The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore Since 1660.

The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore since 1660. By Eric L. Holcomb. Center Books on American Places. (Santa Fe, N.Mex., and Staunton, Va.: Center for American Places, 2005. Pp. xxii, 265. $39.95, ISBN 1-930066-29-5.)

Road, River, and 01' Boy Politics: A Texas County's Path from Farm to Supersuburb. By Linda Scarbrough. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 404. $39.95, ISBN 0-87611-202-5.)

The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore since 1660 is about human geography. It traces the impact that humans have had over time on the natural and built environments of the northeast quadrant of Baltimore County, Maryland. The narrative tracks the area from a wilderness inhabited by the fearsome Susquehannocks to a region into which early land speculators and headright-grant recipients made deep inroads. At the end of the colonial period there was a complicated pattern of large plantations that survived on agriculture supplemented in some instances by cooking local iron ore. After 1780 prosperous Baltimore merchants and farmers overran the northeast area. They created a borderland of beautiful parks owned by the merchants and crossroads communities around which clustered small farms. The merchants hoped to "frame ... beauty into their lives" on the "middle ground between wilderness and urbanity" (pp. 15, 35). The farmers wanted merely to take advantage of Baltimore as a nearby market for their produce. Eric L. Holcomb depicts the area from 1852 to 1898 as a "thriving borderland" populated not only by small truck farmers but also by many middle-class residents who enjoyed rural and village life and the amenities of nearby Baltimore as it crept closer and closer to their doorways (p. 59).

Holcomb also follows the perceptual evolution of an area first viewed as a romantic, picturesque landscape to its emergence as the structural embodiment of middle-class dreams of home ownership in row house, cottage, bungalow, and l-house neighborhoods of modern Baltimore. He identifies many prominent families, shows pictures of their houses, and gives details of their descendants' fortunes. This could have easily become a tiresome genealogical exercise and reduced the history of the region to a serial examination of the census returns. Holcomb, however, stays with his central theme of how wilderness settlers, gentlemen farmers, a bustling collection of tradesmen, craftsmen, and middle-class people, and, finally, successive residents of housing tracts altered, reshaped, and imagined northeast Baltimore and its environment.

In this respect Holcomb avoids the amateur historian's propensity to assemble all available pictures, add some comments, and offer this as the history of a locality. Instead, Holcomb gives a sound history of the architecture of northeast Baltimore County, and he expertly ties house, business, and church forms to the social status, ambitions, and financial capacities of the various waves of people who populated the area and imposed through their buildings their version of what the northeast corner meant as a place. He underscores a central element of human geography: a place is more than a grid location. It is a "center of meaning constructed by experience" (Yi-Fu Tuan, "Place: An Experiential Perspective," Geographical Review, 65 [April 1975], 152). Holcomb illustrates that admirably through the built environment, residential aspirations and expectations, and the confusion of modern suburbia, interstate highways, and dense populations that turned a wilderness, a park, a small village into a dystopia.

Road, River, and 01' Boy Politics is also about a place, Williamson County, Texas, which lies north of Austin (Travis County). Linda Scarbrough investigates the transformation of this thinly populated, agricultural county into a supersuburb inhabited by the engineers and scientists of high-tech firms such as Dell Computers. Scarbrough devotes Part 1 of her lively, well-documented book to water, and Part 2 to 1-35, the interstate highway that passes north-to-south through Georgetown on the Balcones Escarpment, roughly at the center of the county.

Part 1 describes how local "good ol' 'country boys'" such as Owen W. Sherrill and Henry Fox conducted a "brillant political and public relations campaign" to delay for thirty years the construction of two dams, one west of Georgetown on the north fork of the San Gabriel River and a second dam at Laneport (pp. 4, 69). The Corps of Engineers had proposed the dams in 1948 for flood control, despite the fact that the Laneport dam would displace more than two hundred family farms in the Black Waxy, the fertile soil in the eastern part of the county. By 1965 the Corps decided not to build the flood and water-storage dams that Sherrill had wanted on the north and south forks of the San Gabriel but instead opted to construct the originally proposed San Gabriel and Laneport (Granger Dam) dams. The battle was over. In 1978, thirty years after the fight had started, officials finally dedicated the Granger Dam.

In the same manner Scarbrough takes note of the political infighting and scheming that determined the final path of 1-35 through the county and the surprising outcome that made tiny Round Rock the economic powerhouse in the area. What followed was spectacular population growth, the arrival of high-tech industries, poverty in the eastern county, and a maze of highways, off ramps, traffic deadlock, and land speculation that changed a peaceful rural county into one of America's fastest growing supersuburbs.

Both books focus on individual players in the growth and absorption of areas on the margins of large towns almost to the point of prosopography, but the two volumes manage to stick to their central themes. Scarbrough's book is a scholarly monograph that rests on an enormous amount of research in primary sources and personal interviews that undergird its observations and generalizations. It explains the interaction of local politics with government bureaucracies and national politicians such as Lyndon Baines Johnson. It shows how individuals blessed with perseverance, "native political talent," and political friends could manipulate public policy and change the future, often for the common good, to satisfy local needs (p. 360).

JAMES B. MCSWAIN

Tuskegee University