UO > Community Profile > Cumberland, MD

Steven Smith, MD, makes no bones about it. “I’m sort of a country boy, and my wife is a country girl,” he proclaims. Born and raised in the Allegheny Mountains that cradle western Maryland and three neighboring states, Smith came back to Cumberland almost three years ago to continue his practice as a critical-care pulmonologist with Western Maryland Health System after 25 years in big Texas and Oklahoma cities. “We decided it was time to move back to where we wanted to live,” he explains.

Last year he became part of the health system’s forward-moving agenda by taking over the directorship of WMHS’s new hospitalist program, now numbering four physicians, including himself.

Smith chose to indulge his love for the outdoors by buying a home in his native West Virginia, a few minutes from the Maryland border, where his favorite pastimes—hunting, fishing, hiking, and boating—are almost within jumping distance. “With my canoes we can take gentle or whitewater floating expeditions on short notice, too.” In winter, neighboring Allegheny Mountain slopes are a big lure for skiers, although Smith doesn’t number himself among them.

That’s a summary of what area people call “the mountain side of Maryland,” something other physicians appreciate, too. Radiologist Stanley Lambert is a skier and golfer and says, “I’m looking forward to getting my son, who’s three, out for sledding and beginner skiing.” Born in nearby Oakland, Lambert left home for medical training in North Carolina and Virginia, returning partly because Maryland is home, but also because “it’s a beautiful area of the country.”

“I think I was an athlete before I was a doctor,” quips John J. Hewett, MD, also a radiologist. Within minutes he can be biking, hiking, or running on the towpath of the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, a trail that extends 184.5 miles from Washington and will soon be linked to a former rail line, completing a 350-mile stretch from DC to Pittsburgh. Now he’s looking forward to “an enormous indoor recreation center” soon to open at a resort on nearby Deep Creek Lake. The lure for him: North America’s first indoor kayaking facility.

Hewett was also an engineer before he was a doctor, and a kind of North American nomad on his way to choosing Cumberland as his career location. Spinning a globe at home in a “very small” Manitoba farm town, he decided after high school that Miami was the farthest U.S. destination from home and proceeded there for a first year of college. Later he studied engineering at the University of Arizona, invented a sonographically induced hyperthermia device for treating prostate cancer, attended the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, and trained at the Duke University Medical Center. He is straightforward about why he settled in Cumberland: “I interviewed all over the place, but when I came here I liked what I saw.

“I really am more of a city person,” he says, “but here there’s no traffic. And, between Pittsburgh and Washington, there’s nothing on God’s green earth that you can’t do.” For him that includes spending time with a brother living in Washington, where Hewett is now planning to buy a condo. Driving to both cities, as well as Baltimore, takes two hours or less.

For Hewett, there’s another consideration that even trumps zero traffic. “I do much better here than I would do if I worked in Washington. There’s more opportunity out here.” Read less competition. As he puts it, “In Washington (for instance) there are 12 wolves fighting over one piece of meat. Here, it’s three wolves and five pieces of meat.” The cost of housing is a powerful incentive, too. “I live in a house much too big for a single guy like myself. It cost a third of the price of my brother’s Washington townhouse, and it’s three times bigger.”

Outdoor activities and a low cost of real estate are only part of the Cumberland saga. The rest of the story is a comfortable and once-again thriving historic town of some 21,000 where, as one city administrator puts it, “you don’t have to cross four lanes of traffic to get a quart of milk.” Barbara Buehl, the executive director of the Allegany County Chamber of Commerce, says, “I can drive 24 miles to work (from her 35-acre farm home in a nearby town) with not a single stop light. It’s pretty nice.” Not only that; “I can easily shop in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—all in one day.” A glance at the state map explains why.

The Potomac River, twisting its way east from its Alleghenies source to the Chesapeake Bay, has created a jagged, sawtooth southern border, making Maryland one of the U.S.’ strangest-looking states. Cumberland sits at the apex of a narrow neck of land at one of the river’s sharpest incursions. In a wink you can be in West Virginia to the south. Five miles north is Pennsylvania.

For Smith, it’s the best of two worlds. “It’s just so beautiful to be out driving around, with all the mountains,” he rhapsodizes. But it’s also a plus that he can easily get to the three big cities (Pittsburgh is his favorite) to indulge in myriad sports and cultural amenities.

Cumberland’s history is one of being in the right place at a number of right times, thanks to its location at The Narrows, a rare natural pass through the Appalachian Range that forms an almost unbroken 1,500-mile barrier from Canada to Alabama. (The Allegheny Mountains are part of the long north-south chain.) Shawnee Indians first built a stockade there and tamped down a trade trail to the west. It became a preferred route for pioneer wagon trains. British forces used it as a military highway in the French and Indian War, when General Edward Braddock created Fort Cumberland. It would see both the beginning and end of George Washington’s military career. He fought with Braddock, then returned in 1794 for a final review of troops during the Whisky Rebellion, an uprising of Pennsylvania farmers angered by a tax on booze they were shipping to eastern markets. Washington’s headquarters cabin has been preserved in one of the city’s four parks.

