About 90 visitors meandered among the buildings of the Carroll County Farm Museum one sunny morning last week. From there, they boarded tour buses that drove them through downtown Westminster while a guide pointed out landmarks and related local lore.
The buses headed northwest through rolling hills and farms to Taneytown for a stop at a posh inn housed in a restored antebellum mansion and later a picnic lunch at Taneytown Memorial Park.
Then came Carroll Vista, the final stop and the reason for the three-hour odyssey. Carroll Vista, billed as an active adult community, will soon be under construction a few miles from downtown Taneytown.
Carroll Vista is being built through a partnership between Del Webb and Pulte Homes. Del Webb, which focuses on communities for active, older adults, will eventually have about 500 single-family homes and townhomes for residents age 55 and older, company owners said.
Carroll Vista, the first Del Webb community in the metropolitan area, will have a clubhouse, swimming pools, a golf course, tennis courts and walking trails and a lifestyle director to organize activities.
The development, which will be built on 300 acres of one-time farmland, is little more than tall mounds of earth being pushed and shoveled by heavy construction equipment. Pulte Homes will not break ground on the first homes until late spring. But the interest Carroll Vista has generated is so great that company officials said they may have to hold a lottery for the sales of the homes.
Del Webb has conducted three seminars that have drawn as many as 250 prospective buyers. Many of those took the bus tour last week.
"It would be a wonderful retirement alternative for us," said Nancy Shagogue of Reisterstown, who was on her first visit to the Carroll County Farm Museum in about 30 years. "We could be close to our children in an area that we are familiar with. I think we would buy as soon as it could be built."
Barbara Beverungen, Carroll County's director of tourism, and Nancy B. McCormick, Taneytown's director of economic development, were among the group.
"This is a smart marketing idea," Beverungen said. "They are selling the area and the quality of life here."
Guides pointed out popular restaurants, unusual shops, medical centers, golf courses and colleges along the bus route. The visitors heard a few ghost stories, descriptions of architectural highlights and the history of Civil War battle and encampment sites around the town, which is about 10 miles from Gettysburg, Pa.
