Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Jennings, MD

Jennings is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in northern Garrett County, Maryland, one of seven CDPs in the county.

Jennings began in 1899, when brothers Cortez H. Jennings and B. Worth Jennings, prosperous entrepreneurs from Towanda, Pennsylvania, bought up dozens of parcels - about 10 square miles in all - to harvest the old-growth forest between Grantsville and Bittinger.

The brothers built a railroad with multiple spurs through their lands, along with a sawmill, a hotel and a general store; they gave land for two schools and a church and recruited Hungarian immigrants experienced in the timber trades to work in Jennings.

The Jennings brothers ran a twin timber enterprise in Tucker County, West Virginia, that created the town of Jenningston, where B. Worth Jennings died of a gunshot wound in 1906.

As the timber was cut, Cortez Jennings sold parcels to local families who farmed the cleared land; after his death in 1920, the brothers' heirs sold the remaining Jennings enterprises and lands in 1925 to William A. Morgart.

Morgart opened a series of coal mines along the east bank of the South Branch Casselman River and hauled the coal out on the Jennings railroad; the last of the mines closed a few years after his son Louis died in 1951.

A post office opened at Jennings in 1902 and served the community until 1963.

Jennings stands on Maryland Route 495, about 4 miles south of Grantsville and 25 miles northeast of Oakland, the Garrett County seat.

The community occupies the valley of the South Branch of the Casselman River, about 3 miles west of the Eastern Continental Divide, so its water drains west through the Casselman, Youghiogheny, Monongahela, Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Jennings CDP covers 0.34 square miles, all land, at an elevation of about 2,202 feet.