptable, rapidly growing pines. With its mixture of sand and rich organic matter, the soil is well suited to a variety of agricultural pursuits—especially to the production of tobacco, the crop that has always been the cornerstone of Southern Maryland’s economy.

From the time Englishmen first settled at the Indian village of Yoacomico (which they later renamed St. Mary’s) in 1634, Southern Maryland was associated with tidewater Virginia as a part of the Chesapeake colonial society that at its zenith, in the mid-eighteenth century, produced so many individuals of outstanding political and cultural accomplishment. In the early years of settlement in the seventeenth century, however, it was a region where life was often tragically cut short. The hot, humid summers and the numerous swampy areas produced recur-rent attacks of malaria which struck with murderous frequency. Few children born in Southern Maryland in the seventeenth century reached maturity without losing at least one parent. Since many widows and widowers remarried (usually within their own social class), there gradually evolved an interlocking connection of half-siblings, stepchildren, and cousins. Within each region, local affairs were dominated by a few families; but these were extended families whose members included many who lived far from the family’s home plantation.

Charles County, which forms the western third of the Southern Maryland peninsula, was founded in 1658 and named for Maryland proprietor Cecil Calvert’s only son. The county’s economic fortunes always fluctuated along with the price of tobacco; the crop quickly became such an integral part of the area’s economy that it was accepted as legal tender for the payment of debts during the seventeenth century. With its population devoted almost entirely to agriculture, Charles County remained a quintessential rural community throughout the colonial period and the nineteenth century; the only town of any consequence was Port Tobacco, the county seat. When the newly formed federal government took its first census in 1790, it registered the county’s population at slightly more than 20,000 residents, almost half of whom were slaves.

A visitor from 1790 returning to Charles County 150 years later, would have found it little changed. By then the slaves had been freed, of course, but blacks still made up nearly half of the county’s population. The total number of residents had remained virtually unchanged. Tobacco still dominated the local economy, al-though a significant amount of timber-cutting activity and sand-and-gravel excavation had also developed. The area had flashed into national prominence briefly in 1865, when Dr. Samuel A. Mudd (who lived in the northeastern section of Charles County) ministered to John Wilkes Booth’s broken ankle during the actor- assassin’s flight from Washington into Virginia. For the most part, however, the county had remained out of the spotlight—and out of the path of progress as well, continuing contentedly in the old ways it found so comfortable.

Yet there were signs that Charles County’s isolation was starting to come to an end. Before 1940, the only ways to get to Virginia from Charles County had been to take a ferry (or swim) across the Potomac, or else go north through Prince George’s County and thence westward before finally turning south. Route 301, then known as the Crain Highway, had been built in the 1920’s to carry traffic north and south through the eastern part of the county. But one could go no further than the water’s edge until the Potomac River Bridge was finally completed in 1940. With this avenue to Virginia open, Route 301 subsequently became one of the major north-south arteries along the East Coast. Soon there appeared a number of motels and restaurants along the highway in Charles County, built to take advantage of the increased traffic.

Many of the new establishments were located along the nine mile strip of highway between the towns of Waldorf and La Plata. By the early twentieth century, the Waldorf/La Plata strip (along with Indian Head in the west) had replaced Port Tobacco as the primary population center; and La Plata had supplanted it as the county seat. The fortunes of the Waldorf/La Plata strip were given a further boost in 1949, when the Maryland state legislature decided to legalize the use of slot machines in certain counties; these one-armed bandits seemed perfectly suited to the transient pleasures provided by the corridor, which soon became known as the Las Vegas of the East Coast.

Several years after slot machines made their legal debut in Charles County, two men assembled a tract of nearly 8,000 acres between Waldorf and La Plata. Two large parcels of land within the tract had been joined together as early as 1911 by the P.D. Glatfelter Company, a Pennsylvania-based paper-manufacturing firm, in joint ownership with a businessman named Edward A. Sharretts. In those days when timber companies paid little heed to conservation techniques, Glatfelter apparently stripped the land of much of its valuable hardwood and left mostly scrub pine behind. Having gotten what it could from the property, Glatfelter sold it in several sections in 1916 and 1918 to The Farms Company of Maryland.

The Farms Company was an enterprise headed by a Charles County attorney named Laurie Mitchell. According to Mitchell’s son, Judge James C. Mitchell, the idea of it was, after World War One they thought they would get a lot of German immigrants over here. And they’d be thrifty and industrious, and they would develop that property into possible farms or farmlands. So Laurie Mitchell assembled these parcels and others into The Farms Company and advertised in German newspapers for prospective settlers. About a dozen German families (including the parents of one of the present county commissioners, Loretta Nimmerrichter) did emigrate to Charles County as a result of Mitchell’s endeavors, and they settled in the area now known as Gallant Green. But when Mitchell died in 1925, the project lost its driving force; the remaining properties were auctioned off at a bargain price.

The new owners were a three-man partnership that included Robert G. Merrick, who later became chairman of the board of Baltimore’s Equitable Trust Bank. They did not hold the land long, however. Between 1929 and 1935 the parcels passed through the hands of nine proprietors. In November 1935, an ambitious entrepreneur named Scott Appleby, from Washington, D.C., purchased much of the tract. Appleby, who was a wealthy and colorful individual, also purchased other properties in the area, and then proceeded to build the Waldorf Hotel and a prestigious development of 20 houses, known as Woodland Acres, on part of his holdings. Those homes were considered plush for Charles County in the late 1930’s. And in his own inimitable way, Appleby enlivened the local social scene for a time. The Waldorf Hotel became known as the local hot spot; its manager, a man named Roughten, put on a good show at the hotel, giving lavish parties complete with dancers and various other interesting forms of entertainment.

