Acres Of Land

Baltimore County's newest park has an unusual but inspiring message: "Cancer -- There is hope."The 1-acre parcel at Goucher Boulevard and Fairmount Avenue in Towson will be dedicated today, with life-size bronze sculptures, a cascading waterfall, a computerized registry of cancer survivors and a "Positive Mental Attitude Walk."The 10 a.m. ceremony for the Richard and Annette Bloch Cancer Survivors Park will feature its largest benefactor, Richard A. Bloch, co-founder of H&R Block and a cancer survivor.

NEWLIN TOWNSHIP, N.C. - About 20 miles west of Chapel Hill (where old oaks and poplars have been cut down for a parking lot) and a few miles south of Interstate 85 (where commuters zoom to Raleigh or Greensboro) is an endangered land of tall corn and lush pastures with cows and longhorn cattle.Quakers came here 200 years ago, when they ran out of land near Philadelphia, and their descendants still farm along roads that bear ancestors' names.That was when the names of places still stood for something, like Snow Camp, a town where General Cornwallis spent the winter, and Silk Hope, where some fellow in the 1700s imported worms, hoping they would make silk from all his mulberry trees.

ORLANDO, Fla. - The hired hands are milling around the barn in the gray light of dawn, getting ready for another day in the saddle, when Jennings Overstreet pulls up. In this rustic corner of Osceola County, Fla., miles from the rush-hour masses swarming to the north, morning is unfolding to an almost-forgotten rhythm amid the smells of sweet hay, leather and damp earth. A dog barks at the stir of activity; the horses snort and shuffle impatiently. Down on Lake Tohopekaliga, in front of the house Overstreet's father built in 1935 for $800, a flock of sandhill cranes feeds noisily.

We reached out and touched Thomas Jefferson ... at least my wife and I felt we did when we entered his world on a recent driving tour of Virginia's Jefferson country. We discovered that the state where this extraordinary American was born, raised and passed his last years is so rich in structures and landscapes associated with him that he is a presence here still. Seeing his world in three dimensions made him seem even more real to us than did the commendable Ken Burns' television treatment of his life.

A recent Sunday afternoon at the normally sleepy Loch Raven reservoir played out like an episode of "Cops. " At its eastern point, a young man and woman who had been hiking made their way down to the infamous Loch Raven cliffs and jumped into the calm, beckoning waters to cool off. They were blissfully unaware that across the water, reservoir ranger Simon Phillips was watching, just waiting for the 'splash' to spring into action. "We have swimmers in the water," Phillips radioed a fellow ranger and jetted off to cite the swimmers $200 each.

An in-law of the du Pont multimillionaires was charged yesterday with conspiring to murder his stepson's girlfriend, who was beaten and strangled in Las Vegas by hit men -- possibly in an attempt to shut her out of the family's vast fortune, federal agents said.Christopher L. Moseley, 58, was arrested by FBI agents at the lavish Fieldstone Golf Club in Greenville, Del., just hours before the club's inaugural dinner.Moseley's wife, Lisa Dean Moseley, is a direct descendant of the founder of the DuPont Co. and owns the 183 acres of land the course is built on.Moseley is charged in connection with the murder of Patricia Margello, whose body was found Aug. 5 in the air-conditioning vent of a Las Vegas motel.

Washington They were in love, madly in love, when they met -- two teen-agers from a lower middle class suburb in Prince Georges County. By age 16, she was pregnant with a child no one wanted them to have.Six years later, after several break-ups and reconciliations, after he'd become famous and wealthy as a boxer and she'd dropped out of school to support her son, he asked her, on the eve of his first championship fight, to marry him.The public saw it as a storybook romance: ". . . the stuff of dreams, of fantasies little girls fall asleep with," a newspaper columnist wrote after their huge church wedding in 1980.

Homes, offices and shops would sprout around Baltimore's Penn Station under a preliminary plan developed for Amtrak for the midtown site. The national passenger railroad tapped Beatty Development, the Baltimore-based developer responsible for Harbor East and Harbor Point, late last year to create a master plan and lead the redevelopment of about seven acres of underused land around the century-old train station. Beatty Development's vision calls for the construction of up to 1.5 million square feet of new residences and commercial space at a cost of about $500 million over the next decade.

President Barack Obama set aside 480 acres on the Eastern Shore on Monday as a national monument to honor Harriet Tubman - a victory for advocates who have long sought to memorialize the abolitionist's role in leading dozens of slaves to freedom. Relying on a century-old federal law, Obama expanded a smaller park the state recently broke ground on in Dorchester County, where Tubman was born into slavery in 1822. The new designation places the rural land in the National Park Service's control, protecting it from development.

Because of an editing error, an article in Thursday's Howard County section of The Sun stated incorrectly that the Howard County Planning Board recommended rezoning 5.8 acres of land at the southwest corner of Routes 144 and 97 in Cooksville for commercial use. In fact, the board unanimously voted to oppose the rezoning sought by the Cooksville Limited Partnership.The Sun regrets the error.