Family Farm

The Howard County Ethics Commission has concluded that County Councilman Charles C. Feaga did not violate the county's conflict of interest laws when he voted on a zoning amendment earlier this year that helped two developers who have a contract to buy his family farm.In an advisory opinion released yesterday, the five-member panel stated that Mr. Feaga never received "direct financial impact" from his Jan. 2 vote."It's the only conclusion they could have made," Mr. Feaga said yesterday, praising the ethics commission for what he said was an in-depth investigation.

For years, fourth-grade teacher Edna Mae Wasmer has invited her classes once a year or so out to her family farm in Union Mills.This time, she extended the invitation to all 559 children and 50 staff members at William Winchester Elementary School in Westminster for an afternoon at a spot by the creek where her family has always gathered for picnics."

The chairman of the Howard County Ethics Commission said yesterday that he will review council member Charles C. Feaga's vote last month on a zoning amendment in Fulton -- a vote that helped two developers who had just bought an option to buy Mr. Feaga's family farm in Ellicott City.The commission's chairman, Russell Gledhill, said he will bring the case up for discussion at the five-member panel's meeting on Feb. 20. He said no investigation is under way but that he has asked the Office of Law to review the county's conflict-of-interest laws.

For the third time in two years, Howard County's school board has zeroed in on a new plan for handling wastewater to allow a 400-seat addition at Glenelg High School - and Mae Musgrove's farm appears to be the new bull's-eye. The board voted unanimously Thursday night to abandon two previous plans to build wastewater treatment plants and now wants to buy land nearby to expand the school's failed septic field. If no willing sellers are found, the county is prepared to go to condemnation, board members said.

Imagine living in Carroll County 100 years ago - no electricity, no cars or tractors, few indoor bathrooms, no grocery stores with ready-to-cook meats and vegetables, no refrigerators, no computers, no TV. That lifestyle is detailed in a new book by George Grier. "I started noticing as I got older that the older people who remember something about farming back a hundred years ago were sort of fading out of the picture, and that we were going to lose a lot of what we know about what went on at the old family farm," said Grier, 82. So he talked to farmers around the state and searched archives, museums, libraries and former farm families for photos of a long-gone way of life.

Ten years ago, burgeoning development in Carroll and Baltimore counties made the Hampstead-based Lippy brothers wonder if they could continue farming thousands of acres of grain and vegetables in Central Maryland. "But we're farming even more acres now than we were then," Keith Lippy, 36, son of one of the four founding brothers, told the more than 50 business people, farmers and retirees at yesterday's monthly Agribusiness Breakfast at Baugher's Restaurant in Westminster. Lippy Brothers Inc., now the largest grain and vegetable farm in the Baltimore metropolitan area, farms 9,700 acres in Carroll and Baltimore counties and in southern Pennsylvania.

Florence Elizabeth Strohmer, a retired nurse who helped run a family farm in Woodstock, died of lung disease Monday at Northwest Hospital Center in Randallstown. She was 77. Florence Vesper was born in Essex and spent most of her childhood on her family's produce farm. She was a 1946 graduate of Kenwood High School and then received a nursing degree from the old Church Home and Hospital. She worked as a registered nurse at Johns Hopkins and St.

Next year, bulldozers are to knock down the 82-year-old pale green farmhouse overlooking Rogers Avenue just east of U.S. 40 in Ellicott City and slice 15 feet off the crest of the hill on which it sits. Rising there will be four-story apartment buildings surrounding a landscaped courtyard and pond that will obliterate the last remnant of an earlier, rural way of life. The apartments will house 152 upscale tenants age 55 or older. It is an old story in post-World War II Howard County, where a mostly rural population of 36,172 people in 1960 had exploded by last year to 272,452 people living in mostly suburban surroundings, according to census figures.

Allison Dulin, Hereford SPORT TENNIS GIRLS STATS -- In her second season of tennis, Dulin was 8-2 as part of the Bulls' mixed doubles team. Also an all-state and All-Metro field hockey midfielder, she helped the Bulls to the state semifinals last fall. The senior plans to play hockey in the fall at Davidson College. SIDELINES -- Dulin, a National Honor Society member with a 4.77 weighted grade point average, completed an internship this spring with Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred magazine.