The path is quiet in the woods where Baltimore and Howard counties meet along the Patapsco River near Ellicott City. Along this peaceful stretch, no cranes hoist construction materials, no restaurant chains beckon, no office parks loom.

But look closely, and you can see there once was a town. The ruins remain, overgrown with brambles and weeds, the stone stairs a soft mess of leaves and moss and the detritus of time.

The town of Daniels is not exactly lost, but nor is it easy to find.

Park in the tiny gravel lot off Dogwood Road, just west of Hollifield Road. Follow the gravel path into the woods, past a house, to Patapsco Valley State Park’s Alberton Road trailhead. Follow that to a half-buried car from the 1960s on the opposite riverbank.

Walk a few more minutes, keeping your eyes peeled for a fire road that takes you up a steep hill. Up there, you’ll find the remains of St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church, which burned down in 1926 after a lightning strike.

The town of Daniels, which included the church, hung on for another four decades after that, until the C.R. Daniels textile mill closed in 1968 rather than modernize. Flash flooding from Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972 ended the story, pulling up gravestones and carrying old cars downstream, burying them in mud and debris.

The storm left the ghost town that so many local hikers delight in visiting today.

The Baltimore region is no stranger to lost towns. The town of Warren was once home to 900 residents, several churches, a mill and a school. It flooded 100 years ago when the Loch Raven dam created the reservoir that feeds Baltimore and the surrounding areas.

Sparrows Point was the company town for Bethlehem Steel, with its own day care centers, houses of worship, social clubs and homes on the banks of Bear Creek in Dundalk. Bethlehem Steel demolished the company town in 1974 for a new furnace. Only outlines of paved streets remain in a wooded area near Tradepoint Atlantic in Dundalk.

Texas in Baltimore County, too, was a company town, with Irish immigrants toiling at the quarry. The rocky hole in the ground remains active, but the town is long gone, now part of Cockeysville. In Cumberland, little remains of the company town around the Celanese Textile Factory, which is now the state’s Western Correctional Institution.

“There’s no push to keep local history,” said William Barry, a Baltimore-area labor historian.

In Daniels, there’s still something to see — for now.

Visitors can hike a flat mile and a half along the Patapsco to the ruins. Fall is a great time to do it; the river, filled with boulders and surrounded with pops of color from the changing leaves of sweet gum and black walnut trees, is so clear visitors can see fish swimming.

Roger Tarr, a carpenter who grew up in Ellicott City, loved to explore the ruins as a teenager.

He returned recently on a beautiful fall day with his friend, Mark “Indy” Kochte, the author of the guidebook “A Guide to Climbing in Central Maryland.” Kochte was belaying the rope for Meiyan Dong, who was hoisting herself up a rock face along the trail.

“It’s kind of sad now how many stones have come down now from the church,” Tarr said. “I don’t know if it’s nature, or if it’s people being people. People are destructive.”

Elements have not been kind to Daniels, or the other mills once rooted in the Patapsco Valley. Early entrepreneurs convinced area farmers to grow wheat, instead of tobacco, to mill into products consumed in Colonial times.

Storms sheared off the roofs of the towns, and fire destroyed many of the mills, forcing them to rebuild. In 1810, Thomas Ely founded the town of Elysville, which later became Alberton and then Daniels in 1940 when the C.R. Daniels Company bought it to make canvas products.

When companies own the town, the workers depend on their employers for everything, and as a result, Barry said, workers are less likely to form unions or otherwise revolt against the rules. It’s one thing to lose a job, quite another to lose housing, communities and churches.

“Company towns were a way of keeping control,” Barry said.

Phoebe Evans Letocha, a Johns Hopkins University historian and archivist who chairs the Baltimore County Landmarks Preservation Commission, said the St. Stanislaus church can tell visitors a lot about the community. The remnants include stone steps, cobblestone walls, and an area where stained glass windows must have been encased in dome-like shapes. The ruins felt Gothic, unusual for a time when many churches were wood frame.

The fire road that climbs up to the church indicates that the structure overlooked the town, Letocha said. It was likely the best-fortified building there; its walls still stand despite the fire and tropical storm.

There are more ruins beyond the church. Past the church, along the main trail, a number of stone foundations are visible in the woods.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources recommends following the 3.6-mile out-and-back trail under the CSX bridge and to the Daniels Dam, which powered the mill and may be removed. There is a swimming impoundment where town residents would gather and ruins of another church, called Pentecostal Church.

Back in the day, according to DNR, those on the Howard County side of the river, where the mill was located, felt superior to those on the Baltimore County side, in part because they were on higher ground. It was likely insufferable, but they did end up outlasting their Baltimore County neighbors.

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Phoebe Evans Letocha's name.