The Skaggs-Files

Partial Transcript of the chapter "Three Lost Towns" in Millard Milburn Rice's "New Facts and Old Families: From the Records of Frederick Couty, Maryland."

"In my opinion Trammelstown - sometimes also known as Trammelsburg - never existed as a platted town. It is true that at and near the intersection of Maryland's Route #464 and the County Road from Point of Rocks to Frederick, where the Point of Rocks Episcopal Church now stands, a few houses once were grouped and called Trammelstown. But that was not the town John Trammel envisioned in his 1784 will.
In that will Trammel directed his executors, who were his daughter Sarah Trammel DeLashmutt and her husband Lindsey DeLashmutt, to lay out 400 lots for a town. The lots were to be 60x120 feet in size, 'with suitable and convenient streets and alleys.' Half of the lots were devised to Sarah Trammel DeLashmutt and half to Sarah's son Trammel DeLashmutt.
The 400 lots were to be laid off, said John Trammel, 'On that part of my lands called Trammel's Coney Islands and Woodland which lies between Swedes Folly and Potowmack River.' The lots were to be sold 'for 8 silver dollars...' with yearly ground rent of 'not less than 18 shillings [then about $2.40].'
Swedes Folly lay about one mile, approximately north-northwest, from present-day Point of Rocks and had been owned by the Nelson and Delashmutt families for at least forty years prior to 1784.
I have searched the Land Records carefully, but I can find no record of lot sales by either Trammel DeLashmutt or his mother. Lindsey DeLashmutt died in October or November of 1791. Shortly thereafter, in the following March - and that may have caused some raised eyebrows - Sarah married Ralph Briscoe. She devised 'the lands my father gave me' to the two sons she had by DeLashmutt but in so doing nowhere made any mention of town lots.
Trammel DeLashmutt died 1810 and during his lifetime was involved in numerous purchases and sales of land, some of which apparently included the lands his grandfather had given him and on which Trammelstown was to have been laid out. But there is no mention of town lots in any of them.
There is one transaction in which Trammel DeLashmutt sold to his brother John for $55 'one negro woman now in the house of said John DeLashmutt in Trammelsburg.' It may have been that Trammelsburg equated with Trammelstown, but it was not the kind of town John Trammel had in mind when he made his will in 1784. That town was still-born.
Scharf says briefly of the town that 'it was partially destroyed by fire'. I suspect a house may have burned down."