Arthur Abbott's "ol' swimmin' hole" was the pond that powered the grinding stones at the old Trenton grist mill. "I learned to swim when they told me to jump in or get thrown in," recalls the 79-year-old retired plumber.
But no one has swum or skated there for decades; the water level declined, the three-story granite mill went silent in 1946, and then a storm burst the dam.
Back when Trenton Mill was grinding as much as 40 tons of feed and flour a month, Piney Run was a wide, free-flowing stream that provided irrigation for wild hay when it flooded fields below the rugged mill.
Today, except after a storm, it's just a trickle, bubbling over the ruins of the stone dam upstream from the mill.
Trenton -- the name was changed from Zoucksville in 1868 -- is another of those 19th-century enclaves that dot Central Maryland. Once thriving rural commercial centers, they cling to life now as peaceful country villages.
Picturesque frame and stone houses and farm outbuildings stud narrow Trenton Road, which plunges downhill from Black Rock Road to the valley floor where the mill stands. Broad fields for crops and grazing -- redolent with new-spread manure -- stretch behind the houses.
When the Western Maryland Railway pushed west in the 1850s, it bypassed Trenton. That, according to old-timers, allowed the tiny village to remain "just a little bit different," a distinction it still claims today.
Unlike Uniontown, where virtually the entire Carroll County town is a restoration project; or New Market, near Frederick, which has been turned into a strip of antiques shops; or Ashland, in Cockeysville, where part of the former ironworks village has become part of a new luxury development, Trenton retains its character as a secluded country village.
And that's just how Daniel Colhoun Jr., a farmer and civil engineer who arrived in 1962, likes it.
"Yuppies want to look at the farms, but they don't want to hear them or smell them, like a Grandma Moses picture," Mr. Colhoun said. "Streetlights, sidewalks and policemen, all that crap; we don't want it."
Mr. Abbott, who was born in Trenton and worked on surrounding farms and as a plumber, recalling his youth, said, "We used to play cowboys and Indians in the woods and swim in the mill pond in the summer. We went to school here, a two-room schoolhouse up to the fourth grade, then we went to Fowblesburg."
However much the old-timers want to hold back the clock, change is inevitable, Mr. Abbott acknowledged: "It's starting to weed out now as the old families are dying off."
Most of Trenton's homes were built during the last century, and many are still occupied by members of the old families: Abbotts, Armacosts, Cullisons, Merrymans, Martins. It's that kind of town.
In the 1950s, John W. Armacost wrote a history of Trenton for his great-granddaughter, now Brenda Armacost Craft, as her grade-school project. Mr. Armacost, who died in 1964 at age 87, recalled from his own experience and what he heard from his parents and grandparents that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Trenton was a flourishing village of 25 houses and 70 inhabitants.
It had a mill, a smithy and a wheelwright, along with a shoemaker, tailor, hotel and law office.
The general store "carried groceries, dry goods, shoes, boots, hardware and harnesses for the horses. The hotel had a tavern downstairs and private rooms upstairs. In the days of the stagecoach, the hotel was a regular stopping place," he wrote.
Mrs. Craft, now 47, said, "We weren't like other places. We weren't just neighbors; we were family, grandparents, parents and kids in the same house. We're the fifth generation in this house," she said of her century-old fieldstone home.
When she was a child, Mrs. Craft said, Trenton was much changed from her great-grandfather's day, "but it was still a wonderful place to grow up."
She swam and skated at the mill pond, too, "until the dam burst, sometime in the 1950s." Older farmers plowed with horses and cut hay and picked corn by hand into the 1950s, she said. "We were a little bit backward. But it was a quiet place, no trouble, and it's still a pretty town."
The oldest surviving dwelling is the miller's house, built about 1836 when the town was called Zoucksville, after the founding family. Newly resplendent in a complete restoration, including a barn-red tin roof above its granite walls, the house is for sale.
Across the road stands the rugged-looking mill, built in 1862 to replace an earlier mill of about 1839 but now facing an uncertain fate.
A. Murray Fisher Jr., 50, bought the mill in the 1970s and restored it to working order. But since he moved to Virginia several years ago to farm an estate, the mill has been dormant. "It's in good shape and ready to go. There are three sets of stones," said Mr. Fisher, a descendant of the original millwright. "I was interested in saving the mill and the machinery, but we haven't done much with it since we left."
Recently, he said, he has begun to think about selling but wants someone who would renew the mill as the village focal point.
Dominating the village is the steeple of Christ Lutheran Church, the Zouck family's most enduring contribution to the village. Perched on its hilltop, the white clapboard church has been a Trenton landmark since the Zoucks had it built in 1859, and it has an active congregation.
Pastor Dan Nascembeni said, "Trenton is like living in Baltimore a hundred years ago. It's a nice little country parish. The people are independent and feisty."
The area around Trenton is changing dramatically, the minister said: "Farms are being sold and used as hobby farms instead of working farms. The Merrymans have the only working farm; the others have horses. It's good hunt country."
Inevitably, a gulf exists between newcomers and old-timers in any small town where families are related and set in their ways.
Denise Townsend, 36, said her family became the "first outsiders" when they moved from Towson into an old farmhouse on Trenton Road in 1977. "People were very kind to us, very nice, but I didn't know then how clannish they were, how linked," she said. "Trenton is not quite so rural as it was. It was very isolated before, not so much now."
The current generation of newcomers is different, said T. Leo Merryman, 69, whose family is seventh-generation Trentonian, the oldest still in the village.
For example, the church remains at the center of village life, he said, "but the new people are not churchgoers. They say they can worship their God by riding horseback on a Sunday morning."
The village itself is protected from intense development pressure by a buffer zone of 1,853 acres of fields under agricultural preservation restrictions, the largest contiguous block in Baltimore County.
"We have the last big family farm, 150 acres in corn, soybeans and hay," Mr. Merryman said. He added that he hopes his grandsons will carry on the family tradition.
The Merrymans' house used to be the saddler's shop. Two doors away, their son, John, lives in the family home, the former "Merryman's Hotel," a large white building with a long veranda with Victorian gingerbread decoration.
"Drummers [traveling salesmen] used to put up here," Mr. Merryman said. "They stabled their horses across the road, where that green patch of grass is now. The blacksmith shop used to be there, too."
Another community center in the old days was Martin's Store, which also housed the lodge hall of the Independent Order of Mechanics.
Built just after the Civil War, it was long ago converted to a private home, where former Baltimorean Charlotte Virginia Garnett farms herbs and specialty vegetables.
"I always wanted to live in the country," Ms. Garnett said.
Among the newcomers who have set up a horse farm for fox-hunting is Gemmell "Gem" Bruner, who calls Trenton "a dream come true."
She and her husband, Don, an engineer at AAI Corp., restored an old mill house in Freeland, in northern Baltimore County, but "because everything grew up around us," they started looking again. A friend brought them to Trenton.
They "fell in love" with an old house but had to wait for two years before the elderly widow who lived there would sell, Mrs. Bruner said.
Although the Bruners have modernized the interior, county historian John W. McGrain says the two-story stone house -- known as the Moses Cullison House -- has remained essentially unaltered since it was built.
The property appears on an 1850 map of Baltimore County and the initials M.C. and a date, of which only 18-- is clear, are carved in the outside chimney stone.