Elkridge Furnace Inn

On May 5, 1861, U.S. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler occupied Relay, Maryland, with the 8th New York and 6th Massachusetts Infantry Regiments and Cook's Boston Battery of light artillery. Their mission was to prevent Confederate sympathizers from sabotaging the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Thomas Viaduct. Butler considered the viaduct the most important and vulnerable target for saboteurs in central Maryland because it was the only rail link to Washington, D.C. from the north. He stationed his men across the viaduct and positioned two guns on the commanding heights of ELkridge behind the Claremont mansion. Several other U.S. Army regiments and batteries later occupied the fortifications on both sides of the river, at Relay in Baltimore County and here on the heights of Elkridge at Camp Essex in Howard County. They remained in the area until the end of the war.During the Civil War, passions ran high here as in other parts of the nation. Afterward, Judge George Dobbin donated land for the Lawyer's Hill Assembly Hall on Elkridge Heights. Judge Dobbin envisioned the hall, built about 1870, as a "neighborhood parlor" where the divisions caused by the war might be healed. The hall soon became the favored location for social and cultural activities that were previously held in homes on the hill before the war. The Elkridge Furnace Inn here was first established as a tavern in 1744. In 1810, the Ellicott brothers purchased the furnace and taver, attaching an elegant dwelling to the inn for their families.