There are only two historic districts recognized by Howard County government:  Ellicott City and Lawyers Hill (see maps), both of which are National Register Districts.  Even Savage Mill is a National Register of Historic Places Historic District since 1975, but the County refuses to recognize it as a local historic district.  Good luck in finding any real information on these historic districts on the Howard County Website. They seem to keep it closely guarded for some reason.

As we were told publicly by the County numerous times in 2018 when contesting the building of the storage unit on Old Guilford Road, there is no such thing as a Guilford Industrial Historic District, not even designated by the Maryland Historical Trust. Despite the Maryland Historical Trust (MHT) listing hundreds of sites in Howard County (see link at the bottom of the page) most of them are long since demolished since the quest for development of every last parcel in Howard County affords no protection for structures that communities consider historic.

The Guilford Industrial Historic District

The Guilford Industrial Historic District does indeed exist, although it did not qualify for the National Register, and contains the Guilford Quarry Pratt-through Truss Bridge & Ruins whose eligibility for the National Register was recently approved by MHTs Office of Preservation Services.  Recognition as a National Register district should be revisited with the discovery of the 200 year old mill dam, the 180 year old slave cemetery, and several quarry stone piles over 100 years old on the south side of the river along the CA connector pathway.  In lieu of a historic district we have been working with the County to establish a local “Between the Bridges Historic Park”.

The Lunsford Luckado House (aka the Spano House)

Although this house was built in the 1920s from blocks obtained from the granite quarry across the street, it was never submitted as a historic site on the MHT.  The Luckado home was demolished in February of 2017 after the County granted a demolition permit a month earlier requested by a Columbia architect presumably on behalf for the developer, Poverni Sheikh Group. I was told the County thoroughly inspected the property and documented any and all historic and archaeological relevant items but the County has yet to make those findings public – more than a year later.  The house was said to contain many historical items of interest including documentation of Mr. Luckado’s amateur historian research on the Guilford Mill and other local areas.  John McGrain, the great Baltimore historian and mill expert, referred to Mr. Luckado as a “mill-hunter” for his help in documenting the history of Guilford Mill.

John McGrain’s Molinography (see below) and Lunsford Luckadoo

Molinogrphy is the study of the geographical distribution of mills, and in Maryland, there is no greater expert than historian John McGrain who first published the Molinography of Maryland in 1996/1997 and updated it with an online version in 2007.  McGrain wrote of the following of Lunsford Luckado:

“John McGrain received a letter from L. H. Luckado of Guilford on February 14, 1976

I live next door in the stone house and there is a story with it in the days of the stone quarry which I won't get into now. As to your question on it, it was not a mill but was the machine and blacksmith shop to keep the quarry going. The mill stood 50 about 100 ft below the old B. & O. bridge on the south side of Route 32 and today only one corner of the stone foundation is left to be seen and was first a corn mill and gristmill, then became a cotton mill, then a store, the post office during the quarry days, and then burned. The water wheel is estimated by me to have been 18 to 20 feet high and maybe 50 hp, and remains of the dam are 1/4 mile upriver, and part can be seen today. There was also a cooper shop that Columbia City just bulldozed down last year.

John McGrain visited the site on April 6, 1976, and measured a few short sections of stone wall, in one place 7 feet high. The visible part of an east end wall was 18 inches thick. Some of the north wall had been cut off by the bed of the Route 32 roadway as it then existed. McGrain's notes suggest that the surviving walls, only 8 feet 6 inches apart were part of a forebay for a mill. This mill remnant was about 100 feet east of the surviving steel through truss railroad bridge. McGrain noted a mound along the river, well downstream of the site, around the bend in Route 32, but within sight of the highway, on the west or south bank of the Patuxent. “

Certainly this house deserves to be listed on the Maryland Historical Trust as a historic site despite its demolition last year. 

Resources:

John McGrain’s Molinography for Howard County (2007 on-line edition) – see page 49 https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4300/sc4300/000005/000000/000010/unrestricted/howard%20county%20chapter.pdf#search=John%20McGrain