Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Mount Savage, MD

Mount Savage is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Allegany County, Maryland, lying at the base of Big Savage Mountain between Frostburg and Cumberland.

The community takes its name from Thomas Savage, a land surveyor who traveled through the area in 1736.

Mount Savage began as a small farming settlement, but the Maryland and New York Iron and Coal Company, established by Englishman Benjamin Howell, built the Mount Savage Iron Works there, erecting blast furnaces in 1839.

In 1844 the Mount Savage works rolled the first heavy iron rail produced in the United States, at a time when it was the only American works manufacturing heavy railroad iron.

The company built the Mount Savage Railroad in 1844 to connect the works with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Cumberland; the line later passed to the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad, which made Mount Savage its headquarters and built locomotive shops there in 1866.

By 1852 the Mount Savage iron works was considered the largest in the United States, and the booming industrial settlement had become the fifth largest community in Maryland.

As a company town, Mount Savage's industries built housing for their workers and donated land for schools, churches and other public buildings.

The rolling mill shut down in 1868 and the blast furnaces ceased operating around 1870 under competition from Pennsylvania and Great Lakes works.

Fire-clay brick making, organized under the Union Mining Company from 1864, outlasted the iron industry and remained Mount Savage's principal industry through the late twentieth century.

The Mount Savage Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.