Where Croom Road Became a Village

Croom began taking the shape of a village in the mid-nineteenth century around St. Thomas Church, several homes, and John Coffren’s general store, established about 1853. In 1857, the post office opened in the store—bringing mail and merchandise together at a familiar stop along Croom Road.

The road mattered because it connected the port of Nottingham with Upper Marlboro. It was the corridor that linked Croom’s civic and commercial buildings through the surrounding farmland.

By the 1860s, historic inventories describe Croom as a compact rural village with residences and shops for a miller, carpenter, mechanic, and blacksmith. Earlier National Register documentation also identifies a blacksmith and wheelwright shop, general stores, cobblers, and carpenters by the time St. Thomas’ Parish was established in 1850.

A new parsonage and schoolhouse had joined the church and homes by this period. The 1861 Martenet map records these buildings clustered in the village, while the 1878 Hopkins map shows little change—a reminder that Croom’s economy was local, practical, and closely tied to the road and to one another.

Today, Croom’s open setting can make the nineteenth-century village easy to overlook. Its historic landscape retains examples of religious, residential, agricultural, and commercial buildings that show how a rural community was organized without a conventional town grid or a dense commercial center.

For present-day neighbors, the story is a useful way to read Croom Road: not simply as a way home, but as the line that once linked work, worship, schooling, correspondence, and everyday trade.