Maryland on Stamps

Richard D. L. Fulton

Point of Rocks Station: 2023

The station, located at 4000 Clay Street in Point of Rocks, Frederick County, was designed by architect Ephraim Francis Baldwin and was constructed in 1875 by the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad.

According to the application fi led in 1972 to place the station on the National Register of Historic Places, “The proportion, detailing, and color of the Point of Rocks Railroad Station is unusually sophisticated for its rural setting and ranks with the most outstanding work of the Victorian Gothic Revival.”

The application further commented on the importance of such rural railroad stations, stating, “The elaborate architecture of the Point of Rocks Railroad Station testifies to the significance of the railroad as the dominant institution in post Civil War America, especially in small towns,” further noting that, in the case of Point of Rocks, “The town was (actually) moved to its present site in order to be near the tracks, indicating the depth of control the railroad exercised.”

The train station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

In the 1930s, the B&O Railroad and the fledgling Chesapeake and Ohio Canal had both planned a westward extension of their proposed passages west from Point of Rocks, resulting in a clash between the respective companies, which ended up in the Maryland Court of Appeals.

The court subsequently ruled that the two parties had to share the same strip of land leading westward, which included Point of Rocks. The station became a stop on the B&O Metropolitan Branch until the station was closed in 1962 when the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad (C&O) gained control of the B&O. The C&O and the B&O continued to operate as separate entities until 1963, when all of the B&O assets, including the Point of Rocks Railroad Station, were merged with the assets of the C&O.

In 1973, the C&O, B&O, and Western Maryland Railroad had been merged into the Chessie System. In 1980, the Chessie System merged with the Seaboard Coast Railroad and consolidated into the CSX Corporation (which resulted in the CSX having assumed ownership of the Point of Rocks Station).

Also, beginning in the 1980s, the Point of Rocks Station began to serve as a commuter stop for the Maryland Area Regional Commuter (MARC).

The Point of Rocks Railroad Station is currently boarded up because it is no longer open to the public, and is primarily used by CSX as storage and office space for maintenance crews, with the building itself not accessible to passengers; the windows were boarded up as of 2022, when the maintenance facilities were relocated to Brunswick, Maryland.

The C&O Canal Trust reported on its website that the station “is believed to be the most photographed train station in America.”

Point of Rocks Station First Day of Issue cover.