Overview
Loch Raven Reservoir gathers the Gunpowder Falls north of Towson, Maryland, Baltimore's water supply since the early twentieth century — and its 1922 dam-raising drowned Warren, a substantial cotton-mill village of homes, churches, school and store whose several hundred residents were displaced, buildings levelled, and valley flooded; old roads still run to the waterline and vanish, and low water teases foundations, the displacement documented and remembered by descendants first in this record. The watershed's wooded miles became Baltimore's beloved rambling country, and its telling grew with the trails: lights beneath the surface where Warren stood, a church bell in the coves, figures on the drowned-road alignments at dusk, and the separate canon of the reservoir's mid-century 'Loch Raven incident' UFO tale layering the shores' strangeness. Watershed rules restrict access and the waters are dangerous — permitted areas only, stated plainly. Present Loch Raven as Baltimore's drowned-village story — Warren given for the city's water — its underwater lights the watershed's quiet folklore.