River Road / Crow Hill

A historic Black community in Montgomery County, MD

River Road School, circa 1930s. Archival photo courtesy of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC)

The River Road/Crow Hill community of about 33 families ( (Roberts 2017) was about where the McDonald’s is now, northwest of Little Falls Parkway. The Clipper Lane and Dorsey Lane kinship communities were down the road a little way and across the street.

Two acres of Crow Hill belonged to John Burley, formerly enslaved by B.T. Hodges, and two acres belonged to Nelson Wood. Harvey Matthews, Sr. was interviewed for Bethesda Magazine in 2017 and remembered being raised on a farm where the Whole Foods is now.

Land ownership was possible because work was plentiful. Many men toiled in the granite quarries that dotted the area, while others built roads, hauled trash or clerked in stores. The women were maids, nannies and cooks in Kenwood and other white neighborhoods. Matthews’ father drove a sanitation truck and his mother and sister worked at a small grocery and luncheonette that became Talbert’s, a beer and wine store that’s still there today.

The family kept horses and pigs, and Matthews’ father was an expert trainer of hunting dogs. He’d load up his dogs and kerosene lanterns, and at night he’d go hunting for raccoons on open land now occupied by Walt Whitman and Winston Churchill high schools. He’d also trap muskrats in Little Falls creek and sell the hides. Every house had its own garden and as Matthews puts it, “If you lived on River Road, you knew every bean that came out of the ground, because that’s what we ate.” (Roberts 2017)

The children of the communities in this area went to school in Crow Hill until 1954 when Montgomery County schools were integrated. The church cemetery was across the street and the community of Macedonia believes that it has been covered by development projects and parking lots.

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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.

Reference

Roberts, Steve. 2017. “Uncovering the "Lost Colony" in Bethesda: Near Macedonia Baptist Church, a black community on River Road struggles to reclaim its history.” Bethesda Today, (May). https://bethesdamagazine.com/2017/05/22/uncovering-the-lost-colony-in-bethesda/