Burkittsville, Maryland was founded in 1824 and has a population of 151 residents. Located in Frederick County, it is about an hour from Washington DC, just south of Frederick. Today, it’s well-known as the setting of the fictional horror film “The Blair Witch Project.”
As English and German immigrants came to Maryland in the early 1700s, they moved westward out of Southern Maryland into the newly charted Middletown Valley. The Valley’s fertile soil appealed to settlers looking to start fruit orchards and wheat farms. The Tutelo and Seponi Native American tribes were pushed out decades earlier, but towns in Middletown Valley were commonly placed at intersections of old native hunting trails. Such was the case in Burkittsville. The first land purchase was made by a man named Dawson in 1741, but the town traces its establishment to Joshua Harley in 1824. Harley owned the west side of the valley while another farmer named Henry Burkitt owned the east; Burkitt had been trying to establish a town on his property in 1810. Harley established a post office at the intersection of his and Burkitt’s properties and the area became known as “Harley’s Post,” leading to the town’s original growth. But When Harley died 4 years later, Burkitt seized his opportunity and made sure businesses were only established on his side of the property, naming the town after himself in 1828.
Many businesses sprung up in the following 30 years as a center of commerce in the valley. The community was devoutly Christian, with the Resurrection Reformed Church built in 1829 and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church built in 1859. Wheat farming and fruit orchards dominated the surrounding countryside.
Burkittsville faced its first hardship when the Civil War came close. The Battle of Crampton’s Gap occurred just above the town on South Mountain, and Burkittsville served as a military hospital for a number of months. The town was only built for 100 residents, but the population grew to over 500 overnight. Parts of the town were left in ruin. The Union won the battle, protecting their forces at Harper’s Ferry, but Burkittsville suffered greatly.
Rebounding after the Civil War, the town stayed true to its Christian roots. Two seminaries opened in town, run by St. Paul’s and the Reformed Church. The first, St. Paul’s, opened in 1866, ahead of its time for offering higher female education. Two extremely popular rye whisky distilleries provided an abundance of jobs in the small town until Prohibition. Burkittsville was still small, its population less than 200, but life was self-contained and prosperous.
After World War 2, businesses run my men who went off to fight never opened again. Burkittsville lost its place as a rural center of commerce, becoming almost completely agrarian. But the biggest moment in its history was yet to come.
Burkittsville received national attention as the setting of “The Blair Witch Project” in 1999. The film features 3 kids looking for the Blair Witch, who haunts the town and abducts children. The movie starts in Burkittsville, with the 3 doomed searchers interviewing residents, and supposedly takes place above the town on South Mountain. After the movie’s hit release, obsessed fans flocked to Burkittsville to look for the witch. Some residents capitalized and tried to market the town, but the response was mainly negative. Trespassing, property damage, and graffiti of pentagrams was rampant as tourists smothered Burkittsville. Tensions boiled over when movie watchers who clearly didn’t know the Blair Witch was fictional began suggesting that Burkittsville should be demolished, and its residents thrown in jail for endangering their children by living near a witch. Residents felt terrorized, always watched, and disrespected. The mayor, Joyce Brown, was vocal in her displeasure, begging tourists to leave Burkittsville alone and fearing that being known for a satanic horror movie was not an accurate reflection of the Christian town's history.
There were two problems. First, the Blair Witch was fake, all of it lore made up by the directors with no historical or mythical basis in Burkittsville. Second, the film wasn’t even shot in Burkittsville! The movie’s “Black Hills Forest” is the actual Black Hills in Montgomery County's Seneca Creek State Park, and the interviews of Burkittsville residents are actually in Germantown. A lot of the movie was also shot in Patapsco State Park near Baltimore. Receiving attention it had no part in, Burkittsville learned its lesson, and essentially closed the town for the release of the movie’s sequel. Safe to say, no mobs in Burkittsville that time. But that might have been because the movie was so bad.
Today, Burkittsville is a commuter town. It’s a part of the Burkittsville and Crampton’s Gap Historic Districts, and the town’s buildings are very well preserved. Main Street, where most of the buildings still predate the Civil War, feels straight out of the 1800s. Middletown Valley’s rolling hills are backdropped by South Mountain’s towering ridgeline to the West. Burkittsville is extremely beautiful, the definition of a quaint historical small town. Today, Burkittsville maintains that its residents live surrounded by beauty, and to me, that could not be more accurate.
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