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In Boyds, an Enduring Debate Over Infrastructure, Tradition
The Rev. Timothy B. Warner, leading St. Mark's United Methodist Church in prayer, says that a water and sewer connection would make it much easier for his Boyds congregation to expand with a larger facility.
(By James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)
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Even so, Boyds has a recent history of amity between the races. Virts recounted how the all-white, all-male Boyds Community Men's Club in 1965 decided to reconstitute itself as the all-are-welcome Boyds Civic Association to fight the threatened closure of the post office. "Boyds was like a Southern town," he said. "That was a big step, to integrate the civic association."
St. Mark's and the nearby Boyds Presbyterian Church, which is predominately white, for a number of years held a joint Sunday school. The congregations continue to worship together twice a year.
Blacks and whites together have run a credit union for decades and worked to have the Boyds Negro School designated a historic site in the 1980s.
"Traditionally the spirit in Boyds has been one of kindness and generosity on both sides," said Coleman, who worked on the school project.
Boyds "is a very, very intermixed community who support each other very well," observed Foster, who said she does not understand why Warner would make a case for public water and sewer now. "Unless he simply doesn't understand the can of worms he would be opening," she added.
St. Mark's members say water and sewer connections serve areas less than a mile away from their 112-year-old church, which is a short distance from the Presbyterian church, Victorian homes and a MARC train station that form the heart of Boyds.
The St. Mark's congregation has grown from 40 to 170 members in the past three years, and Warner said neither the church's water supply nor sewage holding tank is adequate. Institutional facilities typically do not fare as well on septic systems as homes do.
A dozen or so members also own property near the church, where the land does not accommodate septic systems as well as it does in other parts of Boyds. While they support limits on high-density development, they say their heritage gives them standing to demand better services.
"We're descendants of those people, the founders," Hawkins said, referring to ancestors who lived in the area before the Metropolitan Branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built in the early 1870s, which led to the town's founding.
The county, in its determination to protect the land from development, "is not letting us make use of it," she said.
Foster said she is determined to help preserve the undiscovered gem that is Boyds. "More than what we have, it's what we don't have," she said. "We don't have commercialism."
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