May 12, 1996|By DeWitt Bliss | DeWitt Bliss,SPECIAL TO THE SUN
The Roland Park post office is on Deepdene Road in Tuxedo Park. The Roland Park swimming pool is at the end of Embla Park's Lawndale Avenue. And the Three Arts Club of Homeland is in Embla Park.
Clearly, Tuxedo Park and Embla Park have been overshadowed by the more well-known neighborhoods nearby.
James F. Waesche, in "Crowning the Gravelly Hill," his history of the Roland Park Company developments, included Tuxedo Park and Embla Park in a list of independent developments that "are so close to Roland Park and, in most cases, so strongly influenced by the Park's high standards, that their separate identities have been lost as far as the general public is concerned."
The two communities are north of Wyndhurst Avenue between Charles Street and Roland Avenue.
Arthur E. Davis III, president of Chase Fitzgerald & Co., a real estate firm housed in the former offices of the Roland Park Co., said, "They seem to get lost with time and get their identities from the larger nearby communities."
This has posed a problem for Ann Walsh, an Embla Park resident and president of the Wyndhurst Improvement Association, which represents the two communities and a small residential pocket just below Northern Parkway at Charles Street.
"I have had to get more pro-active than I expected, because we are sandwiched between the Roland Park Civic Association and the Homeland Association," Walsh said.
The two larger associations do not always consult with her group on matters that would concern it, she said.
The identity problem seems to have been around for a while.
Andrew Schneider, who started a meat and grocery business on Wyndhurst Avenue in 1896, had the words Roland and Tuxedo Park Meat Market painted on the side of his horse-drawn delivery wagon, according to an early picture reproduced in Mr. Waesche's book.
The two developments are contemporaries of Roland Park, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1991.
The subdivision plats for Tuxedo Park and Embla Park were filed in the Baltimore County land records in 1892 and 1893, respectively.
Tuxedo Park, in the original plat, ran along the north side of Wyndhurst (Roland Park ended on the south side) from what is now Roland Avenue downhill to the tracks of what later became the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad.
It included one north-south street, Summit Avenue, and several more that ran west to east, Gladstone Avenue, Euclid Avenue -- now St. John's Road -- Colorado Avenue and Linwood Avenue -- now Deepdene Road.
A short length of Wilmslow Road has since been added, running north from Wyndhurst Avenue where the railroad once ran.
Embla Park ran from Charles Street to the tracks and included four streets, Cabash Avenue, Wilson Avenue, Aldeber Avenue and Lawrence Avenue.
Now all have been changed and are known as Greenleaf Road, Boxhill Lane, Blythewood Road and Lawndale Avenue.
Development in the area began before the plats were filed, and Embla was recognized as a community in the 1880s.
It is listed in the 1887 Maryland State Directory and Gazetteer, according to "North Baltimore from Estate to Development." The book, written by Karen Lewand and edited by D. Randall Beirne, said such a listing indicated that the community had its own post office.
In 1888, the Notre Dame Collegiate of Maryland Institute for Young Ladies and Preparatory School for Little Girls, predecessor of the 100-year-old college and of Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson, gave its address as Embla, Md.
Typhoid outbreak in 1903
In May 1903, the school had to send its students home because of an outbreak of typhoid fever from water from an artesian well in Embla Park, according to " A Maryland First," a history of the college by Sister Bridget Marie Engelmeyer that appeared in the Maryland Historical Magazine in 1983.
Sister Bridget Marie, who has served the college as dean, archivist and as an English professor, quoted school records as to the cause of the infection, a workman who "flushed out the wells with a spring water that had surface drainage."
In the same article, she noted that the 1873 catalog cited the Notre Dame Station of what was to become the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, a quarter-mile down Wyndhurst Avenue, as a means of traveling to and from the school.
She also noted that the nuns at the school used the railroad to travel to the farm they owned in Glen Arm.
They would stand on the station platform at the northwest corner of Wyndhurst Avenue and Lawndale Avenue and flag down the train approaching on tracks parallel to Stony Run.
The stop was still listed in the railroad's passenger timetable in 1954 when it stopped passenger service, just a few years before it ended freight service.
Sister Bridget Marie described the trip, which she had made in the 1940s, as "a real adventure" complete with entertainment by the conductor "who talked all the way."
