In Boyds, an Enduring Debate Over Infrastructure, Tradition
Seeking Growth, a Church Fights for a Sewer Connection

By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 23, 2006

Living in Montgomery County's 93,000-acre agricultural reserve offers vistas of wide-open fields, a big sky, room to breathe -- all about an hour from downtown Washington. It also demands the acceptance of tight restrictions against high-density development and the absence of services that most county residents take for granted: water and sewer.

Now, a church congregation in Boyds, an unincorporated town of 3,080 acres and a few hundred people at the reserve's edge, is rethinking that equation. It is preparing a campaign to seek public water and sewer service for the church and some homes, a movement that is likely to be seen as a challenge to the sanctity of the reserve, regarded by many in Montgomery as one of the county's defining features.

"We will fight it tooth and nail," said Melissa Foster, president of the Boyds Civic Association, referring to any effort to bring in water and sewer lines. In recent decades, the association has succeeded in ensuring that Boyds remains an outpost of rural charm that lives up to its motto: "Home in the country."

But members of St. Mark's United Methodist Church, a predominately African American congregation formed in the late 1800s, say that efforts to preserve Boyds's character must also respect the rights and aspirations of the descendants of the freed slaves who settled in the area before the town was created.

"The anti-development argument doesn't work when the community cannot develop itself," said the Rev. Timothy B. Warner, the church's pastor. His congregation, he said, is planning to build a larger church next to the existing one to accommodate a membership that has quadrupled since he became pastor three years ago.

Many Boyds residents say they do just fine with wells and septic systems. "That water is just delicious," said Margaret Coleman, a Boyds resident and historian, pointing to a glass of well water from her kitchen tap. "I wouldn't exchange it for [Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission] water for anything."

Judy Daniel, a planner in the county Department of Park and Planning, notes that county leaders and master plans have long opposed water and sewer service in Boyds and other parts of the reserve. "When you bring in water and sewer, you bring in pressure for higher-density development," she said.

Last November, the County Council voted unanimously to close a loophole that had allowed the reserve's churches and other tax-exempt institutions to obtain water and sewer connections. Last week, the council voted, again unanimously, to limit the size of septic systems in much of the reserve. Both decisions reflected the totemic regard with which Montgomery's leaders view the 25-year-old reserve, which covers about a third of the county. Planning Board Chairman Derick Berlage displays a photo in his office of pastoral Poolesville framed against high-rise development across the Potomac.

Foster and Del Lamiman, vice president of the association, said they were surprised to hear that St. Mark's members were raising the issue of water and sewer access, but it is a long-standing point of disagreement in the community.

Arthur Virts, a founder of the civic association and lifelong resident, has a letter in his files from an association committee to the membership dated Aug. 9, 1966. The missive lays out the pros and cons of connecting Boyds to water and sewer lines; among the three signatories were two St. Mark's members, Betty Hawkins and the Rev. Carlton Talley Sr., who are now pressing for connection, just as they did then.

They were outvoted in 1966, and again at other times over the years, and would likely be today. "Public water and sewer should not be extended in the agricultural reserve, period," Lamiman said.

The subtext of race lies not far beneath the debate's surface. In a letter to the council last year, Warner opposed any limitations that would prevent St. Mark's from expanding and complained about the lack of water and sewer connections. "It is as if, as the descendants of ex-slaves, we are returning to slave-like conditions, not being considered in the decisionmaking, being relegated to less than adequate living facilities, while doing much of the service work that life in a community demands," he wrote.

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."