Like many longtime residents, Mayor Gerald R. Johnson has proudly watched Mount Airy grow into a bustling suburb, while other old farm communities have withered and died.

But many among the wave of newcomers believe growth has outstripped the southwest Carroll County community's ability to serve residents and has put Mount Airy in danger of becoming another faceless suburb.

These conflicting views dominated the recent town election, which saw Johnson face his closest race in 12 years, and nine-term incumbent Councilman R. Delaine Hobbs lose his seat to a first-time candidate.

And now residents, old and new, are left sorting through the growth issues that made the election so heated.

"One thing is for sure, and that is that we all have to live together," Johnson said. "And I hope, at least, that we all have the best interests of the town at heart."

Many signs indicate that the former farm community, which straddles the border of Carroll and Frederick counties, has become another dot in the growing ring of sprawl around Washington.

In the 1960s, Mount Airy was a town of about 600 with a few downtown businesses and farmland stretching to the horizon. By the 1980s, it had a public sewer system, a Pizza Hut and a nascent core of Washington commuters.

Today, the town has a population over 6,000, a Wal-Mart, an Ames, four supermarkets and virtually every major fast-food chain, from Burger King to Arby's to Taco Bell. Its population has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, local schools are packed and subdivisions of new $300,000 houses stretch across what once was farmland.

Town leaders estimate that at least 75 percent of residents leave Mount Airy every day for work, causing traffic jams on the route south to Montgomery County. Plans are in place for a bus line connecting Mount Airy to Washington-area public transportation, although funding remains in state-budget limbo.

This shift has created political and social tensions between longtime residents - the children of farmers and local merchants who are closely tied to home - and newcomers - urban professionals who are more willing to spend their days in cars and are more demanding of government.

"A lot of people who have moved here recently feel they've been lied to in being told about the small-town atmosphere," said Monica Trexler, a community activist who moved to town four years ago. "They feel that the town has let growth take over and let the old atmosphere get away."

'Helped kill' ambience

Veteran politicians seem baffled by the wave of dissatisfaction from residents who have crowded in during the past five years but who now want growth to stop.

"I always just want to tell them that if we had stopped growth five years ago, they wouldn't be here," the mayor said of the newcomers. "The logic does not seem to mesh with reality. If they're so concerned about growth, they shouldn't move here because they're contributing to the concern."

Although the town is not as urbanized as Gaithersburg or Rockville, it has fallen victim to a trend that many population researchers say is inevitable: As long as highly paid exurbanites are willing to endure long commutes, they will continue pushing farther into the countryside in search of idyllic small-town settings, said Charles M. Christian, a professor of social geography at the University of Maryland.

"The irony is that as soon as the urbanites discover that small-town ideal they've been seeking, it disappears, and they're the ones who have helped kill it," Christian said. "The strip malls and the subdivisions follow them out, and pretty soon, what was a small, quiet town is another sprawling suburb."

With these cosmetic changes has come changes in social behavior, too.

Johnson, who moved to town 40 years ago, remembers a place where people never passed on the street without a wave or a kind word, a place where so few people moved in and out that you had to know someone who was about to die to get a house.

That description is common among longtime residents.

Hobbs, 67, said that as a young adult in the 1950s, he rarely saw an unfamiliar face on Main Street, where the denizens of surrounding farms gathered to buy groceries, sell milk, get their hair cut and chat.

Such intimacy is long gone, but neither man spends much time lamenting its passing. When asked what would have happened if Mount Airy hadn't embraced growth, Johnson spoke of towns near his southern Pennsylvania birthplace, where stores are now boarded and most downtown buildings are abandoned.

"If we hadn't grown, we would have died," said Hobbs, a third-generation resident.

That's why, as a young councilman, he pushed to build a public sewer system that would allow significant commercial and residential growth.

Hobbs and Johnson never expected the town to remain undiscovered. "When you live in a place as nice as this and as well-located, well, we all knew that people would find it eventually," Johnson said.

With its proximity to Interstate 70, low crime rates, affordable new houses and solid schools, the town became a popular option for Washington-area workers. Then it became too popular, many newer residents say.

Newcomers don't dispute that the town had to grow, but they believe the zeal to annex land and approve subdivisions has created an untenable situation. They worry about lengthening rush-hour commutes - now about 45 minutes to Rockville and 90 to downtown Washington - and about their children, who take classes in trailers and spend 30 minutes in the lunch line every day.

"I don't want Mount Airy to look like or feel like Gaithersburg," said write-in mayoral candidate James S. Holt, voicing what became a popular catch phrase for the slow-growth movement.

Trexler, like many who have fought for new schools and new leadership, doesn't expect growth to stop. "I understand why everyone wants to live here, because I wanted to live here."

But, she said, the pace of growth has overtaken government services and made Mount Airy a less pleasant place to live.

Efforts to close gaps

Beyond the growth issues, Trexler and others feel they've been treated rudely by longtime leaders.

Susan Cole remembers Hobbs calling her and other women "sweetheart" and "darling" during a town meeting about school crowding. She said he used the terms to put certain speakers in their places, and it bothered her.

Such tensions aside, some say the emotion surrounding school, water and traffic issues has caused critics to overstate the town's long-range problems.

Mount Airy will probably never become another Gaithersburg, said Councilman Frank Johnson, who specializes in planning. Even if the town annexes all the land it can, the population would be hard-pressed to exceed 12,000, he said. Mount Airy, he argues, has already seen its "big pop" from quiet village to suburban center.

Rockville and Gaithersburg have many apartment complexes and condominiums, but Mount Airy's zoning doesn't allow such high-density housing, and without it, the population will remain limited, town leaders say.

Both sides say disagreements about how to grow shouldn't overshadow the fact that everyone loves the town. If residents can get to know each other better, then the town need not lose its intimate nature, the theory goes. Many speak of efforts to close gaps between the old and new. But when residents are asked to specify how that will happen, a long pause usually follows.

"I think it will just occur," Trexler said. "You have more people on the council now who've just moved here recently, and we all have to live together. So I think the ideas expressed by the old and new will blend eventually, I really do."