A look around.

Serving Softly at Page's

I have vowed to stop at Page's Ice Cream on every trip to Cumberland, regardless of season or dietary concerns (although it's closed in the dead of winter). It has hand-dipped ice cream and lots of frozen coffees but all I need is that smooth, creamy soft-serve. And you don't need to get a sundae; just a cup of the vanilla will do. Page's is located on the north end of Centre Street and its distinctive purple and yellow paint job is visible from our deck if the trees aren't too leafy.

Of course, the Queen City Creamery's not too bad, either.

The Story That Started It All

We read this story before first visiting Cumberland in 2004. Bill Heavey is a great outdoors writer.

Going to Extremes

To find the heart of Maryland and Virginia, you need to start by exploring the edges. Maryland's Panhandle, Asking for Change

By Bill Heavey

The Washington Post

Sunday, June 7, 1998

I'd been bouncing down the little dirt track that parallels Ginseng Run near the town of McHenry in westernmost Maryland for what seemed like hours when a wild turkey traipsed across the road. I slammed on the brakes, and so did the turkey. I backed up for a better look. So did the turkey, bobbing across the road it had just traversed. And suddenly there we were, a Honda Civic and America's largest game bird, 20 feet apart and sharing a single telepathic thought: I've never seen one this close before.

It was half an hour later that I finally found someone to ask for directions. The guy was mowing the grass by his mobile home. He was a big, red-faced guy in an American flag rugby shirt. Another flag flew from the porch. He had rigged a second mailbox next to his real one, on a pole 15 feet high. The sign on it read "Air Mail."
"I'm totally lost," I said. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, blew his nose mightily and tucked the cloth away. "Most folks are," he observed at last. "Least you know it."

If the folks in Baltimore who promote Maryland tourism have their say, the remote, nether reaches of Maryland will not stay lost much longer. A concerted effort by state tourism officials, given a good goosing by Maryland House of Delegates Speaker Casper R. Taylor, who represents Allegany County, has resulted in a number of events that may conspire to put Maryland's long-neglected panhandle on the map. There's an $87 million plan to rewater the terminus of the C & O Canal and create a park in downtown Cumberland.

There's the plan to continue propping up the area's historic rail tour, which runs from Cumberland to Frostburg, and feeds patrons to a little olde restaurant that the state just bought. But the crowning glory is Rocky Gap Lodge and Golf Resort, a $54 million venture designed to attract something the panhandle has long ignored: high-income business and leisure travelers. The place is basically a glorified conference center located inside a state park, hard by the heretofore entirely unknown waters of Lake Habeeb. While the location happens to be a two-hour drive from D.C., Baltimore and Pittsburgh, convention-goers alone won't be enough to make the resort pay off. For Rocky Gap to succeed, it has to attract to Maryland's remote panhandle people who don't usually venture west of White Flint. Which is why they're putting in one of the country's few Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses open to the public. It's a 7,100-yard beauty with enough underground water pipes to supply a small city.

Whether these plans to turn Western Maryland into a key vacation area work out or not, there is plenty of pretty country, historic clutter and nice walking out there right now. And you won't need golf spikes and a platinum credit card to enjoy them. At Swallow Falls State Park, you step out of your car into a grove of 300-year-old hemlock trees, then walk a quarter-mile to 63-foot-high Muddy Creek Falls, the state's highest. There's world-class whitewater rafting on the upper part of the Youghiogheny River, and tamer water for tubing on the lower part. And don't overlook the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad just because tax dollars subsidize its operation. It's a bargain at $16 for a three-hour, 32-mile round-trip down a mile-long gorge, over an iron truss bridge and through the 914-foot Brush Tunnel. PBS found it worthy of inclusion in its "Great Scenic Railway Journeys" TV show.

