Built by and for its community.

A country church

On August 8, 1859, a group of neighbors met in the log Mt. Pleasant schoolhouse, near today's Burntwoods and Ivory Roads, to start a Methodist church of their own. They elected nine trustees, John H. W. Cullum and his wife gave half an acre of land, and the cornerstone went down that October. The little frame church was finished soon after for $1,200 and named for Rev. Henry C. Westwood, who led those first meetings. It still stands at the east end of the building, and it's where our neighbors at Cultivate Garden & Goods are today.

Ministers came on horseback. Westwood was one stop on the Patapsco Circuit, which covered all of Howard County and parts of Carroll and Montgomery, and the circuit riders carried their books, food, clothes and a pillow in their saddlebags. They often stayed the night with the Parsley family in Glenelg.

The nine founding trustees were farmers from the surrounding hills: Reuben Ridgely, whose land the schoolhouse stood on, Lloyd W. Linthicum, James L. Parsley, James Harban, Tilghman Iglehart, Edward Day, Evan T. Ridgely, Basil Sollers and John C. Colliflower. William Prettyman was the first minister. Westwood shared its preachers with the other churches on the Patapsco Circuit until 1909, when the circuit was divided and Westwood moved to the St. James Circuit.

A divided church

Two years later, the Civil War split the congregation over slavery. Members who supported it left and eventually formed Providence Church, a mile and a half west on Triadelphia Road, in the southern branch of Methodism. Westwood stayed with the northern church. The church's own history says the 1859 plans included a gallery over the entrance “for the colored people who wished to worship there,” reached by two side doors. Those doorways are reportedly still in the walls under the siding, though the gallery itself has never been confirmed. It's a hard part of the story. We tell it because we feel history is important.

Built by hand

By 1920 the congregation had outgrown the little church. When the conference turned down a plan to enlarge it, they decided to build a new one themselves. John D. Harp gave most of the lumber. Members cut the logs, hauled them to the sawmill and helped raise the building, with carpenter Arthur H. Issacs in charge. The cornerstone, marked “Westwood Church, 1858–1921,” was laid on May 18, 1921, and the new Westwood Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated that November.

The plans and the windows were a gift too. George Wilmer Gettier (1877–1940) trained at the Maryland Institute of Art, now MICA, and was known for impressionist landscapes of rural Maryland and Virginia. He also made stained glass, running Gettier Studios on Howard Street in Baltimore from 1916 to 1925. He was never famous, and as far as anyone has found, Westwood is the only building he ever designed. His great front window, four Gothic-arched panels showing the Garden of Eden, was dedicated to Capt. Harry J. Selby, a church member killed in World War I. The amber-and-blue transoms over the doors are his as well.

The building committee was Thomas Iglehart, John D. Harp, Jesse Eyre, Homer Parsley and Roger Selby. Tucked inside the cornerstone, the story goes, are two pennies, one from 1858 and one from 1921. Bishop William Frazer McDowell dedicated the finished church on November 12, 1921, as Westwood Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church.

The window and the glass

The great window fills the middle of the church's south front, the side facing Triadelphia Road. The 1979 state survey calls it an English Perpendicular window: four tall Gothic-arched panels under an upper section of eight smaller lights, held apart by deeply cut wooden mullions. Together the panels make one large picture, which the survey calls the Garden of Eden, or Paradise: trees and leaves against a sunset sky, over blue hills and water. The surveyor pointed to it, along with the bell tower, as the sign of the 1921 church's sophistication.

Two painted scrolls along the bottom say who it honors. One reads, in part, “In memory of Capt. Harry J. Selby, Company I,” who served with honor in the World War and gave his life for his country, killed in action in France in October 1918. The other carries the verse “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” over a small cross. Selby came from Ivory, just down the road, and the Selby family were among the church's longtime members.

Gettier carried the same palette through the rest of the building. A smaller Gothic-arched window sits in the west bay of the front, in the same colors. Over the entrance doors are five-light leaded transoms, each with an arched amber center bordered in blue. Another amber transom with three blue borders sits on the west side, and a double window there is set with diamond-shaped leaded panes.

All of the daylight in the sanctuary comes through that glass. Every hour of the day, the colored light shifts across the floor and walls. We light the room with warm lamps rather than bright overheads, so the glass can do most of the work.

The man in the window

Harry J. Selby was born at Ivory, just down the road, on December 15, 1894, the eldest son of John W. Selby. At St. John's College in Annapolis he took top honors in both his studies and military drill, and he was picked for the all-Maryland football and basketball teams three years running.

He enlisted in the 1st Maryland Machine Gun Company and served on the Mexican border in 1916, then took a commission in the Regular Army that December. As an officer of the 18th U.S. Infantry, part of the 1st Division, he sailed for France on June 14, 1918. He was wounded near Soissons on July 18.

In the Meuse-Argonne that October, when his battalion's major was gassed, Captain Selby took command and led the battalion through three days of heavy fighting. Marshal Pétain cited him for his bravery and calm leadership in the attack of October 4. He was fatally wounded on October 9, 1918, a month before the Armistice, at 23, and was buried with full military honors at Exermont, France. His fellow soldiers called him the bravest man they had ever seen.

Three years later his neighbors finished their new church and put his name in its great window, beside a verse from John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

His story is drawn from the Maryland Historical Magazine's 1919 roll of Maryland's war dead (Maryland State Archives). If you know more about Harry Selby or his family, we'd love to hear it.

A century later

A wing joined the two churches in 1956. In 1961, a hundred years after the split, Westwood and Providence voted to become one congregation again, Glenelg Methodist, and worshipped here until January 25, 1970, when they moved to a new church on Burntwoods Road. The complex was sold in 1971, and a Baptist congregation used the 1921 church for a time. In the 1990s, Ingrid Melber got lost one day, spotted a sale sign on the church and bought it. She looked after the building for 33 years, filling it with small shops and makers, among them her own Westwood Unique, and keeping its character intact.

The land, the lumber, the labor, the plans and the windows were all given. A building born out of that kind of shared effort belongs to its community, and we mean to keep it that way: a place where people gather, make things, trade and learn, not just pass through. Look up when you come in. We've arranged the shop around the glass.