RADAR 11 - H ²0
Publication Date: June, 2004
Jones's Creek

The Jones Falls Valley has been formed by the creek cutting through this rock formation for at least a million years. --interview with Jim Reger, Maryland Geological Survey

Jones's Creek and the niche it has carved in the planet for millennia is a symbol of the fact that everything is always moving and changing and yet, in human time, seems constant and familiar. When I have lived in other landscapes I have missed the Valley's rocks, hills, woods, and most of all, the stream. The walls of "the Valley" contain a community centuries in its making; I am connected to it by way of family and childhood imprint. This is what having a   "sense of place" means to me.

The headwaters of Jones Falls are the natural springs of Green Springs and Chattolanee, which combine to form the creek that flows south for about ten miles to the natural deep-water harbor at its mouth. The falls is not a particular waterfall, but refers to the fall-line the stream crosses between coastal plain and piedmont. It spills about 350 feet in its run and has ridges reaching as high as 250 feet in places. "Jones Falls," "the Falls,"   "Jones's Creek,"   "the stream"--all of these names were used commonly when I was a boy to describe something that seemed important. "Jones Falls" did not describe an expressway then. Its floods were greatly respected and real events. We played and fished in it. Where we lived was often described by proximity to the stream. People from Hampden, Woodberry or Mt. Washington might just as easily say that they lived "down by London Fog," "up at Maryland Bolt & Nut," or near other factories occupying one of the stream's old mills. People and places were either "up the Valley" or down it.

Native Americans lived in agricultural villages in this part of Maryland for a thousand years before the Europeans arrived. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the rich lands, mineral deposits and waterpower along the creek's banks spawned a natural resource community devoted to farming, mining and milling. Regional culture is often symbolized by its oldest buildings. The Valley's architecture, designed to survive frequent flooding, is stepped to the slopes and utilizes bank plans; it works with the hilly topography. Many early structures are made of stone cut from the valley's walls, like the brownish sparkling "Setters quartzite" and the distinctive blue-green "copper rock" from the Bare Hills. It is regional architecture and of this place.

The importance of this stream to Baltimore lies in the commonly told history:

  By 1800 Baltimore had become the world's largest exporter of grist products made from the grain grown in the fertile valleys above it and ground by the numerous water-driven mills along the streams. By 1833 there were at least 17 such mills along Jones Falls. During the boom period following the Civil War the cotton mills of the Jones Falls Valley led the nation in duck [fabric] production until World War I.

The Valley is a Southern place: many here are descendents of rural folk from Maryland, the Virginias, and the Carolinas who came to work in the cotton mills. They speak in a slightly different tongue from newer residents and sometimes have a different approach to things.

The Jones Falls Valley, including its people, is a truly ancient place, but in the twenty-first century it is experiencing significant changes under our stewardship. It is described these days in terms of real-estate values, development potential and recreational opportunities. The farms I remember are gone. The delicious springs of the headwaters have become undrinkable, and the slopes are filling with generic buildings that could be from anywhere, often built flatland-style on bulldozed plateaus. Introducing a new scale, they break into the earlier architecture and fragment its cohesiveness. In many places now, the sun does not set by touching the hilltops as it always did, but disappears early behind the developments along the ridgetops. The anxiety produced by such changes is about more than aesthetics; it is about disconnection , loss of a spiritual asset.

There is one reassuring constant, heard in the ancient dripping-ticking of Timepassing along Jones's Creek. Over and over, it replays the imprint : my atoms, my psyche, just a speck--yet connected to a place over a million years in the sculpting.

Wayne Nield