It is a land tamed by black hands. Generations ago, the men of Loreley yanked stumps from the earth with pick and shovel, with rope and a horse -- breaking their backs to turn a mosquito-infested tract of clay into one of Baltimore County's little-known but enduring African-American communities.

"They were just determined, determined people," said Joseph Williams, 60, who remembers watching his grandfather clear land in the northeastern Baltimore County community. "They made sure that we got property, that we got land when we grew up."

In those days, unwritten government policies forced African-Americans to improve their communities themselves.

Over the past decade, efforts have been aimed at improving the black communities inside the Beltway, such as controlling chronic flooding in Halethorpe or upgrading housing stock in east Towson.

But officials say the county's far-flung black settlements -- like Loreley, which is finally getting a sewer line -- also shouldn't be ignored.

"There are still enclaves of people who need assistance and need help," said Arnold F. "Pat" Keller, the county's planning director. "If they've been historically overlooked, we need to get on the stick."

Baltimore County's rural black communities are not easy to find.

Some are scattered collections of houses, often on dead-end roads, that would go unnoticed if not for small clues, such as a sign for an African Methodist Episcopal church. Many were founded by descendants of slaves who worked in metal foundries or in the fields.

Loreley is an isolated neighborhood of about 15 bungalows, ranch houses and mobile homes in a clearing reachable from Pulaski Highway by a single public road. The community is next to a county landfill, bordered by Gunpowder Falls and its state park.

Residents, most of them members of an extended family, say their forefathers worked on a large farm in the area. Old-timers recall that electricity didn't come to Loreley until the 1940s. The one road -- then a narrow band of dirt -- wasn't paved until the 1950s.

A decade ago, residents drank from wells -- and worried that the water was tainted by the landfill.

"I had heard somebody say that all they needed to do is put a little bleach in their wells and they should be able to get along just fine with the existing water," recalled Lenwood Johnson, the county government's liaison to black communities. "But you don't hear that kind of talk now."

With Williams leading the way, the residents persuaded the county to lay pipes to carry public water.

The dense soil in their community can no longer support their septic systems. Williams remains uncertain that blacks get their fair share of tax dollars, but he has learned to work within the government's system. The sewer lines are the latest result.

"Sometimes I think back to some of the people who are gone," Williams said. "They said, 'You'll never get water back here.' I wonder what they'd say now?"

Changing attitudes

To see how attitudes have changed in Baltimore County, consider: Barely 40 years ago, there was talk of addressing a "Negro problem" in the county seat by relocating nearly 700 black residents of east Towson to an area near what is now the Carver Center for Arts and Technology.

A steep hill to the south and west, York Road to the east and the soon-to-be-built Beltway to the north would enclose the neighborhood, "thus minimizing the amount of contact that this area's residents would have with those of the surrounding neighborhoods," an academic at the State Teacher's College in Towson (now Towson University) wrote in his 1953 doctoral dissertation.

In his paper, the author acknowledged assistance he'd received from the director of the county planning commission.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as "white flight" from Baltimore City fueled the suburban boom, elected county officials pursued road projects and zoning changes that disrupted black communities.

Projects for the black community were unpopular, said former county executive Theodore G. Venetoulis, who was elected in 1974.

"You could not talk about urban renewal in Baltimore County because it had an urban connotation," he said. His solution was to call the process "revitalization."

Longtime county officials say Venetoulis' efforts to improve east Towson with new sidewalks, curbs and gutters helped forge a new attitude toward black enclaves.

By 1979, the county's master plan, for the first time, noted substandard housing conditions in black communities. A decade later, a new master plan stated an intention to help preserve the county's 40 historic black settlements.

A county survey found black community leaders were concerned about deteriorating housing, contaminated wells, and a lack of public improvements such as sidewalks and storm drains.

Some said their communities were threatened by "encroachment" from new, expensive housing that caused assessments and property taxes to rise.

Not surprisingly, black residents with memories of the years of neglect and hostility are wary of government officials, said Johnson, the county's liaison to the African-American communities. This, he said, is especially true in the rural areas.

"People in the rural part of the county, they need to be taking more of my time and services," Johnson said. "If people are willing to come together, submit the necessary petitions, attend the necessary meetings, they've got the government's ear."

Those who have done so have received help, he said. A small black community in Hereford received a name for its private road, with street numbers for their homes, after paramedics on an emergency call went to the wrong house.

Rural homeowners have received deferred-interest loans to improve houses -- some of which did not have indoor bathroom facilities until recently.

Some remote black communities in northern Baltimore County are in areas that have attracted luxury housing developments in recent years. The combination can lead to conflict and resentment.

'It's like we're invading them'

Alex Edmonds, who like his father and grandfather operates a trucking business at his Cuba Road home near Hunt Valley, had to defend parking his truck on his property in a zoning dispute brought by newcomers.

"I call them 'smuggy whites,' " he said. "If they didn't like the truck, they shouldn't have bought the land. It's like we're invading them, and they came into our neighborhood."

In Edmonds' zoning case, Johnson submitted papers to show that Cuba Road is home to a long-standing black community. Edmonds was allowed to keep his truck but was ordered to clean up his property.

Last month Johnson and John McGrain, Baltimore County's historian, drove to Asbury United Methodist Church on Philadelphia Road, not far from Loreley, to help black residents save a 19th-century building known as the Union of Brothers and Sisters Hall.

The hall's sliver of land offers little parking and the building has no indoor plumbing.

But residents want to continue meeting in the small, two-story structure, which was a school for local blacks.

"I do not come here with a pocketful of money to save your building, but we will work with you," Johnson told the gathering of about a dozen black residents. Later, he said he would explore whether money could be found to buy adjoining property for more parking.

Efforts to save the building -- like the new sewer line planned for Loreley -- are signs of how much things have changed.

"Sure took a long time, though," said Williams, the Loreley community leader. "What do they want you to do? Beg all the time."

Ask Williams why he and others stay in Loreley, he replies: "This is family land. I tell my children what my father told me: Whatever you do, never get rid of your land."

Pub Date: 4/13/99