Beechfield

Description

Beechfield is neighborhood with a suburban feel within the City. It contains a park between the row houses that is not well known because it is hidden from people outside the community. It has an active community association, the Beechfield Community and Improvement Association, which was started in 1980. Meetings are held every second Tuesday of the month. The annual community events include yard sales, community clean-up days and a car show.

History

The southwestern boundary to the city, Frederick Avenue and the continuous path of Beechfield, Coleen Road, and Beechfield form the boundary of the wedge shaped neighborhood of Beechfield. It contains housing built over a century.

Its western acreage was once part of the eighteenth-century estate “Cloud Capped,” known by 1800 as “Cloud Cap," the property of Charles Carrol of Carrollton. The Baltimore Iron Ore Works, whose investors included Carrol, Samuel Chase, members of the Dulaney family and several others, acquired the land during the Revolution. Allegedly, the British fleet of fifty vessels was spotted from the hilltop estate house in September 1814, one day before the Battle of North Point. Owned variously by James Cox, Talbott Taylor, and Orville Horowitz, it was acquired in 1890 by Blanchard Randall, a city grain commission merchant, also owner of Tower Hill, north of Frederick Avenue. Randall enlarged the estate house with terraces built from a demolished city bank.