In the winter of 1963, mysterious buyers began gobbling up Howard County farms left and right, fueling speculation by residents as to who or what was behind the land grab.

Some thought a massive compost pile was coming. Others thought the farmland would become a rocket launch site. Rumors even spread that a Volkswagen plant was coming.

None of these theories panned out.

The mystery of the 14,000 acres of purchased farmland was revealed in October 1963 when a pioneering real estate developer, James Rouse, presented Howard County officials with his grand idea to build an all new city called Columbia.

Why all the secrecy? Simply so farmers wouldn’t catch on and raise the prices of their land.

A staunch opponent of urban sprawl, Rouse knew the Howard County farmland would be developed — it was just a matter of when.

“It’s really the landscape, the location and the assemblage of lands that makes Howard County so advantageous to be sort of this canvas for Rouse’s vision,” said Nicholas Redding, president and CEO of Preservation Maryland.

Code name: Shangri-La

Before founding Columbia, Rouse dabbled in mortgage banking and built shopping malls, including the old Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, which when it opened in 1958 was the first enclosed mall on the East Coast.

In the 1960s, he turned his attention to planned communities. Rouse’s first inquiry about a planned community was on land owned by the Rockefeller family in Pocantico Hills, New York. While the plan didn’t come to fruition, it paved the way for Rouse to develop The Village of Cross Keys, a mixed-use community off Falls Road in Baltimore.

Rouse executed the Columbia project — code-named “Shangri-La,” after a fictional Himalayan utopia in James Hilton’s 1933 book “Lost Horizon” — through a subsidiary of The Rouse Company, Howard Research and Development.

He set his sights on Howard County because it was possible then to ”responsibly project” that the Baltimore-Washington corridor would grow by a million people in two decades, Rouse wrote in the foreword to Robert Tennenbaum’s 1996 book, “Creating a New City: Columbia Maryland.”

“Shouldn’t it be possible to plan between those two cities a small city of 100,000 people to account in a rational, convenient and responsible way for a part of that growth?” Rouse wrote.

Columbia now has a population of about 105,000 residents, Census figures show.

A ‘New Town’

Rouse didn’t want to develop another cookie-cutter suburban community. Columbia would become a “garden for the growing of people,” Rouse famously said, with houses built around nature (not the other way around), and neighborhoods filled with residents of different races, religions and socioeconomic statuses.

Rouse envisioned a community where people could live, work and play. It was part of a “New Towns” movement that produced Reston, Virginia three years earlier and would spawn The Woodlands outside Houston in the early 1970s.

The developer didn’t want to build just homes, but also an accompanying town center with office buildings, stores, restaurants and a large shopping mall. Rouse constructed manmade lakes and miles of pathways for walking, jogging and biking.

“So he was like, ‘Well, you know it’s [development] going to happen. Why not try a planned community here?’” said Erin Berry, the archivist for the Columbia Maryland Archives.

Rouse had four main goals: build an entire city, respect the land, create an environment that accommodated population growth and turn a profit.

“The effort [to create Columbia] was very lengthy planning,” said Ted Rouse, one of Rouse’s sons, in an interview. He remembers traveling with his father to European planned communities in the early 1960s for inspiration.

“What Columbia is about is building a development that respects the environmental aspects and ecosystems,” Ted Rouse said. “Where the river valleys are, where the marshes are.”

Funding the dream

But before his father’s vision could be realized, the elder Rouse needed funding.

He turned to Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., which agreed to provide the funds for acquiring the land (including real estate taxes and interest). Rouse would manage the land acquisition, as well as planning and predevelopment.

The companies formed the Howard Research and Development Corp., though Rouse used multiple shell companies to acquire the land.

Within nine months, roughly 14,000 acres — covering 165 farms and smaller land parcels — had been purchased for some $18 million.

While Rouse said the buying began in February 1963, a crucial first parcel was purchased the year prior after a Rouse Company board member spotted 1,039 acres of farmland for sale on Cedar Lane.

In recognition of the life insurance company’s $23 million in financial support, Rouse named Columbia’s first village, Wilde Lake, after Frazar B. Wilde, Connecticut General’s fourth president.

The secretive strategy in some ways mirrored that of Walt Disney, who set up fake companies and delayed the recording of deeds in order to quietly assemble 27,400 acres in Orlando, Florida, for what would become Walt Disney World in 1971.

Could Rouse’s financing plan work today?

“Financing large speculative land purchases without approvals? It would be almost impossible today,” Redding said.

Besides keeping the farmers and the county in the dark, few Rouse Company employees knew about their boss’s vision.

In the early days of planning, only a few employees, including Tennenbaum, William Finley and Mort Hoppenfeld, were clued in, according to Baltimore magazine.

Tennenbaum became a chief architect-planner on the project. He was responsible for preserving the area’s environmental landscape and selecting the locations of Columbia’s 10 villages.

While Finley and Hoppenfield were learning Howard County’s political ropes and planning next steps, Tennebaum worked in “a secret room locked from the outside” in the legal counsel’s office, according to his 1996 book.

After informing county officials of his intentions in October 1963, the developer assembled a team called the “Work Group” to create more detailed plans.

Then, on Nov. 11, 1964, he made a formal presentation to county leaders officials about his vision for Columbia.

The next year, Howard County Commissioners approved a special “New Town zoning” that allowed for construction to begin in June 1966.

Work began on two human-made waterways (Lake Kittamaqundi and Wilde Lake), Town Center’s first commercial buildings went up, and the Bryant Woods residential neighborhood was built, according to the Columbia Association.

The June 21, 1967, dedication ceremony at Wilde Lake marked the beginning of Columbia.

Rouse’s legacy

Today, Columbia is nearing its 60th birthday. While it’s about a fifth of the size of Baltimore, it ranks as Maryland’s second-most populous community.

Even after all these years, Rouse’s vision still guides Columbia: All of the villages have quasi-governmental boards overseen by the Columbia Association’s Board of Directors, which resembles a town council.

At a recent news conference presenting plans for a Columbia lakefront library and a nearby apartment building, which will include affordable housing, several speakers echoed Rouse’s words.

“Today, Columbia stands out as one of America’s greatest success stories. Downtown Columbia continues to grow as a vibrant and inclusive community that reflects Jim Rouse’s original vision of a ‘garden for growing people,’” Howard County Executive Calvin Ball said.

After Columbia was up and running, Rouse turned his sights in the 1970s to creating immensely popular festival marketplaces in Baltimore, Boston and elsewhere.

Rouse retired from The Rouse Company in 1979, with Harborplace marking his final big development endeavor. He died in 1996 from Lou Gehrig’s disease at the age of 81.

Ted Rouse doesn’t think another Columbia could be built in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, though perhaps one could be constructed in a less-populated area, such as between Columbia and Frederick.

“Some places where farming isn’t working and the farmers are getting old and the young people don’t want to take over,” Ted Rouse said. “So they feel a pressure to sell.”

To Redding, of Preservation Maryland, “Columbia is ambitious no matter what way you look at it,” from how the pieces came together to all that Rouse and his team set out to do, from integrated housing to open space and civic amenities.

Much of what Rouse was trying to accomplish in developing Columbia is still being pursued in communities today, Redding said.

“So not to suggest that we need another Columbia, but we certainly need to take an ounce of Rouse’s vision and figure out how to create more inclusive and affordable places for people to live,” Redding said.