Maryland officials rejoiced last month at news that this isolated Eastern Shore junction would be the future home of a major new State Department security center.

Tiny Ruthsburg, little-changed since the 1700s, is the federal government's preferred site for a state-of-the art campus where diplomatic security agents will train for the age of international terrorism. The 2,000-acre project offers years of construction work and hundreds of permanent, good-paying jobs in Queen Anne's County, which has suffered from rising unemployment and a conviction that its needs often get ignored in the power centers of Washington and Annapolis.

Now, though, local officials who were instrumental in generating support for the facility among Maryland's elected leaders have had a change of heart, complicating efforts to put it here. Members of the county commission have reversed course and joined an eclectic group of opponents who want the Obama administration to spend its construction money - from the federal stimulus package - some place else.

Echoing the alarmist claims of citizen critics, four of the five commissioners announced Dec. 22 that they could no longer support the project, in part because it would be used for .50-caliber machine-gun training, 40 mm grenade launching and helicopter operations. The State Department says none of those activities are planned for the center.

"A lot of it comes down to: Can you believe what the federal government tells you," maintains Queen Anne's Commissioner Eric Wargotz, who initially worked to attract the federal facility but now opposes it. Wargotz, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, says he "absolutely" objects to $70 million in stimulus funds going to the facility in his county, which will cost more than $100 million to build.

The politicians "heard 'jobs, jobs, jobs,' and at that point, they stopped thinking. They never looked under the hood," said Jim Campbell, 71, a former partner at a high-powered Washington law firm who retired to a waterfront neighborhood on an arm of the Chesapeake Bay, about 10 miles from the proposed site.

He is among those aggressively opposing the project, a mix as diverse and piquant as the ingredients of Maryland crab soup: tea party protesters, Republican and Democratic politicians, local conservationists, property rights activists and Shore inhabitants deeply suspicious of the federal government's intentions and nervous about changes to their way of life.

They warn that the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center - with its driving tracks for teaching evasive maneuvers, mock urban center for live-fire training and explosives pit for detonating 3-pound bombs - would be a "little Aberdeen." Some are convinced the installation could eventually swallow more of the surrounding area, a roughly 30-square-mile swath of countryside with relatively few residents and little commercial development.

At the heart of the local opposition are a number of concerns, both practical and ideological: hostility to the stimulus law, worries about declining property values on nearby farms, possible environmental damage and noise from munitions blasts used to teach agents about roadside bombs.

The facility, to be built on privately owned grain fields across from Tuckahoe State Park, enjoys considerable support from the local Chamber of Commerce and other county and state economic development interests. Its appeal is also evident among local residents eager to find work closer to home than places such as Annapolis, 30 miles away on the other end of the Bay Bridge.

Earlier this month, when a State Department official announced some of the 400 permanent positions that would be filled at the center - jobs in buildings and grounds, food service, vehicle maintenance, janitorial and security services, firing range operations, emergency medical and fire protection, among others - applause rippled through an audience of 600 at a public hearing at the county high school in Centreville.

Rachel Carter Goss, 40, who comes from Centreville and now lives in tony Chestertown, stood and told the crowd she couldn't believe that people were actually serious about turning away badly needed employment.

"I have friends all over the area who are in construction and landscaping who don't have work. They are handing us jobs," she said, to a mix of catcalls and applause. "Maybe people can then buy the farmland that they wanted or buy the boat that they wanted."

As for fears that noise from the training center would disrupt the serenity of the area: "I wake up every morning to gunfire from hunters. I hear Aberdeen. If I'm near the water, I hear power boats," said Goss, a family friend of one of the landowners of the proposed site. "Why is this any different? Are we going to start putting silencers on our hunting guns?"

"This is a county where all people do is hunt. The county is always a-banging and a-banging," said Marion Andrew, a 73-year-old Queen Anne's native. He dismissed opponents as "cocktail party dilettantes" who "have got their place in the sun" and want to stop future development.

