Mountain Lake Park woman saves memories of a resort without ‘sin’

History

Mar 11

Written By MLPHA

By Michael K. Burn

Sun Staff Correspondent

1981 Interview with Mary Love about the 100th Anniversary of Mountain Lake Park’s founding.

Mountain Lake Park – For Mary Love, the search for the history of this Garrett County town is an effort to recapture pieces o her girlhood – and to experience secondhand a childhood from an earlier era when this was the cultural center of Western Maryland.

"It was an exciting place for a small town," the county mental hygiene psychologist recalled, those days when the lake resort hosted the Mountain Chautauqua, the self-improvement crash course that brought culture, knowledge, entertainment, and public affairs to the masses each summer before the age of television and jet travel.

The summer brought the wealthy to their Victorian mansion or cross-decorated Missionary Gothic homes in The Park; others rented more modest cottages or stayed at the busy boarding houses.

They absorbed the culture and enjoyed a cool mountain respite from the heat, swimming or boating in the 35-acre lake or promenading down the boardwalk from the tennis club to the B&O railroad station to collect the daily mail.

But Miss love noted, there were limits to their pursuit of pleasure.

"There was a popular saying; 'Go to Loch Lynn if you want to sin' and that's what many people did."

It should be pointed out that Mountain Lake Park's founders were stern Methodists with a narrow view of sin; the community charter and land deed forbade dancing, card-playing, and drinking.

So nearby Loch Lynn's hotel profited nicely therefrom by holding regular dances, offering the chance for an eachre game and serving liquid refreshment.

*Expansive 5,000-seat Bashford Amphitheater had no center supports utilizing an inverted truss system.*

Enforcement of these covenants in Mountain Lake Park eroded, after periodic dispensations, as prohibition was becoming unpopular nationwide and the town incorporated in 1931.

"I imagine the founders were idealists who were disappointed in what became of their vision, " said Miss Love, who is collecting photos, historic memorabilia, and reminiscences of older citizens while working on an indexed street guide to the community as it was at the turn of the century.

But it is the Chautauqua and the summers of leisure – not the traditional of camp meetings and missionary conventions – that is her prime interest. as she traces the history and plans for an open house tour of the more interesting homes of a bygone era.

"There are so many places that have been restored – look at that home with the vertical siding," Miss Love said during a drive through the town. "But there are many others that have been shamefully neglected."

Preserving houses preserves memories, she suggests. But practicality is also a concern. She built a new house just outside the community after rejecting a chance to buy the house where she grew up.; It would have been too expensive to rebuild for year-round living comfort, she explained.

This year, the community celebrated its 100th anniversary with the surprising prospect that it could soon outpace neighboring Oakland (population 1,977) as the largest community in Garrett County.

The Depression and World War II, which marked the end of the Mountain Chautauqua, helped to convert the town from a summer resort to a year-round residential community. The open land within its town limits, laid out in the Nineteenth Century was grandiose design by the architect of Baltimore's Druid Hill Park, now beckons to new residents, as Oakland enacted a building moratorium.

But family ties are drawing others back, such as Kathy Smith, whose great grandparents from Wheeling, W.Va built a cottage here for their use during the summer Methodist camp meetings. She and her minister husband [Manning] moved here seven years ago, as he got a call from the local Episcopal church.

"I remembered it as a child where we spent summer and I wanted to come back," she said. "It's like another world."

Their rambling red-and-white house [The Gables] has been in the family for 70 years, but several generations have added rooms, changed the layout, and updated the conveniences. Mrs. Smith's mother lived with them until her recent death and two aunts live in the "Stone Cottage" catercorner from her home, the original house built by her grandparents.

The Mountain Lake Park Tennis Club, where Mrs. Smith sometimes plays, serves as a sort of social reunion center for old-time families whose descendants have drifted away. The Western Maryland championships, the oldest continuous tennis tournament in the region, draw absentee members back for a week of get-to-gethers through the top competitors are consistently outsiders looking for titles on the ancient, pitted dirt [clay] courts.

"I enter the thing but I never go far, like most of the members," Mrs. Smith said. "It's a social event for most of us."

The summer religious revival tradition also survives today with a week-long nondenominational camp meeting held each summer in the old Auditorium where Sunday services are also held.

The Auditorium, or Tabernacle, was the first building erected by a group of 15 clergymen and laymen who founded the community in 1881 as "a summer resort hewing closely to a methodist doctrine and fully segregated from worldly contamination of every kind," according to the charter.

The rigidity of the founding fathers' moral views seemed to fluctuate over the next few decades as the financial need was a constant prod toward compromise.

The association barred Sunday newspapers and Sunday stops of the B&O railroad in the community station, as well as mercantile activity. But refreshment stands did a brisk Sunday business during camp meetings and lectures, and advertisements for the perditious Loch Lynn Hotell dances appeared in the association's summer program.

Evangelists and ministers of any faith and persuasion were permitted to use the association's meeting grounds, as long as they paid their rent. The group even contradicted its founding charter to permit Marylanders (instead of West Virginians) to hold a majority of shares.

From the start, there were problems with purity of doctrine. Fearing that a "sin town" might spring up on the other side of the railroad tracks, the original association encouraged Maj, Joseph C. Alderson, a Methodist parishioner, to buy the land and establish Loch Lynn. That hotel of temptation was built not long afterward.

*Founders shown left to right; Rev. C.P. Masden | Major J.C. Alderson | C.W. Conner | Dr. C.W. Baldwin | Dr. John W. Goucher | Rev. J. McMillan Davis | S.L. Allen-Newburg*

Though the founders were wealthy men, often active businessmen, the association (which controlled the entire town) was never managed with financial wisdom.

A hotel built by the founders was sold one year later at half the cost, the Chautauqua programs often cost more than they took in and in 1909 the president warned shareholders of two options; bankruptcy or liquidation. This is despite kickbacks from the B&O railroad on every excursion ticket sold to the Park.

The Rev. John F. Goucher, the mission organizer, and philanthropist who brought Women's Colleg of Baltimore to near bankruptcy before resigning as president (and having the school later renamed for his efforts) was a determining influence in the recurring financial problems of the community.

"The association sponsors aimed at religious, literary, musical uplift for the masses, but at some profit to themselves." observed a local historian Jared W. Young.

In 1920, Dr. Goucher convinced the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions to take over the association and its property. The Methodists, after years of problems, gratefully sold out in 1940 to the West Virginia Training School, an interdenominational religious group that still runs a weeklong summer camp meeting here at the old Auditorium.

In its day, Mountain Lake Park attracted a high-powered list of speakers over the years – Presidents Cleveland, Taft, Benjamin Harrison, Samuel Gompers, and the evangelist Billy Sunday. William Jennings Bryan spoke in the Magnificant 5,000-seat Bashford Amphitheater, one of the first such large structures without any middle supports, which gave it outstanding acoustics.

The Amphitheater fell into disrepair and was torn down during the war, reportedly to salvage its chestnut timbers. Its refreshment stand houses El Lobo restaurant, one of two eating establishments in the town. The lake that gave the resort its name is now a marshy field, though four-wheel-drive vehicles still traverse it to haul water from the Crystal Spring.

The auditorium, its paint peeling and the bell long-missing from its belfry looks much as it did in 1881, aside from various additions to the rear to accommodate large crowds of yesteryear's meetings.

"I would love to see that restored," said Miss Love, "but it will take a lot of work from people who care about this town." Two talks she has given on the historical layout of Mountain Lake Park have attracted encouraging audiences and volunteers, Miss Love said, and the planned tour of restored community homes next summer could stimulate further interest.