News & Events

This legislation calls for a deep dive on “the history, operations, and resident deaths” at the facility and the wooded area that was its cemetery. That site includes about 300 gravestones and cinder blocks that mark where some of the Black boys were buried from the 19th into the 20th centuries.

MoCoLMP will be highlighting our county’s 250th with a rich array of events

A historic Black community in Montgomery County, Maryland Hawkins Lane, Bethesda, MD. Photo by Neile Whitney 2025. Driving up Hawkins Lane in Chevy Chase, Maryland, still gives a sense of what this small kinship community must have been like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This kinship community was founded by James H. Hawkins in 1893, when he bought three acres of land that had in until 1867 belonged to a white farmer named James Hawkins. Residents in the late 20t

A historic black community in Montgomery County, Maryland Macedonia Baptist Church, Bethesda, MD. The heart of the River Road communities: Clipper Road, Dorsey Road, Crows Hill In the 1900 U.S. census, John and Martha Clipper and their six sons and two daughters lived in Bethesda, Maryland next to George Clipper (his son? 27 years apart in age) and George’s wife Lucy and their three children. The adult men were working as day laborers. Apparently the census takers had stopped

The Rock Spring Club was one of the hotels that were built near the C&O Canal and employed local Black residents.

The River Road/Crow Hill community of about 33 families ( (Roberts 2017) was located in Bethesda, MD about where the McDonald’s is now.

Miller's Flats was a small residential neighborhood in Bethesda Maryland.

The Alabama community in Poolesville is a mystery. We believe existed somewhere on W. Willard Rd.

The Pine Top community on Riffle Ford Rd. was linked to the Brownstown community in Germantown.

MoCoLMP lays a wreath in memory of Mr. George Peck, lynched in 1880, and talks about how to push back against racism.

The community’s first church, Potomac Grove Colored Church, was built on Violettes Lock Road in 1893 by a community formed by workers at the local stone quarry, near the C&O Canal.

Book talk, Jason Green, Feb. 23, 2026 at peoples books in Takoma Park, Maryland.

The Brownstown community was founded in 1868 by William Brown, who bought ten acres here.

Racism and racial violence in Montgomery County, MS.

A short history of the Big Woods historic Black community in Maryland the 1800s.

The historic Black community of Sugarland, was founded in 1871 in Poolesville, MD.

“IT HAPPENED HERE: REMEMBERING THREE LYNCHINGS” was developed by MoCoLMP and reveals the forgotten and nearly-erased history that occurred in our county. Originally focused on the two lynchings that took place in Rockville, the exhibit has recently expanded to include Mr. Peck’s lynching in Poolesville. With site markers and photographs, this exhibit traces the paths of the three lynchings: Mr. George Peck in 1880, Mr. John Diggs-Dorsey in 1880 and Mr. Sidney Randolph in 1896

What happened to them? What could they do and where could they go when they had nothing, and may not have known where to go and how to get there? Learning about our historic Black communities in Montgomery County, MD.

You are warmly invited to join us at a panel on Saturday at the Poolesville library.

Did 1860s Montgomery County, MD have farms or plantations? Language is important.