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COMMUNITIES: OLNEY
Commerce blossomed early at this important wagon crossroad; only Brookeville and Unity predate it as villages. By 1800 William Kelly had opened a blacksmith and wheelwright shop and Quaker Whitson Canby ran the Fair Hill Pottery Manufactory, employing a dozen Irish potters and producing earthenware plates and bowls. For his home Canby built the log core of today's Olney House, barracking his potters in the old Brooke home Fair Hill. Soon Benedict Duley was operating a general store and William Starkey a tavern. With this cluster of artisans the village acquired the name Mechanicsville. In 1837 Charles and Sarah Brooke Farquhar took over Canby's home and named it Olney, after poet William Cowper's village in England. Eventually the house gave its name to the local post office and ultimately to the village itself. A succession of merchants, farmers, and developers helped shape the crossroads: Barnsleys, Hawkinses, Olands, Hineses, Finneyfrocks, Hoyles, Murphys, Sopers, Burnses, Bells, Ladsons, Armstrongs, Downeys, Berlins, Lambornes. A black community grew up near today's Hines Drive south of the crossroad. In 1978 the growling of bulldozers signaled the widening of the Olney intersection and the leveling of virtually all of old Olney.	Olney of yesteryear graces this 1920 scene looking eastward on Route 108. Soper's general store, left, supplied villagers with meats and groceries. Diagonally across stands Albert Murphy's home and tin shop, and east of that was the Olney Grange Hall, later to become Francis Hawkins' Olney Foods and Locker Plant.
	Alvin 'Doc' Berlin's drug store and soda fountain, right, was a social center in mid-century Olney; doctors, farmers, tradesmen--all drifted in for refreshment and conversation. In front of Albert Murphy's tin shop, left, stood a tollgate where his father Michael, also a tinsmith, collected tolls on the Washington-Brookeville Turnpike until the state took over today's Georgia Avenue in 1914.
	Rare relic of 'Mechanicsville,' Olney House today holds a restaurant and shops. Clara May Downey bought the pre-1800 home in the 1930s to safeguard it from development.
	Fair Hill Quaker school, once the home of Richard Brooke and Whitson Canby's Irish potters, operated almost continuously from 1819 to 1865, when the Civil War forced its closure. "Cannonading on the Potomac...would rattle the windows," recalled teacher Mary Coffin Brooke. "When droves of cattle were driven past the house, on their way to our neighboring farmers to be fattened for the army, the bellowing of the cattle, the galloping of the twenty horsemen in charge, and the barking of dogs bringing in strays, made a pandemonium that rendered sleep impossible." One night General Joseph Hooker's Union soldiers camped on the grounds, fed their campfires with the rails fencing an 80-acre field, and departed next day with Fair Hill's four-horse team and farm wagon.
	Honoring a "fighting Quaker," Allan Brooke and members of the Daughters of the American Revolution place a stone at the grave of Revolutionary War Col. Richard Brooke, located where Olney Village Mart now stands. The ardent patriot's breach of the Quaker tenet of non-violence caused him to be read out of Meeting--fate of many fighting Quakers. The stone marker vanished during World War II and was later rediscovered and placed with the Sandy Spring Museum.
Joseph Finneyfrock pounds iron at the Olney smithy, still going strong in 1956. Today his son Dudley carries on Olney's oldest continuous business.	Joseph Finneyfrock's blacksmith shop shod horses and mended farm equipment starting in 1885, when founded by his father-in-law Reuben Hines. This 1917 picture includes (from left) Dorsey Hawkins, Finneyfrock, Lee Ward, and Charles Hawkins. The Hawkins family ran a wheelwright shop next to the smithy.
Frank Palmer, Sr., hauls cans of milk to Martin's Dairy during the Palm Sunday snowstorm of 1942. Pete Cashell's six-horse snow plow opened a way through snow chest-high to the horses. The Palmers' registered Holstein herd grazed 200 acres at the intersection of Bowie Mill and Cashell Roads.

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