A bit of Waverly's History

In 1840 the town of Waverly (still called Huntingdon) included six buildings all clustered near the 3100 block of York Road: a shoemaker's shop, a corn husk depot, a blacksmith, and three small stone houses. The shoemaker, Jacob Aull, was an immigrant from Bavaria whose sons built the houses in Waverly's first housing boom, and whose daughter Louisa became a neighborhood historian. Surrounding this little village, away from York Road, there were still the estates, summer houses, arboretums and horse farms of the affluent.

In 1866, a large parcel of land, much of it previously used for pasture and farming, was bought and divided into lots. New avenues were laid out. More houses were built, as were the first firehouse, the town hall, and finally the Post Office. Obtaining the Post Office led to the change of name to Waverly, after Sir Walter Scott's first novel, Waverly, to avoid confusion with the myriad Huntingdonians.

Throughout the second half of the century, a number of tracts along Chestnut Hill Avenue and Tinges Lane were purchased by members of the Hoen family, well-known for their photographic and lithographic work. As early as 1866, the Hoens and others were accumulating such open properties, usually portions of other large estates, with the eventual purpose of erecting row houses.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Waverly and the other nearby communities of Homestead, Oxford, and Friendship had become popular summer retreats for other well-to-do Baltimoreans in addition to the original wealthy large estate owners. After spending the summer months away from the City in their cottages, many of these people decided later to make their permanent residences there. The transportation improvements along York Road made such commuting increasingly possible. In the 1870s horses pulled double-deck buses along iron tracks. By the 1890s this early streetcar system had been electrified. So much strip development occurred because of this improved transportation that it became difficult, even then, to tell where Waverly ended and Govanstown and other small communities began.

Between 1880 and 1890, construction accelerated sharply in Waverly. Four times as many houses were constructed in this one decade as in the previous fifty years. These buildings, the majority of which were of frame construction, were modest detached and semidetached versions of the various Victorian styles popular at the time. This construction of a substantial number of small frame cottages filled in much of the vacant land on and around the old estates in a second wave of development. Waverly had become a popular suburb.

In 1895 most of the land to Waverly's north, east, and west was still farm and estate country. Building operations slackened here between 1895 and 1905, but masonry construction for the first time exceeded frame and eventually virtually replaced it. The volume of construction increased in 1910 and thereafter, but the third significant wave of growth occurred in Waverly during and after World War I. Brick row houses became the predominant development pattern. In the northern portion of the community. on 38th Street east of York Road, the Welsh Construction Company built rows of bay window-front houses in 1917, advertising that they adjoined Guilford. The Rochester Home Building Company built daylight house son 36th Street in 1920 and the 700 block of Melville Avenue in1925. Houses at Ellerslie Avenue and 38th Street were built in1929 by Phillip C. Mueller who had previously developed "Oakenshawe."

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