Old Harford Road - Points of Interest

Points of Interest

Several sites of historical interest exist along Old Harford Road. The first four have been placed on the Baltimore County Landmarks List and include:

• The 19th century Krause lime kiln near Summit Avenue (image below). The stone arch kiln burned wood to generate heat for the pulverization of limestone into lime. This process took two to three days, and lime obtained from the kiln was used to reduce soil acidity of area vegetable farms. The kiln was restored by the County in 1979 and is now part of Krause Memorial Park.
• The 1860 Pine Grove School. This one-room school house at the southeast corner of Old Harford and Cub Hill Roads was sold in 1939 and is now a private residence.
• The Federal-style Cub Hill House at 9301 Old Harford Road (just north of Summit Ave; image below). This late 18th century - early 19th century stone structure was once the center of Cub Hill Farm, complete with blacksmith and wheelwright shops, greenhouses and tenant houses. In the mid-19th century a wooden addition (no longer existent) at the west end of the house served as a general store and as the Cub Hill Post Office. The Cub Hill land grant of which Cub Hill Farm was a part dates to the late 17th century. The farm gradually shrank from about 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) to just 50 acres (200,000 m2) when the last owners to farm it (the Macklins) sold it for development in 1952. Cub Hill House and 2 acres (8,100 m2) of the farm have been owned by the Old family since that time.
• The Shanklin-Carroll-Longbottom homestead just south of Waldor Drive. The land grant of which the home is a part dates to 1695. In 1845, 50 acres (200,000 m2) of the original 500-acre (2.0 km2) tract known as "Bear Neck" was purchased by John Wesley Shanklin. Shanklin enlarged the original home, believed to have been built in the early 19th century, and operated a general store.
• The superstructure of one of the Maryland State Forest Service's former network of fire lookout towers (image below). The tower, at 9405 Old Harford Road, Cub Hill, is located at one of the highest points in eastern Baltimore County (484 feet above sea level). The 125-foot (38 m) tower has not been used for lookout purposes since 1972. The tower also once served as a relay link in the first generation microwave communication network built by the Western Union Telegraph Company shortly after World War II for testing the long-distance transmission of television programs; documentation of that network appears in an appendix to the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) report prepared by David S. Rotenstein for the National Park Service in 2006 (see