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Welcome to the Crownsville Conservancy, Inc.
Crownsville, located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, is minutes from the capital city of Annapolis, south of Baltimore and West of Washington D.C.. With a population of over 3,000 people, Crownsville is a quiet but growing area with communities situated along the banks of the Severn River. Pressures from decades of development have showed the need to preserve as much green space as possible.
In the 1920's successful businessmen and families from Washington and Baltimore began looking for summer vacation and second home locations where they could escape from the summer heat of the cities.
Many communities began as a series of salesmens gimmicks to convince prospective buyers to purchase what was essentially swampland. Several elders in Herald Harbor remember receiving their building lots for $25 and $100 in exchange for purchasing subscriptions to the Washington Times Herald Newspaper. Arden on the Severn was once a sand mine.
After WW II many summer homes were coverted to all season residences. In the 1980s and 1990s a building boom took place in Crownsville and continues today under the grandfathered antiquated lot laws. Many 25' x 100' lots held by familes for decades were combined and developed.
The executive summary of a publication called Maryland's Changing Land: Past, Present and Future, prepared by the Maryland Department of Planning in December 2001 showed Maryland's population is quickly growing and developing, increasing 30% from 1973 to 1997.
"An estimated 376,500 acres of forest and agricultural land have been converted to more intensely developed land uses (e.g. residential, industrial, or commercial) to accommodate changes in population and employment. It is expected that another 893,600 people will be living in Maryland by 2020. If we continue to develop according to existing (1997) county zoning, subdivision, resource protection and other development/environmental policies and programs, we will lose 301,302 acres of resource land. This is equivalent to an area six times the size of Baltimore City."
The threat of development real, our non-profit organization is acting to conserve what is left of Maryland's unique landscape while preserving forested buffers, wildlife habitat and natural stormwater drainage areas.
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