Legend has it that Clara May Downey discovered the site of the Olney Inn when she got a flat tire near the 1875 Montgomery County farmhouse. It was the mid-1920s and Downey was considering following many women into the business of operating a tearoom.
Instead of a dainty tearoom catered towards women, Downey’s restaurant (it never operated as a true inn) would become a local institution that operated for 50 years. It is still fondly remembered today.
Baltimore certainly didn’t have a monopoly on the grandiose “Welcome to the South” style of dining that was fashionable in the early 20th century. Montgomery County, though once home to many abolitionist Quakers, also had many citizens who “did not forget their Southern Bonds.*” Downey’s restaurant offered up Southern-style hospitality – complete with house-cured hams and produce grown on the Inn’s sprawling grounds.
A 1940 menu advertised with a vaguely nostalgic tone that the “colored help [sang] spirituals as they [went] about their work.” Later advertisements into the 1970s touted Olney Inn’s “plantation cookery.”
In typically frustrating Maryland fashion, the restaurant employed many Black cooks whose names are lost to time. Their hard work and talent helped build Clara May Downey’s legacy.
By all accounts, the cookery truly was impressive. Clara May Downey began to make headlines in the 1930s by winning cooking contests and sharing recipes and hosting tips. One Martha-Stewart-esque feature in the Brooklyn Eagle featured a Halloween tablescape with whimsical menu suggestions for “Fairy Food” and “Goblin’s Gruel,” with Downey’s own recipe for doughnuts meant to be served on vertical holders at either end of the table.
In 1935, she opened a second location of the Olney Inn in Florida, followed by a New York location in 1941. As the only female board member of the National Restaurant Owners’ Association, she advocated for employee training to enable more women to enter the restaurant business.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle table suggestion from Clara May Downey, 1933
“There are plenty of good jobs for women in the restaurant field,” she declared in 1933, but little training available with owners like herself tied up in the work of running the business.
She had plenty to say about the food as well. In 1937 she lectured the Association on the quality of the raw materials – fruits, vegetables and poultry which restaurants “manufactured” into “wholesome and delicious morsels fit for human consumption.” She pointed out the number of people who worked to grow, harvest, and ship the food, declaring that failure to properly prepare the food is a waste of the hard work of all of those people.
Although “good cooks hate to be bothered with measuring,” Downey insisted on standardizing the recipes of the Olney Inn for consistency. At the time, she estimated that the Olney Inn made hundreds of gallons of jams, jellies, and pickles in their specially made preserving department.
The most astoundingly prescient detail of the 1937 address is the note that her restaurants used a “home movie which shows how we wish to have our guest greeted,” and how to stack trays when carrying dishes to the kitchen.
In 1945, Frederick Phillip Stieff, author of “Eat, Drink and be Merry in Maryland” remarked in the Baltimore Sun that he couldn’t think of any famous female cooks. He cited a personal friend “Mrs. T. Rowland Thomas of North Calvert Street” and Mrs. Clara May Downey as exceptional female cooks nonetheless.
Downey contributed two recipes to “Eat, Drink and be Merry in Maryland.”
Clara May Downey in the news
After Clara May Downey, two subsequent women owned and operated the Olney Inn. Katherine Weiniger ran the restaurant from 1950-1954. Gertrude Allison Brewster was the owner from 1954 until around 1966.
Brewster was a respected cook in her own right, with a dietetics degree from Johns Hopkins as well as experience under the tutelage of Julia Child, who she met at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in France.
Brewster continued the traditions of using local produce and canning on-site. She contributed recipes to “Maryland’s Way: The Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook” for Rhubarb Conserve and “Sandy Spring Quaker Relish” among other recipes like smothered chicken and shrimp bisque.
These sweet potatoes with black walnuts and sherry are well-remembered and well worth making. Maybe don’t use white sweet potatoes if you want them to look a little more appetizing, however.
Gertrude Allison Brewster, Asheville Citizen Times, 1970
When DeWitt Yates took over the Olney Inn in the late 1960s, he sold off a lot of the surrounding properties. It was no longer economical to grow and prepare so much of the raw ingredients. The restaurant remained a beloved institution, often employing skilled musicians for ambiance. Many diners fondly remember a blind piano player – if you know his name please let me know!
In 1975, Yates sold the Olney inn to Harry Simms. According to the Frederick News, Simms, a politician and real-estate investor, bought the inn for his son Michael. While the restaurant was to stay more or less the same, Michael, with a drama degree from University of Maryland, wanted to open a dinner theater on the property. The Simms also made some changes to make the food more affordable.
In 1978, Harry Simms was in the process of selling the inn to a developer when the property caught fire and the inn burned to the ground. Michael was suspected of arson but was ultimately never charged.
The Olney Inn is just one of several buildings in the historic Olney district of Montgomery County which were tragically lost to fire during this time.
The silver lining is the relative wealth of surviving recipes. Thanks to Clara May Downey’s good sense to document the food that made her famous, we can still make Olney Inn Sweet Potatoes, Chicken Livers with Pilaff Indienne, or even “Genie’s Smothered Chicken” – said to be a favorite of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Recipe:
- 4 Cups cooked, mashed sweet-potato
- .5 Cup sherry
- .25 Teaspoon salt
- .5 Cup sugar
- .25 Cups chopped black walnuts
- 2 eggs, beaten
- .5 Cups melted butter
Whip all ingredients together until light. Fold into buttered pan and make in moderate oven until golden.
* Coleman, Margaret Marshall and Anne Dennis Lewis in “Montgomery County: A Pictorial History,” 1984. The book mentions a Confederate memorial built in Silver Spring many years after the war.
Also referenced: “Olney: Echoes of the Past” by Healan Barrow and Kristine Stevens, 2000