John was born and raised in Granite, descended from the Nash, Zepp and Albright clans of Woodstock and Granite. John has served as the GHS treasurer for 10 years, arranges the Spring and Fall history hikes each year and has given a number of Speaker Series presentations during his tenure.
On March 17, 2026, GHS presented a a slideshow tour of Granite. Photos of 43 historic buildings and sites (some no longer existing) were displayed with brief descriptions of each. This photo tour traveled from Woodstock and north along Old Court Road including St. Paul and Melrose Avenues. A future photo tour will feature historic…
During the first third of the 20th century many young men from Granite and Woodstock played on a highly competitive sandlot baseball club. They played at two different baseball diamonds on the grounds of the Woodstock College and in 1911 they were crowned Howard County champs. That team actually featured an out-of-towner, Harry Reisberg from…
In an effort to answer this question, John Brantley researched 10 different men whose names have been associated with early Granite history by local historians and amateur genealogists and in print over the years. He discovered that three of those 10 never actually lived in Granite. And he discovered that the first person to actually…
The closest actual Civil War battle to Granite was the Battle of Monocacy, near Frederick. However, Union troops occupied the Patapsco River valley throughout the war in order to protect the railroad, and interestingly enough, shot and killed one Rebel soldier along the river near Wright’s Mill. All told, there were 35 men from Woodstock…
RAIN, RAIN GO AWAY. That childhood ditty kept running through my mind for the two days before the GHS Spring Hike planned for Saturday, May 14th 2022. For two days the rain pelted and the forecast for Saturday looked even worse – nothing but thunderstorms in the offing. Luckily, on Saturday morning the forecast brightened…
On May 24th, 1830, tickets went on sale for the first passenger train service between Mount Claire in Baltimore and Ellicott Mills, a distance some 13 miles. Three Years earlier 25 Baltimore bankers and merchants had met in the home of George Brown, a director at Alex Brown & Sons, to charter the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company with a 25-million-dollar stock issuance.
A History of the Woodstock Bus Line, the first licensed bus service in Maryland
On what turned into a pleasantly warm October 24th afternoon, a dozen members of the Granite Historical Society, not to mention a few non-members, toured the Worthington Manor site (sometimes called “Worthington Plantation”), the home and center of farming activity for Thomas Worthington starting in the 1760s. T.W. was the largest landholder in Granite history….
The Woodstock College was a leading institution of Jesuit training known throughout the world. John Brantley, who befriended a number resident scholastics while growing up in Granite during the 1950s and 60s, provided a unique insight into the buildings, all built from Fox Rock granite, the beautifully landscaped campus, the athletic facilities and hiking trails…
