A year or so I ago, I wrote this post about the bridge carrying the Georgetown Branch Trail over Rock Creek. The other day I thought it would be a cool idea to take a picture from the top of the bridge with the same new wide angle lens I used to take the linden oak picture.
In Ilchester, MD, a small town on the Patapsco river, you will find many traces of many things of historical interest. I was lured there by the ruins of a few old buildings sitting on the cliffs above the river that I found on some internet maps. However I was too late a they were long since demolished. In fact, going back to the internet, I found that it depended on which map service you used weather you saw the ruins still or not. (actually on bing maps you can see them on certain angles of bird’s eye but not on others)
The town holds more intrigue though. It is located at the end of the main area of Patapsco Valley State Park, in fact the main trail that extends through this park ends at a pedestrian bridge just south of this one. That pedestrian bridge is built on the foundations of the original Patterson Viaduct, which carried the B&O main line, our country’s first 11 miles of railroad, from Mt. Claire to Ellicott City. When that bridge washed out, the tracks were moved north about 100 yards, forcing them to travel through a tunnel and then crossing at the location of today’s picture. I have pictures of that pedestrian bridge but they are trapped on my film camera right now. We’ll get to it eventually.
Here’s one more shot of the Navy Pier Fire in Solomons. I really liked this picutre from the start with the sunset and the smoke together. You can just make out the shadows of people standing on the fishing pier observing the fire.
Today’s picture comes to us thanks to Chris C. who was an eyewitness to last winter’s fire at the Navy Pier in Solomons. The wooden pier burned for hours. Above you can see the view from just south of the Governor Thomas Johnson bridge. We have a close up below in which you can see to the right that there’s a ship docked at the pier. That boat,which caught on fire but was not destroyed,was later towed to the open water. 
Today we return to the subject of a post from a year ago, the Linden Oak, which is the tallest and oldest white oak tree in Maryland. I had the chance to return to the tree this weekend, this time armed with the proper wide angle lens to capture the entire tree. Unlike my last visit, it’s now winter, and without all the greenery of other trees, it’s easier to see the expanse of the Linden Oak.
This slug of iron is a reminder of a time when the economics of iron production where based on a much smaller scale and when it was feasable, if given raw materials near the surface of the earth, a source of water, and a source of fire, to build an iron plant.
In the early days or our state’s iron production, transportation by horse or by river were limiting factors in the use of a furnace’s product. The results of these factors were a number of blast furnaces producing iron around Maryland. Of course in southern Maryland the existance of slave labor in early years added to this economic equation. However, furnaces, including the Patuxent Iron Works, remained in business long after slavery ended as the demand for iron couldn’t be fulfilled otherwise.
New technologies would make some furnaces obsolete while others became more important, slowly reducing the number of producers. Finally, when transportation costs were low enough to justify the use of efficient, large scaled iron plants in place of local ones, most local furnaces shut down.
This picture of iron from the Patuxent Iron Works comes to us from the Calvert Maritime Museum, but the Patuxent Iron works were located along the river in both Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties.
As part of MDP’s continuing efforts to photograph its way up and down the C&O canal, here is what’s left of lock 33 and it’s keeper’s house, located just north of the bridge to Harper’s Ferry.
This satellite dish is on the grounds of Capitol College, a school largely dedicated to technology related fields. Their campus in Prince Georges county contains quite a few academic buildings, like the new one in the background here, and five dorm buildings. The majority of students at the college are correspondents. (which I’m told is an out of date term and should be replaced with ”enrolled online”) I’d think it would be nice to know as a student online that there’s a very nice and extremely up to date campus out there to visit.
Here’s a shot from inside the patuxent reasearch reguge’s visitor center. Each of these lighted glass displays contains a diarama featuring birds or other wildlife that the refuge has worked with or which is endangered. I thought that these displays were very well thought out and informational. The entire area was also extremely asthetically pleasing with these lighted columns in the otherwise dark room. There are a few older exhibits there as well as many geared towards children.
At the Purple Moose Saloon in Ocean City there is a wall with row after row of these purple stuffed moose. In my quest for something Purple in support of the Ravens tomorrow I was sort of unimpressed with my first try at a purple picture. I wanted to visit to the Washington monument in Baltimore, assuming that it would be awash with a gaudy display of Raven’s purple. When I arrived, I found that it had a purple light, but it was literally a single purple light and the single light looked odd when the rest of the monument was bathed in white. So luckily there was purple moose that had escaped from the wall at the saloon in Ocean City to be a part of MDP’s participation in purple Friday. Next Friday we’ll get real fancy!
Just a note: MDP is taking off for MLK day, but will be back on Tuesday.