And now Damascus has edged even closer to the modern mean. The Montgomery County Department of Liquor Control gave a preliminary nod Friday to the first application to sell alcohol in the town in 132 years. After a 30-day waiting period and final approval, a local pizzeria will start serving beer and wine, and one of the remaining dry towns in Maryland will vanish. A dogged little sequence of civic DNA will be overwritten.
“That was one of the things that made Damascus what it is,” lamented Gary Richards, a gas station owner, history buff and unofficial curator of village memorabilia. He’s the one with the collection of old seats from the town theater, altar rails from old churches and milk bottles from the 70 dairies that used to dot the surrounding countryside. “Now we’re just the same as the rest of the county.”
(Montgomery County officials say one dry community remains: Washington Grove, an incorporated neighborhood of 225 houses in Gaithersburg. But it lacks one thing crucial for alcohol sales: “We don’t have any stores,” explained Washington Grove town clerk Kathy Lehman.)
The Damascus booze ban, born of the town’s Methodist roots, was a durable bridge to an earlier age. It had been in place 40 years when Prohibition came. Charles Darwin was still alive the last time a legal beer was sold in Damascus.
There are still 14 Methodist churches dotting the gently sloping hills around Damascus. But the pews are filled with newcomers, commuters who spend their nights in the housing tracts that cover the old dairy pastures and work in Washington, Baltimore and Frederick during the day. In November’s election, it was largely these residents who voted to allow sit-down restaurants to serve beer and wine.
“It’s the old story. A lot of people moved here because they liked the quaint country ways but then voted to make us more like everyplace else,” said Linda Olson, a retired office manager for Leisure World of Maryland who moved here 27 years ago. She’s been a teetotaler since college, but one who doesn’t hesitate to serve wine to her dinner guests.
“It’s not that we think alcohol is evil,” she said. “It was just something that made us different. I worry that the transients will move on, and we’ll be stuck with the liquor law.”
The arrival of beer and wine has divided Damascus, although not very evenly (the town referendum to lift the ban passed with almost 66 percent of the vote) and not that deeply. Even most opponents don’t predict that Damascus will devolve into a MoCo Tijuana, with bars and bordellos crowding the tiny downtown.
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