Daniels

A mill town on the Patapsco with its own post office until 1971

Daniels sits in the woods where Baltimore and Howard counties meet along the Patapsco River, east of Woodstock and north of old Ellicott City, and it takes some finding. It was a company town for more than 150 years.

It began in 1810, when Thomas Ely and his family came to the river and built a textile mill, and the village that grew up around it was called Elysville. It became one of the earliest railroad communities in the country when the Baltimore and Ohio passed through on its way west to Point of Rocks. In the 1850s the family of James S. Gary bought the town and renamed it Alberton, after James's son Albert, and under strong management it grew into a model company town, with stores, churches, a school and a railroad station. The Garys kept the mill until 1940, when the C.R. Daniels Company, a New York canvas maker that had started as a small sail loft, bought the mill, the houses and the land and put its own name on the place. Through the 1950s and 1960s it doubled the plant.

The company owned the houses as well as the jobs. The village's stone Catholic church, St. Stanislaus Kostka, stood on the hill above the village until lightning set it alight on 24 September 1926. By the late 1960s about 90 families still lived in Daniels, and in 1968 the company gave notice that it would close all the housing within a few years. In June 1972 Tropical Storm Agnes came down the Patapsco Valley and finished the job, wrecking most of the empty buildings, tearing up gravestones and carrying cars downstream to bury them in mud. The company moved out after the flood.

The ghost town is now largely part of Patapsco Valley State Park. A flat walk of about a mile and a half from the Alberton Road trailhead off Dogwood Road leads past a half-buried 1960s car to a fire road climbing to the church ruins, with their stone steps and cobbled walls still standing. Beyond them, stone foundations dot the woods, and along the river are the ruins of the Pentecostal Holiness Church and the old Daniels Dam that powered the mill.