Region/Relocation Information
Welcome to Howard County, Maryland where you can enjoy a rich quality of life with an abundance of places to go, people to meet and landscapes to see. Great restaurants, shopping, recreation, history and people are some of the attributes that make this county an ideal destination.
Howard County is a pleasant melding of the old and new, rural and urban. Ellicott City celebrated its bicentennial a full four years before the United States. Columbia, a modern planned community, is a mere 40 years young.
The county was born on the 4th of July in 1851 as an outgrowth of Anne Arundel County and took its name from George Eager Howard, a Revolutionary War general and the fifth governor of Maryland. Today, with super highways crisscrossing the county, it is hard to imagine that in 1851 it took four days to reach the then county seat in Annapolis. It was partly for this reason that the county was formed, making Ellicott City its county seat. Its easternmost border is the Patapsco River, which in the second half of the 19th century was a thriving waterway where commercial water traffic moved to the port of Baltimore and beyond carrying tobacco, cotton, iron ore and other goods from the region.
Columbia is the largest community in the county and home to over 98,000 residents. Founder Jim Rouse’s vision to build a better city has become a reality. As one of the original planned cities in the United States, its experiments in social and urban planning have become models for communities worldwide.
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