Main Street Turns a Corner

Davis lives in Cumberland full time, though Hart, like many of Cumberland's newer residents, is a commuter. He manages the Immunogenetics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, staying in that city four nights a week.

A guest wanders in and asks if she can see the basement bomb shelter, which was added in the 1950s. "We're slowly building a wine collection there because the temperature is so perfect," Hart said. It would be useless against radiation anyway, he added. The Rosenbaums put in plenty of air holes for ventilation.

"In suburban Baltimore," he said, "most people don't know who lives next door. You never talk to them. Up here? Bill and I entertain all the time. You can have two or three parties in an evening. It's a closer-knit community. When we first moved here, it would take me an hour to get somewhere because I kept running into people: 'How're you doing; how's your house?' It's like that."

Chuck and Terri Skinner's 8,000-square-foot house on Washington Street has 95 doors. There are pocket doors with glass panes, French doors, solid wood doors and closet doors with locks to prevent the servants from pilfering -- when there were servants.

There are five closets on the first landing. One holds the mop sink. "You don't see them anymore," Terri Skinner said. Or silver rooms, or valise rooms or 21-by-40-foot ballrooms with two crystal chandeliers.

How many bedrooms? Chuck Skinner ticked them off on his fingers, reaching six and hesitating. "Seven?"

"Eight," his wife corrected as they sat in the dining room, where French doors frame a glimpse of the veranda that spans the rear of the house and a view over sloping hills to the mountains.

The house was rather beaten up when they bought it a year and a half ago, she said. A doctor's family had owned it for many years, and the kids ran wild. "They wrote on the walls, rode mattresses down the staircases and shot BB guns into the plaster. . . . I think when they moved, the house sighed."

The Skinners were living in Ellicott City, Chuck working in aerospace engineering in Beltsville, Terri for an association. She traveled much of the week, which she still does. He is now retired and spends his days restoring the house.

Both knew Cumberland before they moved there. He grew up in the town but moved after high school, in 1959. In those days, many people did. "You had to leave -- move to the city to get work. . . . It's not a pretty story," he said.

Cumberland was once the second-largest city in Maryland, said Ben Wolters, the Skinners' neighbor. "That's why it's called the Queen City. Baltimore was number one, Cumberland number two."

Once, there were 55,000 people living there and 150 trains coming through each day. "They found coal and iron ore and clay to make firebrick. You want a pizza oven? Firebrick!" Wolters said.

"George Washington had his headquarters here," Chuck Skinner added. "They sent Washington to protect the area because the French and the British were trying to claim everything beyond it. The Ohio country, they called it -- way out west."

In the early years of the 20th century, the town was bustling, with big factories on the perimeter and department stores, banks and restaurants downtown.

Then came leaner times. When Wolters, a pilot, arrived in 1977 to work at the town's small airport, "it was a low point in the Cumberland economy," he said. "Kelly-Springfield tires shut down, PPG, Celanese. . . . By 1978, '79, it started going fast."

Wolters, who works for a major airline and commutes to Ohio, stayed on. He married a local woman, Mary Joe, and restored a shambles of a four-unit apartment building to make it a 5,500-square-foot single-family house.

In the past decade, factories have reopened, disenchanted urbanites have been lured by attractive incentives to restore downtown buildings, telecommuters and weekenders have snapped up reasonably priced housing, and early retirees have found second lives as art entrepreneurs.

One thing not in flux: Cumberland's front-porch friendliness. "From a good part of Cumberland, you can walk to whatever you need. We wouldn't really have to have a car," Terri Skinner said. "We'll walk downtown to go out to dinner, come back, and Ben and Mary Joe are sitting on the porch, and they'll say, 'Come on up and have a drink!'

"And then it's, 'Ah, it's getting late; let's order a pizza.' Hours later, we're still visiting with the neighbors."