Restoration Project

She's never missed an oyster dredging season in almost 40 years, but for this winter her future seemed uncertain.With parasitic diseases wiping out the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay, it looked as if the skipjack Martha Lewis was doomed to follow the fate of others in her fleet -- lying on the muddy banks of a cove, slowly rotting away.Instead, she's being restored to her original grandeur when she was known as one of the best working boats on the bay.And when she is returned to the water next month, the Martha Lewis will not only work the bay, trying to do her part catching a few bushels of oysters, but she'll also be a goodwill ambassador for the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum.

SKINNERS NECK -- Ned Gerber and Richard Pritzlaff are surveying a muddy corner of a just-harvested cornfield, marking out what will become a 40-acre tract of tidal wetlands and woods, restored with wild millet, tickseed sunflowers, Indian grass, hackberry, persimmon and other native plants and trees that once flourished on the rural Kent County peninsula near Rock Hall.If all goes according to plan, the 190-acre property on Skinners Neck -- known since the 1830s as Spencer Farm -- will be preserved through an unusual partnership that includes the Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage, the Maryland Environmental Trust and four private investors who are bent on using free-market forces and for-profit motivation to achieve conservation goals.

An ambitious $8 billion plan to restore the Florida Everglades to ecological health over the next several decades is coming under fire from experts who say the proposed measures will actually do little in the way of restoration.The main reason, these critics say, is that the federal-state plan does not go far enough in re-establishing the natural flow of shallow water that once moved in an unbroken sheet down the South Florida peninsula, creating a habitat for one of the world's largest assemblages of marsh wildlife.

Officials at Fort Meade are working on a restoration project they hope will get them out of trouble with state and federal authorities and wrapping up plans to transfer Tipton Airport to Anne Arundel County for good.In an agreement with the Maryland Department of the Environment that was announced last week, the post's Environmental Management Office will reshape tributaries and place small water-loving plants along the banks of Franklin Branch to reduce runoff into that waterway and into Burba Lake, post officials said.

The County Commissioners are accepting a state grant to shore up the banks of Longwell Run. But that doesn't mean they are reconsidering their decision to return other state and federal grants that would have completed four years of work on the Westminster stream.The $20,000 grant approved by the state Board of Public Works last week will go toward reinforcing the banks of the 1.7-mile stream with rocks and plants, part of a long-term project to reverse the effects of years of degradation.

THERE WAS A TIME when London Town rivaled nearby Annapolis in buildings and population. Both were important colonial ports for tobacco exports. But when a new tobacco inspection law was passed in 1747, London Town for some reason lost its port status, while Annapolis did not.Gradually, the community on the banks of the South River disappeared so completely that only one building, a big and outstanding red-brick English Georgian, remained standing. After a variety of uses, including 137 years as an almshouse, London Town Publik House became Anne Arundel County's first restoration project in 1970.

TULCEA, Romania -- Marius Condac, a wildlife warden in the immense delta of the Danube River, remembers when a sudden frenzy rippled through this quiet, waterlogged world, one where change is usually measured by the rising and falling of the seasonal floods, by the reed harvest or the nesting of pelicans.It was the mid-1980s, and Romania's Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, a man known for ambitious and destructive schemes, had decreed that large sections of the delta be transformed into grain fields.

The oldest railroad station in America will soon receive a face lift.Plans to restore the Ellicott City B&O Railroad Station Museum -- at Maryland Avenue and Main Street in the historic district -- to the way it looked when it opened in 1831 were approved recently by the Howard County Historic District Commission.The commission governs development and architectural standards in the county's historic districts in Ellicott City and Elkridge.If the restoration project -- which could begin in May -- receives approval from the Maryland Historic Trust, the museum could receive up to $410,000 in federal, state and private funds, enough to pay for the project, said Ed Williams, the museum's director.

Baltimore County Historical Trust will award grants of $250 to $1,000 next week to seven local preservation projects, including restoration of a mid-18th-century manse in Towson and duplicating copies of a history of Perry Hall for distribution to local libraries and schools.The awards reception and ceremony will be at 5 p.m. Oct. 15 at the Orangery at the Hampton Mansion in Towson.This year's grants include $250 to Babcock Presbyterian Church in Towson -- for a mason to repair the manse roof and stone walls to start the restoration project -- and $750 to Perry Hall Improvement Association Inc. for a history of the 221-year-old community.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has decided to endorse a huge project to protect the Everglades by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to take farmland out of production and restore a more natural flow of fresh water across Florida's swampy southern half, according to senior administration officials.Environmentalists have been urging such a project for years over intense opposition from the region's sugar cane growers.It would be one of the biggest ecological restoration efforts ever undertaken, the administration officials said.

