Miller's Flats

A historic Black community in Montgomery County, Maryland

Homes in Miller's Flats. Photo courtesy of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC).

Miller’s Flats was a small residential neighborhood originally near what is now Bethesda Row. Black families here would have worked in the nearby coal and lumber yards. (Offutt 2009)

Screenshot, “Millers Sub,” 1904 Baist Map of Bethesda, MD. “Miller's Sub” is by the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue/Rockville Pike and Bethesda Avenue. (Baist Map 1904)

In the 1917 Deets & Maddox map of Bethesda, we see the B&O Railroad tracks, which included the Georgetown Electric Railroad (now the Capital Crescent Trail) crossing Wisconsin Avenue. Surrounding these are the flats (one-story apartments) built for Miller coal company employees. They stretched from close to today’s Hampden Lane down almost to Bradley Boulevard, and to the west of Wisconsin Avenue on land that appears to have belonged to the U.S.

Experimental Station of Animal Industry. Today’s Miller’s Avenue is towards the middle of what was this residential area.

The Deets and Maddox maps are different plates on different pages, so are difficult to show here, but part of it is below. Other sources suggest that the larger of the 143 lots were rented to white employees and the smaller lots for Black employees. (Deets and Maddox 1917)

Portion of 1917 Deets and Maddox map, Plates 11L &11K, showing part of “Miller’s Addition to Bethesda.” (Deets and Maddox 1917, Plat 11L)

Nothing remains. If have information about the residents of this community, please let us know.

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This article is part of MoCoLMP's project mapping our historic Black communities and their relationship to sites of enslavement during the Civil War. The map also shows the locations of the three known lynchings in 19th century Montgomery County, MD.

References

Baist, George W. 1904. “Baist's map of the vicinity of Washington D.C.” Washington, DC and surrounding suburbs. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/87691445

Deets, Edward H., and Charles J. Maddox. 1917. “A Real Estate Atlas of the Part of Montgomery County Adjacent to the District of Columbia,” 1917 Deets Map. Montgomery History. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12366/455

Offutt, William. 2009. “What’s in a Name? How neighborhoods got their names.” Bethesda Today, (Nov). https://bethesdamagazine.com/2009/11/21/what-rsquos-in-a-name/