The Ellicott Family and Their Gift to America

They were called ‘dreamers and half-hearted fools’ at the time, but yet they changed the course of American history.

A bird's eye view of Ellicotts Mills, Maryland (later called Ellicott city) surrounded by small images of various buildings and factories in the town, 1854, by E. Sachse & Co. Library of Congress. Public Domain

One day in 1772, three brothers stepped onto the bank of the Patapsco River in what is now Howard County, Maryland. They had come from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, floating their heavy milling machinery down the Chesapeake Bay and then up the Patapsco to Elkridge Landing. Navigating past the great coastal plantations, they pushed upstream to the unchartered wilderness.

As the brothers hacked a six-mile track up steep, rocky terrain along the river, the large planters dismissed them as “dreamers and half-hearted fools.” Joseph, John, and Andrew Ellicott might have been dreamers, but they were not fools—and it must be said that anyone who staked a claim on undeveloped wilderness in the 18th century should never be dismissed as half-hearted.

These men had a vision, and they came prepared to work. They began clearing the land and built an innovative sawmill. With limitless water power, the brothers saw opportunity where others might have seen only obstacles. They were members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and they were settling in an area that was predominantly inhabited by Catholics—the colony of Maryland.

In 1632, King Charles I granted the colony’s charter to George Calvert. Calvert’s son Cecilius brought in persecuted Catholics and created a place of refuge for them. Though the Church of England was the official church in the colonies, religious freedom was the law of the land, tenuously codified in the 1649 Toleration Act. Quakers too had come to America to escape persecution.

“A Landing at the Chesapeake: Leonard Calvert at St Mary's, 1634” after Henry Sandham from “The Century Book of Famous Americans,” circa 1896. Internet Archive. Public Domain

The Ellicotts saw this new land as fertile for the flourishing of their faith, but also for the flourishing of diverse crops. By 1774, they established a grain mill and ground flour from their own wheat fields. They pioneered sustainable agriculture, enriching their lands with limestone that they also milled. Though they didn’t know it at the time, their use of fertilizer would prove revolutionary to local agriculture.

Their little village of Ellicott’s Mills became a self-sufficient community with blacksmiths, wood workers, quarriers of the local granite for building, and limestone for agriculture.

An Interesting Alliance

(L) Ellicott's upper mills built by Joseph Ellicott in 1775 and (R) Hehester Mill built by George Ellicott in 1831. Public Domain

As the Ellicotts began planting wheat and other grains—rotating away from the then-predominant reliance on tobacco as a cash crop—their milling operation grew. It was only a matter of time until the neighbors caught on to their vision.

One of the the Ellicotts’ neighbors was one of America’s founders, Charles Carroll III of Carrollton—a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a descendant of Charles Carroll I (1661–1720). The first Carroll started the family’s plantation in Howard County. The southern plantation primarily produced tobacco and was worked by slaves. This type of agriculture not only depleted the human spirit, but the land as well. In coastal areas, the remains of such plantations already lay desolate. Their owners had moved inland to find fresh soil.

"Charles Carroll of Carrollton," circa 1763, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Oil on canvas; 30 1/4 inches by 25 1/4 inches. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn. Public Domain

But at Ellicott’s Mills, a new way of life took shape. Carroll III became an early convert to new methods of agriculture. He planted grains and rotated his crops. While working with the Ellicotts, Carroll introduced far more sustainable agriculture as the brothers taught him the value of crop rotation and diversification. Many prominent Maryland families had already made plans to move on to Kentucky or Tennessee, but the science-guided restoration of their farms, as demonstrated by the Ellicotts at Doughoregan Manor, allowed them to stay.

A community intertwined in mutual dependence grew in Howard County around these new ideas. Carroll’s patronage created an incubator for creative enterprise as Ellicott’s Mills diversified. The brothers not only milled flour and limestone, but also built and operated a sawmill and an iron rolling mill. Joseph Scott’s “Geographical Description of the States of Maryland and Delaware,” published in 1807, detailed the economic diversity: “Several kinds of mechanical trades are carried on here, such as coopers, blacksmiths, tanners, shoemakers, saddlers (saddle makers).”

Today Ellicott’s Mills has become Ellicott City. Its solid granite buildings give testimony to how it was built. The National Road is followed by modern US 40 and Interstate 70—still a major route to the west. But Carroll’s once vast estate is but a fraction of its former size.

Tongue Row's historic area in Ellicott City, Maryland, showcases stone buildings from the early 1840s, originally built for mill workers. Bob Kirchman

Just 925 acres carved from the original estate are now operated by the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station. Researchers at the station carry out work on forage production, alfalfa and corn variety trials, small grains and soybean varietal improvement, pest management, nutrient management, pasture management, composting, and a host of other subjects—carrying on the spirit of Charles Carroll and the Ellicotts’ interest in their nation’s agriculture.

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