FREDERICK -- For 50 years, Charles Cole has been running his pawnshop in downtown Frederick, but lately something has been missing -- and it's not customers. Rarely has business been so bustling.

"Back in the '50s, when we were just starting out, I knew about everybody in Frederick," says Cole, 78. "Now I can go to any number of places and not see any people I recognize -- not one -- and not talk to anybody. This was a very small town back then. Now we got what they call those dual highways."

Those dual highways are jammed with people making a beeline for Frederick County.

County officials, intent on luring businesses and residents to the foothills of the Catoctin Mountains, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. That has put stress on the schools, the roads and some of the old-timers who live here -- and more people are pouring in every day.

By 2000, according to the Maryland Office of Planning, Frederick will be the fastest-growing metropolitan county in the state, surpassing Howard County.

Already, a county that once creaked is booming like never before its 250-year history.

And already, the arrival of yuppies in the city of Frederick has led, in the eyes of many natives, to the spectacle of prissy antique shops and restaurants with tablecloths next to the moldy thrift stores and the shot-and-a-pickled-egg pubs that have always been good enough for themselves, locally known -- only sometimes affectionately -- as "Frednecks."

It has led to longtime residents such as Cole, who spent only the war years of the 1940s outside of Frederick, feeling a bit displaced.

The boom will not slacken anytime soon. Projections call for steady growth in the county for at least the next two decades, with another 100,000 residents or so arriving by 2020.

"It certainly isn't the same Frederick County that I knew growing up," says John "Linnie" Thompson Jr., 44, the mayor of Walkersville, a white-steepled town seven miles northeast of Frederick that has more than doubled in population since 1980.

"You could go through three traffic lights to get all through Frederick County," recalls Thompson, a native of the area. "Now, you go through three lights just to get out of Walkersville."

All of the change comes from numbers like these: The population Frederick County has increased by more than 60 percent since 1980, to about 190,000 people as of July. More than 35,000 people have arrived just in the 1990s.

The city of Frederick, the county seat, has had its population increase 73 percent since 1980.

Maryland, by comparison, has grown by about 20 percent since 1980.

Whether the growth is a good thing is at the center of this fall's county elections. The current Board of County Commissioners ran on a pro-growth platform four years ago, then turned an $800,000 debt into a $10 million surplus, about half of that money from new and expanded businesses.

"We are unabashedly pro-business and make no apologies for it," says Mark L. Hoke, president of the county commissioners. "We haven't made a promise we couldn't keep, and we haven't given away a damn thing."

Frederick County's unintended success in attracting residents made it necessary to attract business, to help pay for the roads, sewers and classrooms needed to meet residential growth. Though agriculture employs more people than any other business segment, county planners are pushing technology -- trying to capitalize on Fort Detrick, a center of biological warfare research, by encouraging spinoff companies from the minds there.

In many ways, though, Frederick's success has come from the failings of urban Maryland and Washington, D.C.

Workers in Baltimore and Washington -- fed up with high crime, poor schools and the cost of living in the state's urban counties -- are running for the hills. In Frederick County, they find peaceful streets and some of the state's best schools. They find acre-large lots with three-bedroom, two-bath houses surrounded by some of Maryland's most gorgeous scenery -- and they pay about 25 percent less than they would in Montgomery County.

"We've had no regrets about moving here," says Dave Delulio, 44, who briefly considered settling in Bethesda and Arlington, Va., before moving from California to Frederick with his wife, Siobhan O'Sullivan, and their two school-age children.

"What did we have to lose?" he asks. "The crime rate? The cost of living?"

'Worth a little road time'

Since its creation in 1748, sprawling Frederick County has been fiercely independent. Frederick settlers were among the first to openly rebel against England, protesting the Stamp Act by hanging in effigy the tax collector. When the Revolutionary War raged, Frederick supplied the cannonballs.

Until recently, Frederick remained stoically its own place, disconnected from its big-brother neighbors, a mountain town that seemed as geographically distant from Baltimore and Washington as it was culturally removed.

"That impression has been there, but it's never been true. It's still not true, and people are realizing that," says Brian Duncan, the county's executive director for economic development. "We have good schools, we have a low crime rate, a strong arts community, and it's easy to get to Baltimore and Washington and Montgomery. For a lot of people, it's worth a little road time."