Many on the politically conservative Eastern Shore say they fully endorse the facility's national-security mission.

"I just don't want it in my backyard," said Paul Harting, 51, an unemployed welder and truck mechanic who had spent 10 years planning his escape from Prince George's County when he and his wife, Denise, stumbled onto a house in Ruthsburg four years ago.

Federal officials say they searched a 150-mile radius from Washington, including existing military facilities, and that no location matched Ruthsburg's combination of easily developable land and ready access to highways, motels and restaurants.

Members of the Maryland congressional delegation and Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley embraced the project at the county's request and hailed the site's selection as a "win" for the state. Now, they've stepped back and are taking a cautious approach to the project in an election year.

Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a candidate for re-election this fall, calls the administration's recent handling of the issue an "unmitigated disaster." In a blistering letter to the acting head of the General Services Administration, the federal government's real-estate arm, she criticized the agency's "dismissive attitude" toward local residents and its "disastrous lack of preparation" for meeting the public. In response, the agency agreed last week to extend the public hearing process by about a month.

An initial public session, on Jan. 5, was characterized by emotional outbursts and hostile questions reminiscent of last August's contentious health-care forums. At one point, uniformed law enforcement officers advanced on a man who, in frustration, shouted a profanity after the repeated refusal of federal officials to answer an audience question about whether the decision to place the sprawling facility in Ruthsburg was already "a done deal."

"(W)hat might have been viewed as a tremendous economic boost to the Eastern Shore of Maryland is now perceived as a threat to the community's safety and well-being," wrote Mikulski, who a month earlier described the site selection as "good news for three reasons: jobs, jobs and more jobs for Maryland."

Local critics have relentlessly raised alarms about the facility, online and by word of mouth, in one of the state's least populous counties. They contend that more foreigners than Americans would be trained there, that the Shore would become a terrorist target, that ammunition would strike neighboring homes and that citizens of Centreville, less than 20 minutes away, would be spied on by agents-in-training.

Jeffrey Culver, director of the Diplomatic Security Service, whose responsibilities include protecting all U.S. embassies, said there was "no chance" flying bullets would escape the facility. Also, he said, the center will "primarily" train U.S. government employees, along with a " limited number of police and security professionals from countries that are our partner nations in fighting terror."

A government document, circulated by critics, said that real-world surveillance training, designed to help U.S. diplomats recognize when they are being followed, would be carried out within 20 minutes of the site. But the State Department says that nearby Centreville, with fewer than 2,000 people, is too small.

"These exercises take place in urban areas," said a State Department spokesman. "Local residents will not be affected. Exercises will take place at a considerable distance away" from Ruthsburg, a collection of a dozen houses and one vacant store.

Sveinn Storm, the most prominent opponent, has long agitated against the establishment on the Eastern Shore and in the state capital, where he owns a City Dock ice cream parlor. At the first public hearing, he merrily coached local residents on the best way to pressure the visiting feds and handed out a long list of critical questions.

Storm also distributed hand-painted protest signs, with messages such as "When Your Bullets Hit Our Houses, Who Do We Call?" and "The Stimulus was to HELP not HURT people."

He has mined thousands of pages of public documents related to the project, uploading some to his Web site, Citizens for Greater Centreville. Storm, 54, takes issue with friends who think the federal facility will be built in Ruthsburg whether the county wants it or not.

"I tell people," he said with a laugh, "that the only causes worth fighting for are the lost ones."

Lately, the "lost cause" seems to have gained ground, with politicians from the governor on down taking another look. But within five or six months, the Ruthsburg project could well be on its way to gaining final approval in Washington.

In theory, the deal between the federal government and property owners of the proposed site is a relatively straightforward real estate transaction. No action is required by the local politicians who have come under fire from both sides.

"That's the other thing," Queen Anne's County Commission President Gene Ransom III said in a plaintive voice. "We have no power or say at all."

An earlier version of this story described Queen Anne's County as the state's least populous. Kent County is the state's least populous county. The Sun regrets the error.