Drive west out of Baltimore on Route 40 and somewhere past the Beltway the strip malls start speaking Korean. Hangul signs for barbecue houses, bakeries and bathhouses crowd the Baltimore National Pike, and the Koreans in Ellicott City have made this five-mile stretch of suburban Maryland one of the most concentrated Korean communities on the East Coast. In 2021 the state made it official.
The Place
Ellicott City sits in Howard County, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, a town founded in 1772 as Ellicott’s Mills by three Quaker brothers from Pennsylvania who built flour mills along the Patapsco River. The old town, with its granite storefronts climbing a steep hill, is one of the best-preserved 19th-century mill towns in the country.
What most people mean by Ellicott City today, though, is the sprawl of newer subdivisions and shopping centres west of the historic district. Howard County is the wealthiest county in Maryland, with a median household income above $120,000, and Ellicott City’s own median runs higher still.
The schools are the magnet. The Howard County public school system is consistently ranked among the best in the state, and that single fact has shaped where a generation of Korean families chose to put down roots. Almost a quarter of the system’s students are now of Asian descent, a figure that climbs much higher at the schools nearest the Korean Way.
How It Became Korean
From Baltimore’s shops to the suburbs
The story does not begin in Ellicott City. It begins in Baltimore. Most of the Koreans who built this community came to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, part of the wave that followed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and many landed first in the city, where they opened groceries, dry cleaners, liquor stores and wig shops.
It was hard, hands-on work, often in neighbourhoods other merchants had left. The children were frequently born here and raised behind the counter, doing homework on a stool by the register while a parent rang up the last customers of the night. As families built up savings through the 1980s and 1990s, they did what immigrant families have always done in America: they looked for a bigger house and a better school district.
Howard County offered both. The county line was a short drive west, the houses were new, and the schools were the best around. Charlie Sung, longtime leader of the Howard County Korean American community, has described the migration plainly: people came in the seventies and eighties, their kids were born here, and once they were established they moved out to the suburbs, with education the focus of every family.
A corridor takes shape on Route 40
As the families spread across western Howard County, the businesses followed them, and they clustered along Route 40, the Baltimore National Pike. The road was already a commercial spine of older strip malls, and Korean owners began filling the storefronts.
A turning point came in 1999, when a Korean supermarket opened in the Golden Triangle shopping centre on Route 40 to serve the growing population to the north. A full-service Korean grocery anchors any Korean neighbourhood: it draws shoppers, and the restaurants, bakeries and salons gather around it.
By the 2010s the corridor held well over a hundred Korean-owned businesses. Where Koreatowns in Los Angeles or Queens grew up dense and urban, Howard County’s version is suburban, spread along a highway and parked in front of, a Koreatown you reach by car.
Official recognition
The community’s visibility caught up with its size in the late 2010s. In December 2016 the Maryland Department of Transportation designated the five-mile stretch of the Baltimore National Pike, running roughly from Normandy west toward Turf Valley, as the “Korean Way.” The marker recognised what residents already knew, that the highway had become the spine of Korean Maryland.
Local organisers wanted more. The Koreatown Planning Committee Board, formed in 2019, pushed to rebrand the corridor formally and to raise money for traditional palace-style gateway signs. In October 2021 the state officially recognised the area as Maryland’s Koreatown, one of the few Koreatowns in the country backed by a state government rather than just a neighbourhood association.
By then the community numbered an estimated 12,000 to 13,000 Korean Americans across Howard County, and the county’s Korean population had nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010. Korean families had become an unmistakable part of who Ellicott City is.
The Landmarks
Lotte Plaza Market, 8801 Baltimore National Pike. The grocery that anchors the western end of the corridor, a full Korean supermarket with produce, banchan, a butcher and a small food court of stalls selling Korean and Japanese dishes. For many families the weekly Lotte run is the rhythm that organises the rest of Koreatown around it.
H Mart, 3301 North Ridge Road. The national Korean grocery chain’s Ellicott City store, stocked deep with imported goods, fresh seafood and an in-store eatery serving rice and noodle bowls. Between H Mart and Lotte, a Korean kitchen in Howard County need never improvise a substitution.
Honey Pig Koreatown, 10045 Baltimore National Pike. A Korean barbecue house where the tables are built around dome grills and the night runs late. It is the kind of loud, smoky, communal room where second-generation kids bring friends to show them what they grew up eating.
