PUMPKIN CENTER, Md. -- They don't raise pumpkins in Pumpkin Center anymore.
What was once the pumpkin capital of western Maryland, and perhaps the entire state, is now nothing more than a few farm houses and an old creek bed.
There are no stop signs, no road signs, no sheriff.
'It's really just a place on a map,' said local historian David Dorsey. 'There's no town, really.'
But before the Great Depression, Pumpkin Center was a thriving farm community that each autumn would seem to brighten by the thousands of pumpkins ripening in endless rows.
'They used to raise a lot of pumpkins here. For a good 20 years this place had the most plentiful crop in all Maryland,' said Marcellus Slider, whose family settled in the Pumpkin Center area in the early 1800's. 'Now there ain't nothing. I haven't seen a pumpkin in 10 square miles of this place.'
Slider has farmed the fields of Pumpkin Center, nestled midway between Old Town and Flintstone in eastern Allegany County, for all his 82 years.
Halloween, he said, has passed Pumpkin Center by.
'Not since 1930,' he said when asked about Pumpkin Center's days of plenty. 'Why? Why do you think it died out? A man has to feed his family and there was nothing to raise, nothing to raise but a little hof Pumpkinnter's farmers to leave for the promise of city life.
No one knows the population of Pumpkin Center now, nor the whereabouts of many of its former inhabitants.
Allegany County officials guess anywhere from 100 down to 'no more than a dozen' call Pumpkin Center home.
'But there may be more pumpkins than people,' said one county employee.
Earl Cooper disagreed.
'I've lived there for 50 years,' he said sadly, 'and I can't remember ever seeing a pumpkin.'