But the great affair out here is the ramble, to see what's over the next hill, to poke your nose into places you haven't been invited.

full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/travel/index/stories/heavey06071998.htm

Cumberland as a real estate investment

Investor Hot Spots
by Kenneth R. Harney
RealtyTimes August 7, 2006

Forget the splashy high-profile, big markets if you’re tracking where home real estate investors are putting their money these days. Forget Miami, Naples, Vegas, San Diego and LA. Start thinking about lower-key places like South Bend, Indiana; Pocatello and Boise, Idaho; and the northern Maryland panhandle. According to a new analysis of mortgage data for the first quarter of 2006 nationwide, investors in those four local housing markets accounted for higher percentages of total purchases than anywhere else in the country: More than one out of five purchases in each went to investors. The study was done by Loan Performance LLC, a subsidiary of First American Real Estate Solutions. Loan Performance has access to a vast database comprised of millions of active, ongoing mortgages, through cooperative agreements with virtually all major lenders and Wall Street investment banks. That huge database allows it to essentially look inside the mortgage market in real-time, observing emerging trends in delinquencies, types of loans being originated, loan to value ratios, credit scores and many other characteristics on a market-by-market basis. In its latest analysis, covering new mortgages originated for home purchases between January 1 and March 31 of this year, Loan Performance found a stunning 25.8 percent of all mortgages financing home real estate purchases in the Cumberland, MD-eastern West Virginia market went to people who identified themselves as investors, not primary owner-occupants. In South Bend, Indiana, investors accounted for 23 percent of all new purchasers. In Boise, Idaho it was 20.8 percent and Pocatello 20.2 percent. By contrast, Miami and Naples, Florida, where investor purchases of condo units and preconstruction contracts were all the rage during the peak boom years of 2003-mid 2005, investors accounted for just one out of six new purchases during the first quarter of this year. Although Loan Performance offered no theories about current investor patterns, the top several hot spots -- at least as percentage shares of the total local market -- appear to share some common characteristics. Real estate prices in all of them are moderate by national norms, and rental properties tend to cash flow better than, say, Miami condos, which come with high price tags and negative cash flows for investors. Also real estate appreciation in places like Boise, the northern Maryland panhandle and West Virginia never went off the charts during the boom years, but maintained steady, moderate growth. Second home purchases may also have played a role in the Idaho, Maryland and West Virginia markets. Loan Performance also looked at the markets with the highest percentages of higher-risk negative amortization and interest-only mortgages during the first quarter of 2006. West Virginia topped the neg-am list with more than half of all new home loans -- 51.4 percent -- carrying negative amortization options. In Wyoming 26.2 percent of all new purchase loans were neg-am, as were 22.5 percent in Nevada, 21 percent in California and 15.6 percent in Florida. Neg-am loans allow home buyers to make monthly payments that are less than the amounts needed to amortize or pay off the debt over the stated term of the loan. Typically neg-am loans either require balloon payments at some point during the term, or in the case of popular payment-option loans, to "reset" at some point to a payment level sufficient to pay off the debt within the stated term of the mortgage. By depressing monthly payments, neg-am loans allow purchasers to acquire properties that they might not otherwise be able to afford using a traditional mortgage. For that reason they are popular with buyers and investors in many markets, but also carry elevated risks of default should borrowers be unable to make payments after the "reset" date, refinance into affordable replacement loans, or make balloon payments.

Work and Wildlife

We made a short trip to Cumberland last month and gave my parents their first view of the place. My dad again proved to be the world's best supervisor/handyman (highly knowledgeable, very dependable and works cheap). We hung a ceiling fan, swapped out a light fixture, replaced a jackpost supporting the deck and touched up some mortar. Later, after I had to return to Kensington, he solved two long-standing nagging problems. Turns out a loose wire was all that was troubling the garbage disposal. And the oven actually does work -- it just needs a new knob. If it had been left up to me, I probably would have replaced the oven.

A neighbor told Clementine and my mom that she had recently seen a bear stomping around the Wills Mountain area. We're not sure if he's affiliated with the mountain lion (nicknamed Pablo de Fabio by Clem) seen there about seven or eight years ago.

Washington Comes to Cumberland

The Washingtonization of Cumberland? Not hardly but this story from The Washington Post explains the town's attraction.