Bon Appetit Bakery and Cafe, 10155 Baltimore National Pike. One of the corridor’s Korean bakeries, the soft milk breads, red-bean pastries and coffee that mark a Korean neighbourhood as surely as the grocery does. Tous Les Jours, the Korean chain, also has a branch nearby at 9380 Baltimore National Pike.
Bethel Korean Presbyterian Church, St. Johns Lane, Ellicott City. One of the community’s church anchors, and home to a Korean school whose weekend classes teach hangul and heritage to children, and in some sessions help adults reconnect with the language. For immigrant families the Korean church is often the first social institution, long before the grocery.
Charles E. Miller Branch Library, 9421 Frederick Road. The Howard County library branch that has hosted Korean-language community classes, a small civic detail that shows how the public institutions of an affluent county have absorbed and reflected the people who moved here.
The Korean Way signage, along Route 40. The palace-style gateway markers, with pillars and tiled roofs, that announce the corridor. A March 2024 to February 2025 Korean pop-up museum at the county welcome centre, drawing some 16,500 visitors, showed how far the community had come from quietly running shops in Baltimore.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Ellicott City are part of the post-1965 immigration from South Korea, a wave drawn by family-reunification visas, professional opportunity and, after the economic strains and political turbulence of the period, the promise of stability in America.
Many arrived already educated and middle-class, or determined that their children would be. They were not, by and large, rural migrants; they were people who saw small business as a foothold and the American school system as the prize.
That ambition is why the path ran through Baltimore’s shops and ended in Howard County’s classrooms. The Korean community here is bound less by a single home province than by a shared strategy: work hard, save, and buy your way into the best schools you can reach. Ellicott City was the answer to that equation.
Ellicott City Today
Today the Korean presence is woven into the texture of an affluent American suburb rather than walled off in an enclave. At Centennial High School, one of the county’s top-ranked schools, Asian students make up close to forty per cent of the enrolment, and Korean surnames fill the honour rolls and the college-acceptance lists that the families crossed a county line for.
The corridor itself keeps evolving. Old Korean barbecue staples now share Route 40 with bubble tea shops, photo-booth studios, dessert cafes and karaoke rooms aimed at a younger, often pan-Asian crowd. The official Koreatown branding markets the area as a cultural destination, drawing diners and tourists from Baltimore and Washington alike.
There is also a quieter relationship with the larger Korean community of the Washington suburbs, the dense world of Koreans in Annandale and Koreans in Centreville across the Potomac in Northern Virginia, and the families of Fairfax. Ellicott City is its own centre of gravity, the Baltimore-area pole of a Korean Mid-Atlantic that stretches from the Beltway to the Capital. For a sense of how different a Korean neighbourhood can look in its urban form, the older world of Koreatown in Los Angeles offers the contrast: dense, vertical, born of the city rather than the suburb.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do Koreans live in Ellicott City, Maryland?
The Korean community in Ellicott City is concentrated in the residential subdivisions of western Howard County and along the five-mile stretch of Route 40, the Baltimore National Pike, officially designated as Maryland’s Koreatown. Korean businesses cluster on the corridor while families live throughout the surrounding neighbourhoods.
Why did so many Koreans settle in Ellicott City?
Most came to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, started small businesses in Baltimore, and later moved to Howard County for its highly ranked public schools and larger homes. Education was the central motivation, with Ellicott City’s school district seen as among the best in Maryland.
Is there really a Koreatown in Howard County, Maryland?
Yes. In December 2016 a five-mile stretch of Route 40 was designated the “Korean Way,” and in October 2021 the state officially recognised the area as Maryland’s Koreatown, marked by traditional Korean palace-style gateway signs.
How many Korean Americans live in the Ellicott City area?
Estimates put the Korean American population of Howard County at roughly 12,000 to 13,000, one of the densest concentrations of Korean Americans in Maryland. The county’s Korean population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010.
What Korean grocery stores and restaurants are in Ellicott City?
The corridor’s anchor grocers are Lotte Plaza Market at 8801 Baltimore National Pike and H Mart at 3301 North Ridge Road. Korean restaurants and bakeries along Route 40 include barbecue houses such as Honey Pig and bakeries such as Bon Appetit and Tous Les Jours.
How does Ellicott City’s Korean community relate to the DC-area Koreans?
Ellicott City anchors the Baltimore side of a Korean Mid-Atlantic that also includes the large Northern Virginia communities of Annandale and Centreville near Washington. The two clusters are linked by family, faith and business, but Ellicott City functions as its own centre.
If your family’s story passed through Ellicott City, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a shop counter in Baltimore to a Howard County classroom, to wherever you are now.