Transportation fame began in earnest in 1806 when Cumberland became the starting point of the National Road, America’s first government-funded highway. Prosperity chugged into the town with the arrival of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1842. Then the city became the terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. In its heyday, the C&O funneled lumber and other staples, but especially coal from nearby mines, from Cumberland to Washington, DC aboard some 500 boats a season.

By 1880, the “remote” mountain town was the second largest city in Maryland and basking in the nickname “Queen City of the Alleghenies.” Elegant buildings sprang up on Baltimore Street, its main thoroughfare, which became a nucleus for business, shopping, and entertainment. The excellent transportation options attracted new industries—a rolling mill to produce rails for the B&O, tanneries, glassworks, a furniture factory, and others.

Today, viewed at night from Interstate 68, Cumberland’s most recent transportation addition, the city looks almost like a fantasy Christmas village. White lights outline the vintage mix of downtown buildings, City Hall, and 14 church steeples, some dating as far back as 1790. Even in the light of day, the city could be mistaken for a Norman Rockwell illustration.

Transportation assets notwithstanding, Cumberland’s economy began to slump during World War II. By the 1970s, technology’s economic climb and plummeting sales of old-fashioned products had left some companies in the backwater. Other plants moved away, and a once-vibrant downtown shriveled. Population shrank to half of its peak of more than 40,000.

But some encouraging factors remained, including two well-reputed hospitals built during the high-population era and some loyal corporations such as Biederlack of America, now the world’s largest manufacturer and biggest sports-licensed distributor of high pile acrylic blankets and pillows. After opening its sole U.S. distribution center in 1979, a one-man/one-phone operation in Cumberland, it set up a new mill two years later in a vacant grocery store, expanding operations to its current output—10 miles of blankets a day. Its worker roster now numbers about 400.

The city’s human assets—committed community leaders and residents with a never-give-up spirit—proved to be even more valuable.

The centerpiece of a service area with some 230,000 people, the hospitals seldom lacked patients. The first, Western Maryland Hospital, began in 1888 as a clinic for rail workers in a local doctor’s home. Its name was changed to Memorial Hospital in 1929 to honor servicemen killed in World War I. The Allegany Hospital, originally built in 1905, was taken over by the Daughters of Charity in 1935 and the name was changed to Sacred Heart Hospital. Together, the two facilities maintain just under 300 beds.

Although Sacred Heart is now part of Ascension Health, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health-care systems, the two hospitals joined forces in 1996, adopting their current name, Western Maryland Health System. To avoid duplication, specialty service centers were established at each campus. “Considering our location, it’s pretty impressive when you look at what we do,” says community relations director Kathy Rogers. “A lot of hospitals in similar locations don’t do some of those things.”

Smith adds, “We have a robust reputation in medical specialties, partly because this is a hub for local counties.”

For instance, the Heart Institute, which opened in 2000, has Maryland’s only comprehensive program of its kind west of Baltimore. The resident surgeon has performed more than 1,200 procedures in the last four years, and a second recently signed on to keep up with demand. According to the Society for Thoracic Surgery, complications following surgery, lengths of stay, sternal infections, and mortality rates are all lower than national and regional averages.

Lambert lauds his radiologist colleagues for “being progressive, learning the latest techniques, and trying always to push the envelope.” One example: “We have one of the most advanced MRIs anywhere for diagnosing breast and cardiac disorders. It allows us to do the testing in basically one stop.”

As part of the updated Women’s Health Specialty Center, a new obstetrical department also opened in 2000. In 2001, oncology services were consolidated and expanded and include a full range of cancer care from diagnosis to hospice care. WMHS is also the health system of choice when patients are transferred from area rural hospitals without the same range of specialties.

Not trapped by a comfortable status quo, WMHS officials recently announced that a new $260 million hospital will replace the current two facilities in 2009. To ensure state-of-the-art convenience for practitioners and comfort for patients, some 300 doctors, nurses, city representatives, and others were part of the planning process. Adding to the convenience, the hospital will then be adjacent to Allegany College of Maryland, which has a comprehensive allied health program, and the Allegany County Health Department.

“This ties our programs directly to the hospital’s future needs for qualified health-care professionals,” says Jon Loff, the director of the college’s Business/Industrial Training Institute. The institute’s other mainstay, employee training courses, have helped lure new corporations to the area, too.

For both Hewett and Lambert, it was gratifying to be included in the planning stages for their department, which will be fully electronic and filmless. The real goal, Hewett says, “is to have a place that’s extremely friendly toward patients. We believe there should never be any other place where people would have to go for radiology now or in the future.”