Cheverly Nature Park

Cheverly Nature Park and Quincy Run

Nature and History

Cheverly Nature Park, with its alternating ridges and ravines, provides cover for smaller animals and woodland birds. Pine and hardwood trees dominate, with chestnut oak being the most plentiful.

Mountain laurel is common and along with other shrubs, such as deerberry, blueberry, and pinxterbloom azalea, has recently filled in the shrub layer. Ground level vegetation includes locally rare Indian cucumber-root, Indian pipe, spotted wintergreen , ground pine and partridgeberry. The park is also the free- flowing headwaters of Quincy Run. English Ivy and Oriental Wisteria are the predominant invasive plants.

The land was once part of 500 acres granted in 1685 to James Cranford (d 1699). The property was called Cranford, His Adventure. Later misreadings changed the name to "Crawford's Adventure." That land eventually became Cheverly, Sections 7, 10, and 3A-4A, as well as the hospital land.

Cranford’s land was subdivided and went through several owners. When our Nature Park property was sold in 1849, two-thirds of the land was described as covered with “good oak wood.”

In 1900, Madison Whipple and others filed a plat for the Crawford's Adventure subdivision of 5 30.5-acre lots with a spring at the center of the tract. It appears that the subdivision remained unbuilt. 11 acres is now Cheverly Nature Park.

The 1926 plat for Cheverly Section 7, which would have included the land now occupied by Cheverly Nature Park, featured a park surrounding Crawford’s Adventure Spring. By 1927 the spring area had been incorporated into Cheverly Section 10 and the Spring Park idea abandoned.

With the Great Depression, building in this section of Cheverly ceased. The 1938 aerial image shows areas cleared for planned roads, including the land bridge mentioned below.

Reacting to plans for apartments on the property, the Town of Cheverly acquired the land for the Cheverly Nature Park between 1976 and 1979 . The latest acquisition dates from 2006.

Tour the Nature Park

Begin at the north end of Tremont Avenue. There is room to park on the east side of the street.

The sidewalk becomes a path through Cheverly Nature Park. Turn right at the blue plastic bridge. You will now be on a circular path that generally follows streets originally platted for Cheverly Section 7. You will walk through an open woods where chestnut oaks, mountain laurel, and American beech trees predominate. The path will take you downhill toward a subtributary of Quincy Run that receives runoff from Lockwood Road. If you choose to walk along the stream when it is watered you will notice that the water alternately flows underground and surfaces again. The stream course was platted as a road for Cheverly Section 7.

Bear left to continue on the circular path. About where the ravine levels off, you may bushwhack down to the stream and Crawford’s Adventure Spring. This may be the only water you see.

Just north of the spring the stream again drops underground. Walking a few steps over sand and under a fallen tree you will arrive on a land bridge built to connect Spring Road, which had been platted for the 1901 Crawford’s Adventure subdivision, with the roads platted for Cheverly Section 7. In the stream bed you will see terra cotta pipes intended to put the stream under the planned road.

Exploring Cheverly Nature Park, you may see ground pine, partridge berry, and Indian cucumber.

The stream, now the main branch of Quincy Run, continues northwest past the new Igbo Anglican Church site, to be piped under the Baltimore Washington Parkway on/off ramp and the parkway itself. If you cross the ramp you will see a short open stretch of Quincy Run in a grove.

Quincy Run continues west of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway behind the properties along Landover Road and Newton. You may see its course at 58th place, although the stream is piped until it leaves the Town of Cheverly.

Photo by Dave Kneipp.