Recent decades have almost erased the earlier roles of Ednor and Norwood as busy commercial crossroads having their own post offices. Before his death in 1999 Stanley Stabler recalled these villages as they were more than three quarters of a century ago when he was a boy:

On Ednor's southwest corner J. Herbert Cuff ran a yellow frame country store and post office. In front stood the toll booth. Next door Cuff stabled the horse that carried him to Laurel each week for merchandise. South of the stable were a smithy and cider mill, and next door was Cuff's house, later to be bought by the Barger family. Across present New Hampshire Avenue lived the Patties and Latleifs. The road heading east, then called Cedar Lane, led into Brown country. Generations of the large Brown family farmed the slopes and valley of the Patuxent, and Charles Brown built the bridge that gave his name to the crossing. Secluded in its grove, the old home Clifton slowly aged across the centuries.

Norwood at the time was known as Holland's Corner. Where the Red Door Country Store trades today, James Holland opened a store about 1860 and in 1889 became the first postmaster. Nearby was a scales and a smithy run by Lawrence Budd. All around stood fine homes: Snowden Manor of the Quaker Hollands, Llewellyn Fields, Plainfield, Woodlawn, and the home called Norwood.

Apples were stored and sorted in the packing house of G. Rust Canby, shown here in a painting by Joseph A. Winn c.1945. The water tank filled a sprayer for protecting the fruit from insects and disease. Canby owned four orchards, two of them along Ednor Road between Norwood and Ednor. During the June-October apple season he employed as many as 25 workers picking and packing fruit. During World War II German prisoners of war from nearby Ft. Meade helped harvest the crops.

The threshing crew of Ednor's George Richardson traveled from farm to farm in the 1920s and '30s, "thrashing" neighbors' wheat, rye, and barley. The men's work was hard, hot, dusty--and dangerous: Thresher Joe Miller wore a sock over a wrist from which the hand had been torn by his machine. Threshing day--always, it seemed, the hottest day of the year--was also an ordeal for the housewife. In her sweltering kitchen, often over a wood stove, she prepared a full-scale farm repast for the grimy men at lunchtime. Ednor resident Henry Latleif also ran a thresher.

Frame Amersley has played many roles since R. Rowland Moore and Margaret Tyson made it their home in 1886. Often its occupants acted in concert with neighbors across the fields in Plainfield, also a Moore redoubt. In 1889 the two families became pioneers in the experimental use of steam heat--advanced technology causing far less dust and dirt than coal and wood. In 1894 they went hi-tech again, stringing a telephone line between the two homes. Tarleton and Rebecca Moore Stabler purchased Amersley in 1895, and soon Stabler and William W. Moore of Plainfield set up Amersley as a local creamery and ice cream shop. Today Amersley is the home of Priscilla Allen.

Tarelton Stabler's two Jersey cattle probably contributed to the Amersley creamery and ice cream shop.