BCPL History and Genealogy - Perry Hall - Immigration and Change: Perry Hall around 1875.
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Immigration and Change: Perry Hall around 1875
by David Marks
Historian, Perry Hall Improvement Association

When Buddy Butt packages his fruit baskets every day, it is in the spirit of a family which has farmed Perry Hall for over four generations. "Pride of Germantown," Buddy Butt's one-man operation, is the linear descendant of one of Perry Hall's oldest family farms. Like his family before him, Buddy Butt packs and sells fruit for neighbors and friends, always in the spirit of one of Perry Hall's oldest and most noteworthy families.

"They were hard working folks," he says of his ancestors. "Your life more or less turned out by the way you worked." Butt recalls the routine for a Perry Hall family around the turn of the century: clearing the land, growing fruits and vegetables, selling them at market downtown on the weekends, then returning home with a few extra dollars for a new tool or a wagon. By today's standards, it certainly wasn't a life of luxury. Instead, families measured happiness by the togetherness they felt after the produce was sold and they'd earned enough money to keep going on.

The Butt family was one of several to settle Perry Hall in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. They were mainly German, and when the new immigrants settled 900 acres of land near Forge and Belair Roads, they called their village "Germantown." The 1877 atlas of Baltimore County authorized by the Library of Congress shows a thriving settlement along Belair Road, with names like Butt, Rye, Mohr, Kahl, and Soth populating the growing village. Perry Hall was changing. It was no longer a rural wilderness populated by a few scattered English landowners, but was becoming a country hamlet dominated by German and Irish immigrant families.

These were people of humble means. They tilled their small farms intensely, raising "stoop crops" that required families to crawl along the ground to weed and harvest. Carrots, beans, leeks, celery, parsley, and onions were grown, then gathered, cleaned, and hauled to the city markets on the weekend. They often set up their stands on Friday evening, returned before dawn on Saturday to sell their vegetables, and did not arrive back in Perry Hall until midnight or early Sunday morning.

While not a grain-growing area, many farmers planted a few acres of wheat, rye, oats, and barley. Grain was threshed by Fox's sawmill, which was located north of Walter Avenue on Belair Road. Residents often bartered with the Fox family, trading grain or small vegetables for lumber that was used during the cold winter months.

During the winter, families survived on vegetables and fruit which were stored in caves, man-made and natural. Food had been stored here during the year, squirreled away by the farmers for months when harvests were impossible. Ice was cut on the Gunpowder Falls, then stored in underground hollows or icehouses on the farm. When the water was unfrozen, fishermen caught herring and carp on the Gunpowder River. Foxes, rabbits, squirrels, and quails were abundant throughout Perry Hall, and in the years before urbanization, some hunters bagged as many as thirty rabbits and ten quail a day during the winter hunting season.

Many sons and daughters married the children of other Perry Hall farmers. They tried to give a few acres of land and a new barn to the newlyweds. Parents often saved up much of their life savings for this gift. They invested a portion of their week's earnings at Germantown Savings and Loan, the community's only bank, and if they had a poor week at the market, their family would have to do with a little less food. The amount deposited in the bank remained the same.

It was this spirit of thrift and hard work which guided Perry Hall's first families through difficult times. They led simple lives; there were few stores or taverns in the town, and only a handful of visitors ever stopped along Belair Road to chat with the country residents. Often, only three or four wagons would pass through Perry Hall every day, usually carrying crops to the city market from Bel Air or Kingsville.

Many of Perry Hall's first families are still here, although most of the farms have since been divided or developed. Other farms diversified. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, there were several canning houses in Perry Hall, although these did not prove profitable. Another experiment, however, proved wildly successful: the "greenhouse," where flowers were grown inside vast glass buildings and shipped to city residents. Perry Hall was known for many years as "the greenhouse belt," and many of these still operate in the Honeygo area of our community.

Other signs of the first families are still with us, embedded in the community. Our major streets bear many of their names, including those of the Klausmeier, Penn, and Soth families. "Pop Dietz's" has sold vegetables along Belair Road for generations, and the Moore Orchards near Philadelphia Road are among the largest in eastern Baltimore County. Then, of course, is Buddy Butt's "Pride of Germantown," that one-man operation which so perfectly captures the essence of Perry Hall past.

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The text version of this page was last revised on 26 August 2008.
The graphics version of this page was last revised on 26 August 2008.
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