For a bar or restaurant that has been around as long as Oliver’s Old Towne Tavern, there are bound to be some bad days mixed in with many good ones over the years. December 24, 2022, was a very bad day. Marylanders will remember that this past Christmas Eve saw temperatures freakishly dip down into the single digits. Santa Claus came to town that night and found Laurel was just as cold as the North Pole. And earlier that day, Oliver’s got a big, old lump of coal in its stocking in the form of a burst water pipe that resulted in this Laurel landmark being shut down for more than two months.
The memory is still raw for owner-operator Lenny Wohlfarth, who recalled to the Beverage Journal, “The temperatures had indeed dropped into single digits. There actually were quite a few properties in the Laurel area that suffered similar damage. I can’t verify this, but one of our firefighters said they had had at least 150 calls for pipes and various things like that. We opened up at Noon because there was a lot of football on TV that day. Around 2:30-3 o’clock in the afternoon, my wife [Pamela Wohlfarth] who was working and the other staff noticed that water was coming out from some of the light fixtures in the back of the bar. So, they started bringing trash cans and buckets. Even some customers were grabbing pails and anything they could do to help.”