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Local
Reservoir threatens ex-spy Chambers’ farm

(AP)

Kelsey Volkmann, The Examiner
Mar 7, 2007 3:00 AM (6 hrs ago)
Current rank: # 28 of 21,078 articles
Carroll County - He railed against government invasion of residents’ private lives, but now the government could seize the farm where espionage secrets he hid once were kept.
Carroll County may build a reservoir on the farm where Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet spy who defected to become a critic of communism, stored U.S. State Department documents in carved-out pumpkins that he gave to then-Rep. Richard Nixon in 1948. The documents incriminated another spy, Alger Hiss.
Chambers, a former Time magazine managing editor, claimed Hiss was a member of the Communist Party and Soviet spy. Hiss, a Baltimore City College High School and Johns Hopkins University graduate, was later convicted of perjury in connection with the same allegation in 1950.
“This is a man who single-handedly stood up to state authority and the [county] is now attempting” to take his land, said John Chambers, Whittaker’s son, who now owns the land.
Commissioners recently voted to send their triennial update of the county’s water and sewerage plan — which calls for a reservoir in Union Mills and possibly on Chambers’ Pipe Creek farm — to the state.
Opponents — including 12 U.S. congressmen — criticize the reservoir as an encroachment of the National Historic Landmark, a place “where Whittaker Chambers found sanctuary from the Communist underground and where he bravely and publicly stood his ground to challenge an enemy Communist network while hiding evidence of guilt on this farm,” Mauricio Tamargo, a lawyer from Burke, Va., wrote commissioners.
“Your search for future water sources should not involve this property, and a future federal-county conflict would not be in anyone’s interest,” U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett wrote in another letter.
The county has to determine funding, engineering plans and environmental impacts before commissioners approve the dimensions of the reservoir, a county plan since 1970, said Jeanne Joiner, planning department project coordinator.
“All of a sudden, people are upset, but [the reservoir plans] have always been there. They just didn’t pay attention,” Commissioner Julia Gouge said.
John Chambers and his neighbors have founded a residents’ group, the Union Mills Dam Association, to fight against eminent domain.
kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com
Examiner
http://www.examiner.com/a-604138~Reservoir_threatens_ex_spy_Chambers__fa...