Campsite 69

The tallest ground on this site's horizon stands 17.2° above level, to the northwest.

On the March equinox direct sun reaches the pitch at 7:26 am and leaves it at 6:12 pm: 10 h 48 m of it, against 12 h 12 m of daylight on an open horizon.

Most of the forest's interior was patented from vacant land between 1820 and 1840, for timber and mining. Much of it was held in partnership by Richard Caton, who had married Charles Carroll of Carrollton's daughter Mary in 1787, and William Carroll, a grandson of Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek, a signer of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Their Town Hill Mining, Manufacturing and Timber Company was financed by the estate of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who had died in 1832, and in 1836 it built a steam sawmill. In 1841 John Upton published a report on "the Freehold Estate of William Carroll, Esq., at Town Hill" that promised "Inexhaustible Iron Mines"; a modern bibliography of the region's industry calls the ore imagined. In 1843 the London agents of Caton's daughter Marianne, Lady Wellesley, advertised a steam mill and 12,700 acres at Green Ridge. All DNR identifies from the mill is its chimney, a tapered stack of coursed native stone about 30 feet high, lined with brick, which the Youth Conservation Corps restored in 1974. A 1979 state survey recorded a stone chimney without naming Carroll and guessed at other uses; whether it is the same structure has not been settled. By about 1870 the land had passed to the Mertens family, whose orchard has its own chapter.

Before the orchard, these ridges supplied timber and the Town Creek valley tanned leather. The Carroll interests built a steam sawmill in 1836. In the 1880s and 1890s a narrow-gauge logging line called the Green Ridge Railroad brought timber down from the north and passed it to the canal and the B&O over a wooden trestle across the Potomac at Okonoko; it was gone by 1904. The Kulp Lumber Company ran a sawmill east of Oldtown and shipped lumber from its own siding on the Western Maryland until 1914. At what DNR calls Log Roll Overlook, logs were tipped over the edge of Green Ridge into Town Creek and floated nine miles at high water to a sawmill by the canal. DNR's plan says the last of the virgin forest was cut between 1880 and 1912, and a period of neglect and wildfire followed. The Town Creek valley also tanned leather. Robert Lashley and his descendants ran a tannery at Flintstone that one history called the only industry in the eastern county other than farming and logging. Jason Hanks owned tanneries at Chaneysville, Gilpin and Everett and about 1865 had a fourteen-room house built near Gilpin. An 1880 directory lists two Flintstone tanners, L. T. Dickinson and J. B. Hoyt & Co.; which one owned the tannery whose manager's house stood near Gilpin is not known.