Travelers whizzing up and down York Road probably don't realize when they get to Stevenson Lane, they're at the epicenter of Rodgers Forge.
Recently, colleague Laura Vozzella reported in her column that The Times of London, in a profile of Olympian Michael Phelps, said that he hailed from "the blue-collar mill town of Towson" - to be more accurate, it's Rodgers Forge.
We take our neighborhoods seriously around here.
Rodgers Forge has Phelps, and Towson can claim Olympic swimmers Anita Nall (1992) and Katie Hoff (2008) for their own.
Joseph M. Coale III, a historian, author and ardent preservationist who lives in Ruxton, explained to Vozzella that there were never any mills in Towson.
There is a stream, however, and it's Towson Run or Bowen's Run, whose waters run west across the Towson University campus, past Greater Baltimore Medical Center and under Charles Street, until swirling into Lake Roland.
Towson Run's waters were never powerful enough to support a commercial milling operation.
The nearest mill - itself a long-ago memory - was several miles west of Towson, on the shores of Roland Run at what is now the intersection of Joppa and Thornton roads in Riderwood, says Coale, author of Middling Planters of Ruxton, 1694-1850.
The story of Rodgers Forge goes back to 1800 when a 19-year-old Irish immigrant, George Rodgers, purchased four acres of land from Govane Howard's estate and built a house and a blacksmith shop on the southeast corner of York Road - then called the York Turnpike - and Stevenson Lane.
Rodgers had plenty of competition from six other nearby smithies in Govanstown and Towsontown.
The enterprising Rodgers abandoned the cartwright trade and focused exclusively on horseshoeing.
Rodgers had a son, also named George, and that son had a son named James, and all worked as blacksmiths. Four generations of Rodgerses would work in the forge.
"Had there been royalty in this country, they might have stopped therein to have a shoe refitted for their horses, or had there been a Longfellow in Maryland, he might have sung of the Rodgers family," observed The Evening Sun in 1929.
"As it is, the romantic old forge is almost unnoticed by the many who pass by close to its door on the streetcar or automobile," observed the newspaper.
"Little do they realize it's an active survivor of the times when their great-grandfathers, grandfathers and fathers traveled up the York Pike in the stage coach and horse car."
