Middle River was a vital manufacturing center during World War II due to the expansion of the pioneering Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company, which founded its operations here in 1928. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Middle River rapidly became a defense boomtown. Between 1939 and 1943, the number of Martin employees surged from 3,000 to 52,000. The small town, with 161 residents in 1939, and its local building community were unprepared and unequipped to house the massive influx of newcomers. The Martin Company began the expansion of the town’s residential facilities and called on the federal government to continue. In 1941, the Maryland State Planning Commission hired Hale Walker, planner for Greenbelt for the Farm Security Administration, and Irving C. Root of the National Park Service to prepare a master plan for Middle River. Their plan incorporated many Garden City features already started by the Martin Company housing—pedestrian paths to playgrounds and schools, curving residential streets separated from the new dual highways of Martin and Eastern boulevards, and neighborhood shopping centers.
Construction of single-family and semidetached houses began in the Victory Villa subdivision in 1942. Other surviving residential areas such as Aero Acres, with detached single-family houses, and Stansbury Estates garden apartments also were built as defense worker housing. Victory Villa Gardens built by the Farm Security Administration in 1943 (demolished 2005) included a thousand attached units in one-story wood multifamily dwellings arranged on curving streets named after Air Force bases and offering communal green space. Development of these wartime home-front projects transformed Middle River and represented the largest such effort in the greater Baltimore-Washington region, foreshadowing the industrial decentralization and large-scale suburban development to come in the postwar decades. Although somewhat altered and under redevelopment pressure, Middle River still offers an outstanding collection of World War II-era national defense resources in its buildings, land-use patterns, and community institutions.
Writing Credits
If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.
SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.