Daniels, Maryland: The Mill Town the Patapsco Took Back

01From Elysville to Alberton: Three Names for One Mill Town

The story begins with the river. According to the historical marker at the site, the Thomas Ely family built a textile mill on this stretch of the Patapsco in 1810. The Elysville Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1829 to make cotton textiles. The Baltimore Sun reports that the settlement was christened Elysville in 1834. The stone mill that became the heart of the village was built between August 1845 and the spring of 1846.

In 1853 the Gary family bought the town and renamed it Alberton, after the son Albert Gary. The post office carried the Alberton name from 1854 until 1943. The mill's work was practical and unglamorous. During the Civil War it produced canvas tents for the Union Army. By 1915 it was turning out denim, sheeting and duck, a heavy cotton canvas. A dam on the river furnished 400 horsepower to drive the machinery.

The last name came in 1940. The C.R. Daniels Company bought the whole village at auction for $65,000, according to the Baltimore Sun, which puts the sale at about 550 acres. The Sun gives the population at the time as 800. The place has been called Daniels ever since.

02Life in a Town Owned by the Mill

Daniels was not a town that happened to have a factory. The factory owned the town. The Granite Historical Society lists a general store, a post office, a bowling alley, a pool hall, a library, a ball field, a restaurant and three churches, all owned by the mill. It also records the rule that held the arrangement together: the head of a household had to work in the mill to live there.

The housing sat in four areas: Guilford, Calf Hollow, Lower Brick Row and Upper Brick Row. The National Register nomination describes a complex of seven early industrial structures and a church, surrounded by about ninety mill-hand houses. By the late 1960s roughly 90 families still lived in the village, according to the marker text. A Catholic congregation had worshipped at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, built in 1879. Lightning struck it in 1926 and the fire that followed gutted it.

03What Happened to Daniels?

The end came in two blows. In 1968, residents were told that the C.R. Daniels Company would close all of its housing within a few years. The company then razed the village's housing rather than modernize it, and the National Register nomination counts about ninety mill-hand houses and the Catholic church among the losses. A community built around company employment had its homes taken apart in a single year.

The mill outlasted its village by four years. On June 21, 1972, Tropical Storm Agnes sent the Patapsco over its banks and destroyed the mill and the structures that remained. In 1973 Daniels Mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places, listed as a ruin and a record of what the flood left behind.

The people did not forget. In 2012, the 40th anniversary of Agnes, the Baltimore Sun covered "Discover Daniels Day" at the site. The Granite Historical Society notes that former residents and their families still hold an annual Daniels reunion.

04Can You Visit Daniels Today?

Yes, in part. The Daniels Area of Patapsco Valley State Park, managed by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, includes the dam and the ruins of the company towns of Daniels and Guilford. The state continues to study the dam's future. Walkers can still find the stone remains of St. Stanislaus Kostka Church and the ruins of the Pentecostal Holiness Church.

Some pieces of the old town are off limits. The original mill site and the Gary Methodist Church are private property, and DNR asks visitors to respect that. The mill site now houses several private businesses. The residential village is gone, and no one lives there now.

05What Remains of Daniels Today

What remains of Daniels is mostly outline: the dam that once drove the looms, foundations and walls left among the trees, and two ruined churches. The streets of Upper and Lower Brick Row, and the rooms where about ninety families lived, have gone back to park woodland. The mill site at the old heart of the village now hosts private businesses, and the Gary Methodist Church stands on private ground. The Daniels ghost town is a place to walk slowly and read the stones. Every year the people whose families lived there still gather to remember it.