Then and Now: The Maple Rest Tea Room

From homemade milkshakes, to local crab cake sandwiches, to imported Korean cars — that’s a broad history for one small corner of York Road and Bellona Avenue in Lutherville.

Decades ago, the Maple Rest Tea Room was a mom-n-pop soda counter where Lutherville students caught the bus to Towson High School and availed themselves of the milkshakes, sodas, candy and newspapers sold within.

Bud Cornell, a Lutherville resident for most of his 79 years, remembers the Maple Rest well.

“They had at least one pinball machine,” recalled Cornell. “My experience with it was primarily going there after church on Sunday to pick up the Sunday Sun.”

Cornell and his cousin Jim Long, who currently helps run the Baltimore County Historical Society, both remember William “Big Bill” Whitelock, who owned and ran the Maple Rest after a series of previous owners.

“He used to have model houses for the railroad exhibits, like the old Towson Fire Hall, and a train garden,” Long said. “He always had them on display in a case on the countertop.”

After the Maple Rest, Mr. Fifteen took over the York Road and Bellona corner. Mr. Fifteen was a carry-out fast food chain that got its name from selling 15-cent sodas and fries. “Mr. Fifteen built in the early 60s,” remembered Long. “It had no dining room — you walked up to the counter from the parking lot.”

By 1968, a teenaged Long was working at the corner’s next incarnation, which many of us will remember as Baltimore’s own White Coffee Pot Jr.  White Coffee Pot Jr. was known for its bread pudding and Maryland-style fried chicken, but Long remembers their other fare.

“We had the best fish sandwiches, and the best crab cake sandwiches and crab soup,” he said.

The last White Coffee Pot Jr. closed in 1993 in Brooklyn Park, Md. By then, the Lutherville corner was Jack’s Corned Beef. A few years later, in 1997, the burgers, fries and sodas yielded to the Kia dealership that we see there today.

Mike Williams, the manager at Nationwide Kia, said that customers often come in to shop for a car and remember having eaten, in the same spot, at Jack’s Corned Beef.  He likes being part of a long local history.

“Nationwide has been in the community for 40 years,” said Williams. “We’re just looking to take care of our neighbors.”

Big Bill Whitelock would have agreed.  And it’s for more reasons than simply that he served sodas to his neighbors in the same location. Whitelock went on, after the Maple Rest, to work up the street at the old Cheiftan Pontiac, and sold Jim Long his first car.

Now that’s Lutherville coming full circle.