10-26-2023 Howard - Flipbook - Page 66
RETRO HOCO
BY MIKE KLINGAMAN Howard Magazine
When Savage brought Santa south
A wealthy businessman had plans to resurrect the struggling town into a Christmas village
This 1949 photo shows the circus that mill owner Harry“Santa”Heim held in the New Weave Building at Savage Mill. SUBMITTED PHOTO
Seventy-five years ago, the textile town
of Savage was on the ropes. After World
War II, the 19th century cotton mill closed,
putting residents out of work and plunging
the blue-collar community into bankruptcy. The good news? Santa Claus was
coming to town.
In 1948, Harry Heim, a wealthy Baltimore businessman, purchased Savage and
all its assets for $450,000, with plans to
resurrect the struggling town as a yearround, life-size Christmas village. Heim
had made his fortune manufacturing
holiday ornaments; why not refurbish the
textile mill to do the same in Savage, while
decking the town with twinkling lights and
boughs of holly?
Heim’s goal was to transform Savage
(pop. 1,200) into both a Santa’s workshop
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and a dreamscape for kids, complete with
tinseled trees, reindeer and a Christmas
castle.
“I always prayed some day that I would
help people,” he told The Baltimore Sun,
“and who is better to help than thousands
of children?”
Work proceeded on the town’s Yuletide
mien and, on Dec. 11, 1948, Heim held a
gala opening. Nearly 15,000 people poured
into the little village on the banks of the
Little Patuxent River, including three B&O
trainloads of children from Baltimore and
Washington. There, they were welcomed
by a bewhiskered Santa and a parade led by
a German oompah band that marched past
homes dressed in holiday cheer. Even the
post office was done up in red and white,
its poles outside masked as candy canes.
Then William Preston Lane Jr., governor of Maryland, spoke to the crowd.
“We hope to provide a home in Maryland permanently for Santa Claus so he
won’t have to go back to the North Pole,”
Lane proclaimed.
But Heim wasn’t finished. He later
added a carnival to the grounds, including
a 1,000-seat circus tent with live animals to
draw folks in.
Success was short-lived. In 1949, Heim
was convicted of failing to file his Maryland income tax return. A year later, the
carnival tent was deemed a fire hazard and
closed by the state fire marshal. In 1951,
weighed by debt, Heim closed shop and
sold the town to a fixtures manufacturer.
Two years later, he suffered a heart attack
and died.
