The barn( left) and smokehouse( above) are original to the 1862 Johnson homestead.
Comus area schoolteachers who were boarders in the home. Levin added the long porch across the back of the building on the ground level and the chicken house that now runs alongside the Inn. Johnson’ s eight sons sold the property in 1936. The new owners sold it to the Spates family in 1945, whose vision built the legacy of The Comus Inn as a public gathering place.
The Birth of a Restaurant mus Inn we know today came just a decade later, when Johnson sold 30 acres and the log farmhouse to Joel Hamilton Wolfe. Wolfe was a“ smithy,” a blacksmith whose forge kept the area horses in shoes and produced or repaired farm tools, as well as the iron railings used in the Monocacy Aqueduct. Wolfe expanded the house significantly to the two-story gabled roof building that forms the core of today’ s inn, encapsulating the Johnson’ s log cabin. Wolfe was an industrious landowner, and promoted the area as a healthy retreat from the city, advertising its“ mountain air” in local newspapers. Because Wolfe was primarily a tradesman and not a farmer as many of the neighboring owners of larger land tracts were, there is no large bank barn on the property. He continued his blacksmith operation until his retirement in 1902, selling the property to a Johnson descendant, Levin B. Johnson. Johnson’ s daughters lived in the house for years, as well as
It was the Spates family that had the foresight to create the precursor to The Comus Inn we know today. John“ Jack” and Jeannette Spates purchased the land and house in 1945. They lived there for more than a decade, moving to a farm nearby when his brother Ed Spates and his wife Dorothy took over the property and began fulfilling the family’ s collective vision of creating a much-needed restaurant for local residents, in addition to visitors to Sugarloaf Mountain and the surrounding countryside. They dreamed of a country-style
plenty I autumn harvest 2025 9