The renewed focus on the farm's wartime history arose about two weeks ago when Patrick McHugh, 31, of Fallston, an amateur historian and Civil War re-enactor, testified as an unsolicited witness at a Board of Appeals hearing that the golf course and luxury homes planned by the Mangiones would destroy the county's only remaining important Civil War site. "I'd feel better about it if these historians would have a plan to come up with the money to buy it." It's a pipe dream," said Merryman, a Parkton resident who was born at Hayfields and ran the farm for relatives from 1939 until 1978. "If there was any reasonable way to keep it as a historical site I would approve, but there's not one chance in a thousand of doing it. It's the best use of the land at present," he said. "A golf course is pretty much the only use that would bring in enough revenue to maintain the buildings. Merryman, 83, a great-grandson of John Merryman and last of the family to farm Hayfields, has thrown his support, albeit reluctantly, behind the plan. The old slave quarters are to be the pro shop. The three-story fieldstone mansion is to be converted into the clubhouse and a restaurant, which will be open to the public. "Our hope is that our adaptive reuse of the structures will bring some real vitality and vibrance to the property, and we hope to honor its history within the mansion." "My family is keenly aware of the local significance of the Hayfields property," Mangione added. The state and county paid $8 million in 1994 for the 367-acre Cromwell Valley Park "and we have 475 acres," John Mangione said recently. John Mangione, who heads the project for his family, said it would take about $11 million to buy the tract his father, Nicholas, paid between $4 million and $5 million in 1986. Several of the historians urged public purchase of the property for a historical park, but that would be prohibitively expensive at this time of budget constraints at all levels of government. Zimmerman said that the Merryman story and Gilmor's raiding are well known, but that he is not aware of any detailed discussion about military action around Hayfields as the case has proceeded. Fischer, a Hopkins alumnus and history professor at Brandeis University. It was a center of the Confederate movement in Maryland and also for the Federal countermovement to keep the state in the Union," said David H. "The Merryman Farm is a Civil War site more important than any other in Baltimore County today. The plan, however, was abandoned when Union reinforcements reached Baltimore and Washington. Harry Gilmor's cavalry raided the county, burning railroad bridges and cutting telegraph wires. The Confederates bivouacked at the farm while Maj.
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