"The Town Between the Tracks"

"The Town Between the Tracks". . , Berlin grew up next to the C&O Canal and the Potomac River, major routes to the developing West. The large parking lot you see across the railroad tracks was the original location of the town., The town featured a three-story opera house which hosted traveling plays and early moving pictures. The old general store owned and operated by William L. Gross stood along the tracks at the foot of modern-day Maryland Avenue and provided space for an apothecary and dentist's office. A hardware store, lumber yard, general stores, newspaper office, several boarding houses, and private residences rounded out the early town., Between 1890 and the early 1900's, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad expanded its rail yard in Brunswick to become one of the largest in the world at the time, and this process began to shift the town to its present location up on the hills., As the early 20th century unfolded, the old "Town Between the Tracks" disappeared. A decade after the B&O expanded the yard once again in 1906, only a handful of abandoned buildings remained. Some were torn down, but others stood empty and dilapidated for a time. The last building came down in the 1920's.