Picture This: The Sucro-Lawrence House in Once-Bucolic Eden Terrace Still Stands

Long before the Baltimore Beltway carved its course through parts of Catonsville, a bucolic area known as Eden Terrace included a number of late Victorian-era homes. One, known as the Sucro-Lawrence House, for the family that has been the sole owner since it was built, is a reminder today of simpler times.

In May of 1983, Antoinette (“Toni”) Hughes offered an oral history conducted by interviewer Charlotte French at 13 Woodlawn Avenue, her grandfather’s and father’s home, as part of the Friends of the Catonsville Library oral history program. The full interview transcript is available to visitors to the Catonsville Room.

Toni Hughes is the daughter of Arthur Gower Lawrence and Antoinette Sucro Lawrence and offered fond recollections of growing up in the house during the 1920s and 30s—the heyday of Eden Terrace. Many of the homes were originally considered summer cottages, although her family lived there year-round. Hughes remains a Catonsville resident today. 

“It was real country when we were kids,” Hughes told French, recalling that there was open meadowland, filled with daisies, where families would picnic.

The developer, Victor Bloede, who also established the Caton Spring Company, built his home atop a hill and left it deeply wooded. She recalled that a path cut through it, which “had the most beautiful velvet violets.” That home burned to the ground in a Christmas Eve fire when Toni was a teenager. Bloede rebuilt a fireproof home on the same site only to have it razed because of the Beltway construction.

One of the unusual aspects of the neighborhood was the artesian well water system that Bloede established. “It was delicious water. It was just like drinking out of a spring,” recalled Hughes.

The Sucro-Lawrence House featured a backyard tennis court that provided a source of recreation to the children in the neighborhood. “I used to think I was very popular, but now I know it was because I had a tennis court,” Hughes told French.

By the late 1950s, the beltway changed forever the nature of Eden Terrace. Recalled Hughes: “It was terrible. I mean this was such a peaceful, quiet, heavenly place to live … when that came along they took away all those beautiful homes. …  You can’t imagine how dirty it was when they were building that beltway.”

By the time of that interview some 25 years later, construction was a distant memory. Hughes told French: “In fact, when it’s quiet at night, you miss it.”

Other original houses still standing, after the Beltway construction in the late 1950s, are: 9 Woodlawn Avenue (Read House); 22 Woodlawn Avenue (Albert-McDonald House); 101 Arbutus Avenue (Michel House); and 114 Forest Avenue (Hazelhurst House). 

Thanks go to Bryce Rumbles, librarian at the Catonsville Branch, and Lisa Vicari, Catonsville Room volunteer and board member, Friends of the Catonsville Library, for their research assistance. Anyone interested in ordering digital reprints of any of the historical images featured in this series, should contact Bryce Rumbles at brumbles@bcpl.net.