A History of St. Charles, Maryland - Portrait of a New Town

CHAPTER ONE

It followed, therefore, that development pressures on Charles County would come, and come they did, spearheaded in no small measure by that tract of 8,000 acres of land in the vicinity immediately south of Waldorf and north of La Plata, ultimately known as St. Charles, at one time early on as Linda City …

Nineteen fifty-eight was a watershed year for Charles County. It marked the end of three centuries of the county’s life, and the residents celebrated their tercentenary with a special pageant at Chapel Point. It was a tremendous production, according to one eyewitness observer, with “redcoats and boats landing and skyrockets going off, and Indians running up and down, and everyone had half a snootful.” The only problem was that since so many people were in the pageant, “nobody really showed up to watch it because everybody in the county was participating.”

While Charles County celebrated its colorful past, Arthur Desser was drawing up plans that would shape the county’s future. Desser and Garfield, Inc., headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, had previously developed residential communities (complete with schools, recreational facilities, and shopping centers) in Florida, Arizona, and California, and intended to build a similar community on the Charles County tract it had acquired from Congressman Boykin in April of that year. Desser planned to name the development Linda City, in honor of his very young wife, a former chorus girl.

As members of a rural society, Charles County residents have at times displayed intensely xenophobic attitudes, and Desser appeared to be precisely the sort of outsider whom they especially distrusted. A bald, short, portly man who generally eschewed any strenuous physical exercise, Desser wanted complete freedom to develop his land as he deemed best; and he did not gladly suffer interference from any who might obstruct his plans. Things went awry right from the start. One of Desser’s first acts in Charles County was to erect a large billboard beside Route 301, depicting Linda in an evening gown in hopes of enticing prospective home- buyers. That was too much even for the Waldorf/La Plata corridor, and the resulting local criticism finally convinced Desser to remove Linda’s likeness and dedicate the billboard to the tercentenary instead.

After establishing a second-story office above a dime store in Waldorf, Desser proceeded to open negotiations with county officials for the approvals and permits necessary to begin construction. In those years much of the county’s business was actually transacted by a handful of insiders within the friendly confines of the Stumble Inn, a bar and grill near the courthouse in La Plata. (This was the sort of provincial procedure that had led some critics to observe that Charles County was 25 miles and 100 light-years away from Washington.) Hoping to gain an entree into the closed circle of local affairs, Desser retained an influential elderly county resident named Asa Groves to deal with the officials in La Plata.

Despite Grove’s best efforts, though, relations between Desser and county officials deteriorated rapidly. It was Desser’s misfortune to enter Charles County at a time when some of its residents were beginning to realize that the growing population pressure from the Washington metropolitan area might soon disturb their cherished way of life. It was also his misfortune to hold a tract that lacked sewer and water facilities in an area that had no comprehensive water or sewer system. Desser’s need for county approvals on santitation systems for his com-munity made his project a hostage—both to local sentiment that hoped to prevent growth altogether and to the officials who realized that growth was coming and hoped to obtain water and sewer facilities with no cost to the county, at the developer’s expense.

Whenever Charles County officials debated the relative merits of growth in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, their reference point was always their neighbor county to the north. Prince George’s County had experienced explosive—and largely unplanned—growth in the years after World War Two, with a depressingly unattractive example of urban sprawl as the result. In effect, Prince George’s officials allowed developers to build virtually anything they wanted, anywhere they wanted. Beyond the aesthetic and environmental problems posed by this permissiveness, the disproportionate construction of apartment buildings in relation to singlefamily dwellings badly skewed the tax base in Prince George’s County.

Reed McDonagh, then one of the leaders of Charles County’s Democratic party (and later president of the county commissioners), was one of those who recognized the Prince George’s experience as “an object lesson” for its neighbor to the south. One of the mistakes of Prince George’s, McDonagh saw, lay in its failure to formulate and implement a zoning ordinance that encompassed the entire county. “Therefore,” said McDonaugh, “the more remote agricultural areas of Prince George’s County to the south were not subjected to controls or zoning, and became a dumping ground for those things which were thought to be undesirable in those areas that were controlled.” Charles County, with its relatively low land prices, clearly appeared to be next in line for the burgeoning Washington metropolitan population, and if Charles County officials failed to learn from the mistakes of Prince George’s, McDonagh pointed out, “then we weren’t keeping store.”

So, to establish controls over the development pressures represented by Desser and Garfield’s Linda City, Charles County established its first planning commission in 1958—the year Desser bought the Boykin tract. Almost simultaneously, the county created its first sanitary commission, including within its jurisdiction all of the land then owned by Desser and Garfield.

There was still considerable resistance in Charles County, however, to establishing any sort of countywide land-use-control measure. There were residents, recalled McDonagh, “in the more remote areas of the county who saw zoning as an interference with their private lives and the use of their property.” Even with the weight of the newly formed Charles County Chamber of Commerce behind the measure, the only reason the county commissioners (Charles County’s three- member executive body) were able to pass even so much as an interim partial zoning ordinance was that it provided another bulwark against Desser—and anyone else threatening the area’s tranquility. It was not until the early 1960’s that Charles County adopted a full-scale zoning ordinance, and even then the subsequent revolt by the voters cost more than one commissioner his position.

Armed with their new powers, the county officials simply refused to issue the permits Desser needed to begin construction. Desser had cleared one section of land—about 50 acres, enough for 200 houses and lots—stripping it down to the bare ground, with little care taken to landscape it. He had brought in Harlan Bartholomew from St. Louis to assist with the land-planning effort, and retained Whitman, Requardt and Associates of Baltimore for both land planning and engineering design. Desser also brought in former New York State Senator Raeburn to help push the project through the county’s newly developed bureaucratic red tape.

That was a mistake. Raeburn, a cigar-smoking, fast-talking New York politico, clearly irritated Charles County officials. His threats to take legal action against the county merely fortified their resolve not to give Desser what he wanted. Less than a year after he had purchased the Boykin tract, Desser and the county government had reached a stalemate. Relations between the two sides deteriorated into out- and-out antagonism. In a fit of pique, Desser purchased the Charles County Leaf, one of the local newspapers, and turned it over to Earle Palmer Brown (his public relations consultant) and Reed McDonagh to operate as a pro-Linda City publication under the editorial leadership of a local journalist named Tom Hayden. (The area’s other two newspapers, the Times-Crescent and the Independent, generally took an anti-Desser stance.)

Since the major issue was always the construction of sewer and water systems, the sanitary commission’s meetings served as the primary battleground for conflicts between Desser’s forces (Raeburn, Groves, Bartholomew, Lykes Boykin, and representatives of Whitman Requardt) and Charles County officialdom. Since the members of the sanitary commission received no compensation for their time, the meetings often began late in the evening (after everyone had finished work) and lasted until about one or two o’clock the next morning.

To obtain its own design and cost estimate for a sewer and water system, the commission retained the services of Johnson and Williams, a Washington engineering firm. When Johnson and Williams submitted plans that called for sewers 30 to 40 feet deep, the commission decided that it was certainly not going to pick up the tab for such a costly operation. It then became apparent that if Linda City were ever to become a reality, Desser would have to build the sewer system himself and donate it to the county. This sort of procedure, which bore a striking resemblance to blackmail on the part of a local government, was not...