In 1942, Appleby sold part of his Charles County holdings to Senator Robert Rice Reynolds of North Carolina. Reynolds, described by the Washington Post as a globe-trotting, oft-married isolationist, had just married for the fifth time in October 1941. His new bride was Evalyn Washington McLean, the 20-year-old heiress to the estate of Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the Hope Diamond and widow of a former publisher of the Post.

Reynolds, a legendary track and football star during his days at the University of North Carolina, had begun his political career in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, when he campaigned for the U.S. Senate by stressing his background as a poor boy from the hills. Known to his constituents as Our Bob, Reynolds was a devout isolationist who served two full terms in the Senate before retiring in 1945. His first wife (a 20-year-old debutante) had died shortly after the birth of their second child; his second marriage (to a 17-year-old girl from Georgia) ended in divorce, as did his third marriage (to a young Frenchwoman); his fourth wife (a former Broadway showgirl) died in 1935. By the time he married Evalyn McLean, Reynolds was 57 years old.

On September 21, 1946, Evalyn McLean Reynolds was found dead in her bed-room from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

Besides the land he purchased from Appleby, Reynolds also held other property in the area as part of the McLean inheritance. There was a deserted old white- pillared mansion on the land; known as the McLean Mansion, it was full of old newspapers from the Civil War, and ornate furniture (which was occasionally appropriated by local residents). During World War Two, the federal government established several prisoner-of-war camps in the Southern Maryland/Prince George’s area; one of them reportedly was located on part of the Reynolds- McLean property.

Reynolds appears to have made no effort at all to develop his Charles County holdings. In February 1951, he sold the property to one of his closest friends in Congress, Representative Frank W. Boykin of Alabama. Two months later, Boykin and his partner, Albert Ernest (a vice president of the St. Regis Paper Company), purchased some five thousand acres of Appleby’s property between Waldorf and La Plata. With the addition of a few miscellaneous parcels adjacent to their main holdings, Boykin and Ernest had thus assembled nearly 8,000 acres of northern Charles County at an indicated cost of less than $200,000. Even though the land was titled in the names of Ernest and his wife, Boykin was always the prime mover and shaker in the enterprise.

By pulling this property together into one large tract, the two men set into motion the forces that would begin to permanently transform Charles County. They appear to have had a number of motives for assembling such a huge tract of land. Certainly the extensive stands of timber on the land appealed to both Boykin and Ernest. Boykin owned several hundred thousand acres of woodland in Alabama for which St. Regis held a lease to cut timber; he and Ernest did in fact do a considerable amount of selective cutting on their Charles County tract between 1951 and 1957. They also contracted out the rights to mine the extensive subsurface deposits of sand and gravel.

Beyond their obvious financial gain from extracting the natural resources from the land, Boykin and Ernest also hoped that the tract would be chosen as the site of the international airport (later named Dulles International) then being planned for the Washington area. Being a very flat piece of land located just 25 miles outside of Washington, it probably would have been an adequate site; Boykin and Ernest obviously would have been considerably enriched if it had been selected. But the decision was eventually made, of course, to locate the airport in Chantilly, Virginia, west of the capital.

Yet Congressman Boykin had still another reason for purchasing the Charles County land. Lykes Boykin, a Northern Virginia attorney who was a close friend of the congressman (but no immediate relation), recalled that Congressman Boykin loved land, he thought land was the greatest thing on the face of the earth, and they weren’t making any more of it, so he’d like to buy as much of it as he could. Frank Boykin had first displayed his love of land as a young man in Alabama, and over the years the land had returned his affection by helping to make him one of the wealthiest men in Congress.

Born into poverty in Choctaw County, Alabama, in 1885, Frank Boykin had begun his career at the age of eight, leaving school behind after the third grade to haul buckets of water to a railroad gang for 35 cents a day. He completed his first major real estate transaction several years later, when he traded a shotgun (which was considered a most valuable commodity in Alabama at the time) for several hundred acres of land in the Mobile area. That two hundred acres ultimately proved to have a massive salt dome underneath it; Boykin had begun to make his fortune. By the time he was twenty-five, he was a millionaire.

Boykin’s wealth was always founded on the value of land. The congressman knew land, Lykes Boykin remembered: He was very, very sharp at buying land and timber. And then he’d start looking for what other use you could make of this land. Does it have oil under it, does it have sand, does it have gravel, does it have any other mineral deposits? He was very, very conscious of all that. Over a period of years, Frank Boykin accumulated close to 300,000 acres in Alabama. He entered into a 60-year timber-cutting lease with St. Regis for part of the land; on another parcel, the Getty Oil company drilled a well that proved to be worth $50 million.

Besides being one of the wealthiest men in Congress, Boykin was extravagantly flamboyant. He was the prototypical Southern congressman in the Huey Long mold, an ebullient gentleman in a white suit whose self-proclaimed philosophy was Everything is made for love. He habitually carried a derringer or two with him in Washington, and once allegedly ran out of one of the city’s banks after it had been robbed, waving his pistols in the air and shouting imprecations at the thieves. Like his colleague Bob Reynolds, Boykin had a reputation as a ladies’ man; but unlike Reynolds, Boykin remained married to bis first and only wife. There is a story told by an old friend of Boykin’s about his courtship of his wife-to-be, Occlo, whose parents at first did not approve of Frank at all:

So they were sending her away, and she got on