Braddock Heights: The Mountaintop the Trolley Built

In eighteen ninety-six, investors in the Frederick and Middletown Railway solved a classic transit problem: to make a trolley line profitable you need riders, and to get riders you need a reason to ride. Their solution was to buy land atop Catoctin Mountain along the route and build a resort. They named it Braddock Heights after the ridge, opened the first trolleys in August of that year, and spent the following decades filling the mountaintop with an amusement park, a skating rink, and summer cottages perched at nine hundred fifty feet with views across the Frederick Valley.

For decades it worked. The park declined after the Second World War, the trolleys had long since been replaced by cars, and the mountain suburb became simply a quiet community of houses with a good view.