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Columbia Began
50 Years Ago This Month
B
By David Greisman
efore there were 10 villages with more than 30 neighborhoods for nearly
100,000 people, and before there were pathways and pools and gyms and
camps, there were the first four plots of land making up a total of 1,039 acres.
This is where the planned community of Columbia began, with
what was primarily farmland owned by R.G. Harper Carroll, William Kahler, James R. Moxley and Esther Wix. In early November 1962 — 50 years ago this month — those properties were acquired for just $655,000 by a company calling itself Howard Estates. Yet that was but a shell company of Community Research and
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Development, which itself was a subsidiary of The Rouse Company. And
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those 1,039 acres, all located west of Cedar Lane in what is now part
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of Harper’s Choice and Clary’s Forest, would be just the beginning. By October of 1963, a total of five shell companies had purchased a patchwork of 13,719 acres of land, done in this surreptitious
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manner so as to avoid price inflation. At the end of that month, The
The Security Realty sign from the first land purchase for Columbia, made in 1962.
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Rouse Company announced that it was behind the mass land
in nine months under relative secrecy so that they kept the prices to
acquisition, and that it intended to use it to build a city.
a point where it was economically feasible.” Rouse had lived at the time in the Baltimore neighborhood of (continued on page 2)
“Being able to buy that much land is significant,” said Barbara Kellner, director of the Columbia Archives. “They were able to do it
C A M O N T H LY 1