In Mount Airy, Panoramas at the Right Price
Md. Town Offers Land for Less, Quaint Downtown

By Marianne Kyriakos
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, October 14, 2006

Something about scraping the manure off their shoes at a rainy county fair a few years back convinced Rick and Mary Anne Smith that "hobby farming" would suit them.

They sold their Silver Spring house and found a real estate agent, Mary Anne Smith said. "She kept a database of people like us -- Washingtonians who were looking for the perfect country property, those two-to-four-acre parcels."

The Smiths now have the life they wanted 35 miles north of Washington, in greater Mount Airy. They paid $160,000 for an eight-acre lot in the Maryland countryside and hired Keystone Modular Homes to put up a $250,000, four-bedroom Cape Cod.

Just off Interstate 70, the town of Mount Airy, with 3.8 square miles inside its corporate limits, is home to 8,908 people, said Town Clerk B.J. Dixon. Two-level frame or brick storefronts line the historic district's hilly Main Street, including a gun shop, restaurant, pharmacy and antique store. Queen Anne-style houses are set back from the streets on shaded lawns. Frederick and Carroll counties meet inside the town.

In the surrounding area, some 26,000 residents have a Mount Airy mailing address, which includes most of Zip code 21771 and parts of two more counties: Howard and Montgomery. The foothill-fringed region features farms and subdivisions of large single-family houses, most built in the past seven or eight years.

Mount Airy sprouted astride 830-foot Parr's Ridge in the 1830s, as the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad reached the location.

A Wild West-style settlement blossomed, with shooting parties and drunken brawls, said Mike Eacho, president of the Mount Airy Historical Society. "The railroad workers had money in their pockets and drinking on their minds -- among other things."

Eacho said Mount Airy's present-day residents are much calmer: "I always refer to them as the townies and the commuters."

Rick Smith is among the daily commuters. Audiobooks and satellite radio ease the drive to his job as director of the National Health Service Corps in Rockville. Mary Anne Smith retired last year from her teaching job at Colonel Zadok Magruder High School in Rockville, because, she said, "This farm has become a full-time operation."

Her charges now are 23 goats, three horses and other farm animals. She makes frozen yogurt and cheese from her seven quarts of goat milk a week.

The Caballero family moved from Gaithersburg to Mount Airy "to get away from it all," said Edward Caballero, 57. His wife, Ruth, still commutes to the Washington area. Daughter Michelle, 22, recently opened the Vintage Coffee House on South Main Street.

It's where the young people come to "chill" and enjoy live local bands, said Rita King, who was lounging one day on the sofa and drinking root beer with her friend Ryan Burkett. Both are 18 and recently started college -- King at York College in Pennsylvania, Burkett at Catholic University in the District.

With the nearest movie theaters and shopping malls more than 10 miles away in any direction, the year-old coffeehouse was a welcome addition to a downtown Main Street "that used to be dead," Burkett said. "There used to be nothing here for younger kids."

Burkett was adopted from South Korea by a Caucasian family in Mount Airy and has the distinction of being one of 188 Asians in the Zip code. "People say, 'You don't really sound Asian.' Well, yeah," Burkett said with a laugh, "considering I've been raised white in Carroll County."

After college, "I'd be willing to stay here," Burkett said. "I'll love Mount Airy." He pauses a few seconds. "For always."

Dalia Schulman shares the sentiment. In 2001, she and her husband, Stephen, gave up on high-priced, closer-in real estate and the loneliness of an "impersonal" street in Bethesda where no one spoke to them when they took walks.

"We even had a dog," she said. "What kind of people don't say hello to somebody with a dog?"

During their Mount Airy house hunt, the two had a pleasant jolt of "reverse sticker shock" when they saw the price on one brochure. "I said, 'Stephen, something's wrong. There's a typo.' "

There was no typo: They bought their four-bedroom, stone-front model on a third of an acre for $300,000.

The couple owns Knife & Fork Caterers Inc. of Rockville, named for a restaurant they once had in Georgetown. Stephen Schulman still goes back and forth to the Washington area every day.

Dalia Schulman stays in town and is "beyond happy." She opened a knitting shop on Main Street, where she teaches needlework and now mah-jongg. Her newest passion is the "fun-after-50" Red Hat Society, a women's social group.

Breezes from the foothills are cool and brisk at 5:30 a.m. in Mount Airy, and the carnival grounds are deserted. But that didn't keep volunteer firefighter Warren "Tony" Esworthy from showing up to sand and paint the guardrails one recent day. There are lots of rusty guardrails leading to the fire company's 43-acre property.

Esworthy is something of a town hero. He was one of six firefighters injured in the line of duty in 1987, when the speeding engine on which he was riding "backstep" spun out of control, skidding 76 feet on its side before colliding with a tree. Esworthy was trapped in the wreckage for 40 minutes.

A resident for all of his 53 years, he and his wife paid $70,000 20 years ago for a Cape Cod-style house that now is worth $500,000. "I got no bills," he bragged, "and I don't believe in credit cards."

Though he can no longer answer fire alarms, his friendships with the firefighters have tied him to the company. "The guys used to bring my wife to visit every day," Esworthy said of the 110 days he spent recovering at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. "They did it on their own."

Deanna Brown felt no such comradeship in 1976, when she became one of the first five women admitted to the Mount Airy Volunteer Fire Company. "It was an all-male domain before," the 38-year resident said. "A lot of the guys swallowed real hard."

One did more than gulp, Brown said. "Every time he went to the bathroom, he left the door open just to humiliate the women."

The community grew, and the Mount Airy fire department hired many more women. As for Brown's male co-worker: "He started closing the bathroom door."