In sweltering summers of the Gilded Age, Baltimore’s wealthiest citizens locked up their Mount Vernon mansions and rowhouses and took trains to the hotel and cottages at Deer Park in the western Maryland mountains.

They drank Deer Park’s spring water — later bottled for the masses — and engaged in an array of activities, all arranged by the owner of the exclusive resort, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The elite of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Washington also sojourned at Deer Park. In June 1886, President Grover Cleveland, the only chief executive to be married in the White House, honeymooned there with his bride, Frances Folsom. (She was 21, he was 49; they had five children.)

Those who could afford it savored relief at the Deer Park compound every summer.

It must have been great while it lasted.

Waves of history — the invention of the automobile, war in Europe, a pandemic, the stock market crash and the Great Depression — washed the Deer Park wonderland away.

In time, Deep Creek Lake became Garrett County’s main destination for vacationers. The B&O’s hotel burned in 1944 and was demolished. Today, there are two remaining Deer Park cottages, one of them built in the late 19th century by a Baltimore architect named Josias Pennington. (He was the designer of the B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards, among other buildings.)

At some point, the Pennington Cottage became the Deer Park Inn, and that’s where we found ourselves one evening last week — just off the old hotel road, in a woodsy section of town. Only about 300 people live in Deer Park now, and that includes the owners of the inn, Sandy and Pascal Fontaine.

We sat at a linen-covered table on the old porch, waiting for dinner to arrive. In those minutes, I was struck by the near-perfect silence. I counted only three sounds: the song of a wren, the light buzz of a hummingbird drawn to hanging flower baskets and soft music whispering through the inn’s open front door.

I looked down, across the lawn, to the narrow road and imagined black buggies of the 19th century, then the first Fords of the 20th century, carrying the long-gone lucky to their summer quarters. The moment seemed a little ghostly.

And then, when the meal started to arrive — a rich corn chowder, followed by monkfish on one plate, beef tenderloin on the other, surrounded by fresh vegetables — I had to wonder how such a thing happened.

How did a French chef end up in this remote place?

Pascal, who turns 69 this month, worked in kitchens in Europe, the Middle East and Florida before landing with his wife and two sons in rural Maryland.

He grew up in the Loire Valley, trained in culinary arts in Paris and was a cook by age 17. After moving through numerous jobs — in France, Germany, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Bermuda — he took a position as head chef of a restaurant in Coral Gables, near Miami.

After that, he became executive chef of a hotel in Washington. He was there for 13 years, in charge of 30 cooks.

His sous chef, Cristeta Comerford, went on to become executive chef at the White House in 1995.

Around that same time, Pascal and Sandy Fontaine decided to leave Washington and buy the shuttered Deer Park Inn.

“I was spending too much time out of the house,” he says. “So we say, you know, maybe it’s time for me to do something with the family. …We were visiting this area and the (inn) was closed. We made an appointment and we made an offer and before we know it, we’ve been here 28 years.”

For Pascal, the move meant a return to the daily cooking-from-scratch that happens well below the rank of executive chef.

He built a menu of classic French cuisine with American accents.

One of the first challenges was adjusting the menu for the seasons and finding good ingredients.

He decided early on that the best source for bread was his own kitchen; he’s been baking multigrain loaves each day for years. Getting good, fresh seafood requires frequent trips to a market in Washington. But Pascal buys his produce, some meats and cheeses from local farmers, many of them Amish and Mennonite. He travels about 30 miles to Springs, Pennsylvania, for more.

“There’s a produce auction in Springs,” he says, “and this time of year, right now, it’s like being in a candy store.”

Leeks are a big part of French cuisine, but not Garrett County farming. So, for a time, Pascal convinced an Amish family to grow them for his kitchen. He’s also harvested, cooked and pickled wild ramps, the small leek-like plant primarily found in the eastern Appalachians each spring.

The Fontaines make preserves from local fruits and berries; the inn’s entrance hallway is stocked with jars of jams from strawberries, peaches, pears and blackberries.

Pascal creates his own pastries, too, and the standard menu includes his dark chocolate pâté.

The inn’s prime season is Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s open only on weekends the rest of the year. All the entrees come with “special occasion prices,” something that made sense once we ate and found Pascal’s dishes superb, once we understood the primarily summer business model and appreciated the need for maintenance of the old inn.

And, of course, there’s the peaceful atmosphere of the porch, the sense of history, the hummingbird softly buzzing by.