Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Mountain Joppatowne, MD

Joppatowne is a census-designated place (CDP) in southwestern Harford County, Maryland, that functions largely as a bedroom community for Baltimore.

Joppatowne was established in 1961 as a planned unit development by the Panitz Brothers Company, on land bought from Beulah Hare Chell that had been the Joppa Farm estate.

The 2020 census counted 13,425 people in 5,158 households in Joppatowne, with 5,437 housing units; the population had risen from 11,391 in 2000 and 12,616 in 2010.

The CDP covers about 7.39 square miles in total, of which about 6.73 square miles are land and 0.66 square miles are water.

Joppatowne is named for colonial Joppa, which was itself named for Jaffa in present-day Israel; the Joppa townsite lies within present-day Joppatowne on Rumsey Island, where Big and Little Gunpowder Falls meet to form the Gunpowder River.

Joppa was a major colonial seaport and tobacco-exporting hub whose harbor could take the largest ocean-going ships, and it served as the county seat of the original Baltimore County from 1712 to 1768.

Joppa declined after its harbor silted up and the county seat moved to Baltimore in 1768, and the town was mostly abandoned by 1814; two even earlier settlements on the site, Gunpowder Town and Foster's Neck, were chartered in 1706 and abandoned in 1707, reportedly after a smallpox outbreak.

The Rumsey Mansion, built between 1720 and 1724, is the only original building still standing from colonial Joppa; its owner, Benjamin Rumsey, was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and the first Chief Judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, serving from 1778 to 1806.

The 17-acre Old Joppa Site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 24, 1979, as an archaeological site.

Preservationists, backed by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, persuaded the Joppatowne developers to spare the old Joppa townsite, and in 1970 the Episcopal Church built the Church of the Resurrection beside the foundations of the original St. John's Parish church.