Main Street Turns a Corner
Urbanites Drawn to Cumberland, Md., by Small-Town Potential
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Jorge Zamorano whipped out a copy of the Cumberland Times-News from behind the bar at the Starfish Cafe, one of two restaurants he owns on Capitol Hill.

The newspaper trumpeted a 17 percent increase in housing prices in the Western Maryland town over the past year. Zamorano, a Cuban-born artist and restaurateur, was pleased at his prescience.

Fourteen years ago, on a snowy Christmas vacation, he found himself in the mountain town, watching fat flakes swirl around the Victorian main street.

"I was mesmerized by the beauty of it," he said. "The first thought that came to mind was 'It's a Wonderful Life.' "

Then came the second thought: "What a shame, all the buildings boarded up and empty. This place in the right hands? The potential!"

Since then, a noticeable stream of outsiders from Washington and elsewhere have moved to Cumberland, a city of about 21,000 on the C&O Canal, to take advantage of low real estate prices and a slower lifestyle.

For Zamorano, it took 10 years of visits, watching Baltimore Street, the main drag, being revitalized by a National Trust for Historic Preservation Main Street project, before he lured his business partner, Miguel Rodriguez, to the town.

"I fell in love immediately," Rodriguez said.

They bought one building for a clone of Zamorano's other Capitol Hill restaurant, the Banana Cafe, but before construction began, Zamorano wanted to buy another.

The Manhattan Bar and Grill was the first of their two restaurants to open, four years ago. "It was the day after Thanksgiving, when they light the Christmas tree. It's a huge event in Cumberland," Zamorano said.

"Like Rockefeller Center," Rodriguez added. "There were 5,000 people out front. We ran out of food."

They now divide their time between Washington and Cumberland, switching off weeks, enjoying the town, forgetting the world.
continued: 2 3












Jorge Zamorano, left, and
Miguel Rodriguez
branched out from two restaurants on
Capitol Hill to open two more in
Cumberland.
(By Stephanie Cavanaugh
for The Washington Post)

Cumberland and the Economy

Cumberland is in the process of refortifying its economy. This story from the Cumberland Times-News of July 8, 2007, is an excellent look back at what the town has been through.

Life after Kelly
Michael A. Sawyers
Cumberland Times-News
CUMBERLAND — On a spring day in 2094, if anybody thinks to do it, people who are not yet born will disassemble a time capsule kept at what is now the Allegany County Office Complex alongside a thoroughfare appropriately named Kelly Road.

By then, the capsule will be 100 years old. That day far in the future will also be the 200th anniversary of the founding of what became The Kelly-Springfield Tire Co., an enterprise that once pumped out 11,000 automobile tires a day at this very site. It was a corporation that fed and clothed thousands of local families. “The Kelly,” as people called it, was a large slice in the pie chart of Cumberland life.

For 82 years, through two wars, through the Great Depression and through thick ply and thin, the smell of rubber was the smell of money.During the early 1980s, the Goodyear subsidiary generated a payroll of $54 million. Not only did that mean that production workers lived reasonably well, but it meant that Greene Street liquor stores sold more six packs when shifts ended. It meant that nearby Squilaci’s had a line of customers waiting to use the billiards table or to order a sandwich. After all, 7 a.m. is happy hour to someone who started working at 11 p.m. the previous day. It meant that this well-paying smokestack industry remained in Allegany County.

Twenty years ago, on May 21, that all came to an end and 1,010 workers had to go on with their lives.
full story: http://www.times-news.com/archivesearch/local_story_189105528.html

"Chillin' Right Here"

A youtube troubador known as Ryan V with a song he says was inspired by Cumberland:

Western Maryland Scenic Railroad

The old steam engine train is visible from the deck of our house. The 32-mile roundtrip from Cumberland to Frostburg is especially pretty in the fall and it's a good idea to make reservations. There also is a special Christmas train.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVuDSPon1MU

Western Maryland Scenic Railroad: www.wmsr.com.

Weekend getaways

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/25/AR2007072500774.html