Roofing Contractor in Glen Burnie, MD

Glen Burnie carries a huge stock of postwar housing. When Harundale was built after the Second World War, more than a thousand near-identical prefab homes went up at once, on concrete slabs with brick, shingle, or aluminum siding, and much of that original material is still on the houses.

Those roofs and walls are well past their first life, and re-roofs and re-sides tend to run in clusters as one street after another comes due. Older homes and newer infill sit alongside them across this Baltimore-edge suburb, and on the prefab sections we often handle siding and roof together.

The defining event for Glen Burnie's housing came in 1947 in Harundale, and it still shapes how we scope a job here. That year the Byrne Organization set up a prefabrication shop on a 300-acre site and produced the parts for all 1,200 homes at once, on welded steel frames with outside walls of brick, shingle, or aluminum siding over redwood, set on concrete slabs. With that mix of walls on neighboring houses, a Harundale roof job often takes in the siding too.

It was one of the largest prefabricated developments in America, and it marked the start of the postwar suburbanization of previously rural Anne Arundel County. Harundale Mall followed in 1958, reportedly the first enclosed shopping mall east of the Mississippi, and it was developed by James W. Rouse, the same developer who later built Columbia, where we are based.

The town is older than the prefabs. Glen Burnie is an unincorporated town and census-designated place in Anne Arundel County, a suburb of Baltimore, and its name traces to 1812, when district attorney Elias Glenn established a country estate south of Baltimore that he called Glennsburne. Through his descendants it became Glennsbourne Farm and then Glenburnie, and postmaster Louis J. DeAlba split it into two words in 1930.

The Glenn family's land became the town. In 1854 Elias Glenn's grandson William Wilkins Glenn folded the Curtis Creek Mining, Furnace and Manufacturing Company into the family property, and the business flourished through the 19th century. Glenburnie became an official state subdivision in 1888, and the family hired George T. Melvin and Henry S. Mancha to lay out and promote the town.

A few older masonry buildings here come from a very different era than the houses around them. First Avenue Elementary was built in 1899, and the oldest area church, St. Alban's Episcopal, went up in 1904 with many bricks dating back to Marley Chapel, an early Maryland parish from the 1730s.

Glen Burnie grew along its highways, and roofs near them collect road grit all the time. Crain Highway opened in 1927 and Ritchie Highway, MD 2, followed in 1939, carrying nearly all Baltimore-area traffic bound for Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge until Interstate 97 opened as a bypass in the 1980s. The Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad ran through Glen Burnie until passenger service ended in February 1950, and North Glen Burnie is now served by the Cromwell/Glen Burnie light rail station.

Roof or siding work in Glen Burnie? Call (667) 200-6656 or book a free inspection.