Friday Field Trip: Mt. Pleasant Farm

As I drive around my new home in Howard County, Maryland, I have been trying to make sense of the place. It's a sometimes uneasy mix of rural and suburban.

My daily drive to my son's school takes me along the busy county roads that shuttle commuters to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Alongside them the fields of sweet corn are spent, glowing golden in the sunny but cool early fall.

I take a winding side road to be sure to drive past an old stone farmhouse nestled in a green hollow. The long way around takes me past a stucco farmhouse built onto an original log cabin. The farm is perched atop a hill only a few feet away from the busy junction of two farm roads-turned highways.

However, between the surviving farms, small developments of McMansions increasingly dominate the landscape. Round a corner on the shady country lane, and the road is cleared of trees, opening up to reveal a sign advertising estates starting in the $750,000s. Though the loss of farmland to development slowed across Maryland between 2002 and 2007, Howard County itself lost more than 8,200 acres of agricultural land, a 22 percent decline.

This morning I decided to take a closer look at Howard County's rich agricultural heritage. I hiked the paths of the 300-year-old Mt. Pleasant Farm, which the Howard County Conservancy, the county's non-profit land trust, currently runs as an environmental education center.

I was drawn immediately to the Montjoy Barn, built in the late 1700s and moved to its current site for preservation. It is the oldest barn in Howard County and the only existing example of an English wheat barn in the county. Its horizontal siding sets it apart from the vertical board and batten barns on the rest of the farm.

Just past the barn a mowed trail winds through a meadow of goldenrod, thistle, and milkweed. Purple chicory flowers bloom low alongside the path.

Each dip and bend in the path reveals a new vista of native plants and grasses. At the bottom of the hill, a small stream lined with mica bounds the farm; a group of Conservancy volunteers closely monitors its water quality.

Another trail winds along the back of the farm, past a grassy meadow that must once have been corn fields. From there the noise of the cars on the road recedes, and the housing developments across the highway seem a world away. I notice the slender plastic tubes that protect the hardwood saplings from deer. In a few decades these young trees will have reforested some of the cleared areas. As those trees grow and leaf out, the pressure of population growth will no doubt continue to put more demands on the land, challenging residents to preserve at least as much as they take away.