More than 32,000 Frederick County residents -- 40 percent of all working residents -- work elsewhere, more than half of them in Montgomery County.

For those commuters, the drive can be time-consuming, but it is appealing at the end of the workday to return to Frederick from Montgomery, where the crime rate, after adjusting for population differences, is 25 percent higher. In raw numbers, crimes in Frederick declined 6 percent last year, despite the growth.

And despite that growth, Frederick County -- aside from the city of Frederick -- remains a region of lush foothills spotted with tidy burgs. Big grocery stores have begun to move in, but are kept on the outskirts of the towns. "Downtown" in these places consists of a general store, a hobby shop, a church and perhaps a diner. Main streets are named Main Street.

"I think people move here because they enjoy the country, and they like that you can know everybody," says Tom Harrigan, 24, a clerk at the whitewashed Ross General Store in Myersville, a town of only 953 people -- but double the size of just seven years ago.

"We just hope everybody doesn't ruin it here," Harrigan says, pointing down Main Street. "There's 100 new houses going up right down there."

Matt Winn is one of the new arrivals. When he was transferred this summer to his company's Montgomery County office from Fort Wayne, Ind., he and his wife, Valerie, had little trouble deciding that they and their three boys would live in Middletown, a snoozy little town of 2,300 people in western Frederick County.

"We're close enough to the big cities, but you're in the country almost out here," says Winn, 41, a vice president for TMP Worldwide, a sales and marketing firm. "The only problem is the commute to work, but it's worth it to come back here. There's more of a community atmosphere here."

Challenge of school crowding

Frederick has been scrambling lately to build a county capable of holding all the people who are already here, and the roads have been among the chief projects.

"We used to just have the mountains and good schools and all the history here," says Kim Hamrick, 34, whose husband was born in Thurmont and settled his family there. "Now we got this traffic, too."

The county has made progress. It has already secured more than $26 million in federal highway funds to build an interchange connecting Interstate 70 and Interstate 270. When it is completed, traffic flows could improve dramatically.

Construction will also begin next year on a Maryland Rail Commuter (MARC) service link to Frederick, connecting it to the Washington area, reducing traffic on I-270.

School crowding, though, has presented another challenge.

The Frederick County Public School District has been constructing schools as fast as money will allow, but the students are arriving more quickly than they can be handled.

Over the past 10 years, about 1,000 new students have joined the system each year. To accommodate them, the district has built 12 new schools and nine major additions to existing schools.

That has helped the problem but is a long way from solving it. Twenty-one schools in the system are crowded, some of them severely. One elementary school, designed to hold 586 students, has more than 750 children.

The county will spend $185 million to build, by 2004, a new middle school as well as an elementary school addition, a middle school addition and three high school additions. And the district will still be crowded.

"We've reached the conclusion that with this kind of growth, we're never going to be under capacity at all the schools," says Ray Barnes, executive director for facilities for Frederick schools. "Our goal is to take as many schools as possible off the overcrowded list. That's the best we can do."

The school district, despite crowding, consistently ranks in the top five in Maryland, and three county schools received national awards for excellence last year.

"The growth is fine to a point, and we're getting a grip on the schools, even though we have a long way to go," says Cathy Delauter, 32, a PTA president and a Frederick County native who lives in Thurmont with her three children and her husband, Michael. "I think what everybody's after is controlled growth."

But Duncan, the economic development official, says controlled growth is difficult. For now, the aim is to pave the way for growth by preparing the infrastructure for new businesses.

"If you want to sustain life, you have to encourage growth," he says. "Planned growth is not exactly easy to do in a capitalist society."

Hoke, the county commissioner and a retired Army colonel, is more blunt: "Anybody who doesn't like it," he says, "can get the hell out."

So Frederick County will continue to grow. New residents say the split was once severe between the new arrivals, who talk on their cellular telephones while pushing their children on park swings, and the natives, who see the changes coming all too fast.

"There are still some disagreements, but it's much better," says Susan Duesbery, 30, who moved about 2 1/2 years ago to Frederick from Toronto. "It's really come down to, how fast do you want to grow?"

"In terms of raising a family here, it's great," she says as she plays with her two young children at a Frederick city park. "I'd like maybe a funkier downtown, maybe some more happening, but I don't think we can get that without getting some of the things we don't want.

"A lot of people who moved here don't want Frederick to turn into the places they left."

Pub Date: 9/28/98