The land on this corner of North Stokes Street and Pennington Avenue was first owned by Peter Lesley Hopper (1856-1917), who owned a lot of property in the city. The 1894 Sanborn Insurance Map shows a building at this location that was a one-story Salvation Army Barracks. But by June 1897, the Susquehanna Shirt Factory of Havre de Grace was started here with a “full force of employees.” However, in July 1898 it was announced that the lease for the shirt factory was transferred to the “William H. Towles Manufacturing Company” who had outgrown their plant in Baltimore. The capacity of this factory was deemed sufficient to work about 150 employees. “Their trade extends over the entire country, and the location here will be a permanent one,” the announcement said. By 1899 the long one-story building with a small rear one-story addition was working at full capacity. They manufactured “Jeans, Nainsooks & Canton Flannel Drawers.”

The 1904 Sanborn Map shows the Havre de Grace Steam Laundry located here, owned by T. Milton Carroll, but by 1910 the premises were vacant. That most likely is because T. Milton Carroll had begun Carroll’s Laundry around 1903 in a building nearby. By 1921, this was the location of the Havre de Grace Motor Company garage, with a capacity for 35 cars, while during the 1940s a skating rink existed here.

The Improved Benevolent Order of Elks Lodge #314 (the African-American Elks Lodge) was in a two-story building here at #200 facing Stokes Street in 1945 when Emma J. Currier (wife of Oliver R. Currier) sold it to them. It bordered on Pennington Avenue on the south, Centennial Avenue on the west, and Stokes Street on the east. Due to overcrowding at the Colored School on Alliance Street, the Elks Club permitted primary school classes to be held here on the second floor. The last class they held here was in 1952.

In 1952, Thomas Earl Borneman and his wife, Elizabeth “Libby,” opened Chesapeake Rent-All, also called United Rent-All, in #212 and hired Merrill Dougherty shortly after that. In the large corner lot they had several sheds and outbuildings and rented a variety of equipment (probably after demolishing the Elks Lodge building). Merrill Dougherty took ownership in 1996 and ran the business here for several more years.

Around 2009 Merrill Dougherty relocated his rental business to the Post Road, consolidated his three lots into a parcel of 30,000 square feet and sold the property for development of St. John’s Commons. All the buildings were demolished and an apartment building for subsidized senior living was constructed by 2011 with the address of 601 Pennington Avenue and known as St. John’s Commons.

County Records
Built 2011. 34,161 sq ft, 30,000 sq ft lot, apartment home for elderly. Harford County records list this as 601 Pennington Avenue.