Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A Waterfall on Falls Road


Lately I've been taking the Falls Road bike trail to and from work. Even on days that I don't plan to bike I sometimes walk down it in the morning. I knew there was a waterfall at one point (near part of the hilly path that leads from Steiff Silver to Falls Road) but I never stopped to look at it. Yesterday I went down the meandering steep earthen steps that someone had thoughtfully shored up with re-bar.

The overlook to the falls is a nice little area and I was surprised to see that this is a man made waterfall. According to the Baltimore Ghosts this waterfall was built to power a mill. I don't know which one, but it certainly looks a lot like the one in this old photo on the Star Spangled Trails web site. I also found out that this waterfall is known as Round Falls. Since I am too busy to get to the Maryland Room at the Pratt for further research, I'll have to leave it at that for now. But,  would love to know what mill was here and when.

Incidentally, this is the first entry in my new blog, Color and Light. I decided to give up my previous garden writing column and the blog that accompanies it to peruse other topics of interest. However, one of the goals for this blog is to showcase my photography. For Color and Light, I imported and combined the entries featuring my own photos from my old blogs A Baltimore Gardener and The Curious Urbanite (which I still love, but it also has too narrow a focus). I also plan to throw in some backdated photo entries from the winter that didn't fit in to these other blogs.