No Cookie-Cutter Community: Bayberry Believes In Dirt, Difference

"I look at Bayberry as a camp for adults," he said. "It's in a rustic, wooded area that isn't totally groomed. People leave work on Friday, go to the grocery store and liquor store, go home and don't leave till Monday."

Much of Bayberry Drive looks like many other suburban streets lined with bright green lawns and driveways leading to oh-so-similar structures. But on the road's northern third, where the Bayberry neighborhood is, thick-trunked trees drip viny tendrils nearly to the ground. The way is narrow, dirt-shouldered, and crowded by more old trees and tangled undergrowth.

Back here, the native dogwoods have survived, gleaming white amid the brown brush on an early spring afternoon. The human habitats blend into rather than dominate the landscape. On mostly third- and half-acre lots, the homes are a mix that includes little brick cottages, white clapboarded saltboxes and rambling ranches.

Edie Segree is president of the Bayberry Community Association's 12-member board. She and her husband, Allan, moved into their split-level home on a half-acre non-waterfront lot in 1965.

"It is the first and only house I ever lived in," Segree said. "It wasn't a development per se then. People bought the lots, then built. That's why all the houses are different."

Bayberry's residents also built the community's common area. That's where many residents spend their weekends, swimming in the shallows of the wide sandy beach, cooking on the community grills or launching their motorboats and sailboats from the pier.

It's not all play, though.

"Everybody pitches in," Nudell said. "If the pier falls down, we're all out there with a hammer."

The 44-year-old father of two traced that attitude to "the elders who kind of pulled us in and said, 'We don't pay for things; we do it ourselves.' " He said, "That builds camaraderie."

Among those elders is Peggy Scheide Hancock, Bayberry's first resident, who moved to the community in the 1950s. The land's owner, for whom she and her husband Mel Scheide worked, gave the lot to the couple, provided that they "build a home and live in it," Hancock said.

But the 1 1/2 -story brick house with its prime view of the river wasn't finished when they had to leave their Baltimore digs.