How Would You Describe Frederick?
Join the the author of this Washington Post article as he takes a tour of downtown Frederick and attempts to describe Frederick County as a whole. Here is an excerpt:
Flannery O'Connor, the great Southern writer who explored themes of divine grace and the grotesque, might have felt right at home in Frederick County.
With an urbane style and mordant sense of humor, her stories captured the tensions between city and country, black folks and white folks, the sacred and the profane.
You wonder: What would O'Connor, who practiced her craft in New York City before illness forced her return home to Milledgeville, Ga., make of a place poised between extremes like Frederick?Here, after all, is a place still making the shift from dairy farming to commuting, from Grange hall to sprawling bedroom community. It is a place that seems equally well defined by both the city of Frederick's First Saturday Gallery Walk, which showcases galleries, restaurants and boutiques, and the community's annual obsession with the ol'-timey charms of 4-H exhibits and carnival rides at the Great Frederick Fair.
In Maryland's largest county, geographically speaking, the tempo swings from the timeless rhythms of sowing and reaping on the flanks of the Catoctin Mountains to the gonzo rumble of skateboards in the city's Hill Street Skate Park near the so-called Golden Mile. Though the "clustered spires" skyline of churches remains a distinctive emblem for the city, the county's first mosque sprung up recently in a converted farmhouse on the city's outskirts.
How would you describe Frederick County?
Frederick: the 18th century outpost has spent the past few centuries reluctantly becoming its own thriving metropolitian city. With a long pause as a small farming community center for most of the late 19th and early 20th century. The 21st century will see Frederick turn into a full fledge suburb of the greater washington/baltimore metroplex.
Two words:
Bo Ring
THE best place in the world to live!
I love Frederick. There’s a magic and charm here that is hard to find. I’ve lived several places over the last 16 years and always come back here, to where I consider home. Finally we own a home here, and it’s a dream come true.