Gov. Martin O'Malley, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon and children from Maree Farring Elementary School kicked off Earth Week by breaking ground yesterday on an environmental education center that will help anchor a $153 million waterfront restoration project near Baltimore's Brooklyn and Curtis Bay communities. The cleanup of 22 acres of shoreline along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River - one of the most contaminated areas in the city's harbor - has led to recovery by the Maryland Port Administration of 30,000 tons of trash, roughly the same weight as 4,000 buses, including timber, concrete, pollutant-containing electrical equipment, more than two dozen shipwrecks and nearly 200,000 gallons of petroleum-tainted water.

The solid wood beams supporting the new pale green metal roof over the late Nancy Smith's 19th-century Blandair mansion in east Columbia are better than new. "White oak will just last forever, if it's old timber," said Chris McGuigan, the National Park Service's project manager on the $1.6 million restoration project - the first phase of a $14 million project to convert the overgrown farm into a park. That's why the Park Service used wood from old barns - white oak and pine that came from old-growth trees.

THE IDEA WAS TO PEEL AWAY LAYERS of history, to strip off non-original details and get back to the essence of the building envisioned by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Going back in time, architecturally, was the overriding concept behind the $32 million restoration and modernization of Baltimore's Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was built starting in 1806 and dedicated in 1821. It was the reason the 1940s-era stained-glass windows were removed. It was the impetus for re-creating 24 skylights in the dome -- to "restore the light" in the cathedral as Latrobe meant for it to be seen.

Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith and other officials plan to celebrate the completion of a stream restoration project for Minebank Run -- a Gunpowder Falls tributary that leads to the Chesapeake Bay -- on Tuesday morning at Cromwell Valley Park. The Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management completed the $3.1 million project hoping to restore the banks of the local tributary, which has a history of major erosion and flooding problems, according to officials.

Two federal agencies are considering a mammoth wetlands restoration project that would use mud dredged from Chesapeake Bay shipping channels to undo 60 years of erosion at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge - a task that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers say they would like to rebuild 8,000 acres of marsh at the 24,000-acre refuge on the Eastern Shore. The proposal is included in a 20-year management plan that outlines how the corps would handle the more than 3 million cubic tons of dredge spoils that must be removed each year to keep the port of Baltimore operating.

My great, secret pleasure this summer has been gardening. Well, not exactly gardening, but as befits a television critic, watching gardens being made on a television show - specifically, one called Ground Force on BBC America. The premise is simple: A team of three gardening experts is called in by family, friends or neighbors to secretly transform someone's sorry back yard or lot into a paradise in 48 hours. As the BBC promotional material puts it: "Turfing, trimming, planting, paving and decking, they turn garden chaos into havens of tranquillity, style and calm."

The Baltimore County Public Library plans to reopen its Randallstown branch April 29, nearly a year after the building was damaged by fire. "It's going to be a better, safer building than it was before the disaster," says James H. Fish, the county library system's director. The building, at 8604 Liberty Road, has been closed since May 5 when a fire caused extensive structural, smoke and water damage. The $1.2 million restoration project involved five contractors, who repaired a portion of the roof and electrical, climate control, computer and telephone systems.

ABERDEEN - The busload of visitors from China scrambled around the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum pointing wildly, snapping pictures and marveling at the collection of memorabilia plucked from the battlefields of the 20th century. They posed in front of the gleaming French reconnaissance vehicle from World War II, restored with the care of a Renaissance painting. Others went outside for a photo in front of "Anzio Annie," a gargantuan railroad artillery piece that fired a round 30 miles, captured from the Germans.

SKINNERS NECK -- Ned Gerber and Richard Pritzlaff are surveying a muddy corner of a just-harvested cornfield, marking out what will become a 40-acre tract of tidal wetlands and woods, restored with wild millet, tickseed sunflowers, Indian grass, hackberry, persimmon and other native plants and trees that once flourished on the rural Kent County peninsula near Rock Hall.If all goes according to plan, the 190-acre property on Skinners Neck -- known since the 1830s as Spencer Farm -- will be preserved through an unusual partnership that includes the Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage, the Maryland Environmental Trust and four private investors who are bent on using free-market forces and for-profit motivation to achieve conservation goals.

Officials at Fort Meade are working on a restoration project they hope will get them out of trouble with state and federal authorities and wrapping up plans to transfer Tipton Airport to Anne Arundel County for good.In an agreement with the Maryland Department of the Environment that was announced last week, the post's Environmental Management Office will reshape tributaries and place small water-loving plants along the banks of Franklin Branch to reduce runoff into that waterway and into Burba Lake, post officials said.