River Road / Graysville

A historic Black community in Montgomery County, MD

River Road School, 1954. (Kathan, Rispin, and Whitley 2017)

The River Road community of about 33 families (Roberts 2017) was located in Bethesda, MD about where the McDonald’s is now, northwest of Little Falls Parkway. The Clipper Lane and Dorsey Lane kinship communities were down the road nearby and across the street.

Two acres of River Road 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 in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because work was plentiful, and because the land was swampy and less desirable for farming. 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)

Developers started to pressure homeowners to sell beginning in the 1950s. Some families were evicted for houses that weren't up to county code, often for lacking running water (they used wells) and sewer systems (they used outhouses), that the county had refused to install when white communities nearby were updated.

The community faced pressures felt by other Black communities:

...the neighborhood was terrorized by Ku Klux Klan “visits” after dusk. Residents recognized the Klansmen wearing hoods at night as the same people who wore the Montgomery County Police uniforms by day.

“As a Black in the community, you had nobody you could go to. The police were the Klan themselves,” Matthews says. “They rode pickup trucks…and would hoot and holler.” They called names but stopped short of physical violence. (Pekow 2024)

The children of the communities in this area went to school at the River Road School (known by white neighbors as the "River Road Colored School") until 1954, when Montgomery County schools were integrated.

The church cemetery was across the street and the community of Macedonia has filed a lawsuit, claiming that part of their cemetery was been covered by development projects and parking lots, and trying to prevent further building on that piece of property. (Staton 2025)

Note: If you go to the "Mapping Segregation Project" webpage, and enter "Macedonia Baptist Church" on River Road in the search bar, you can see the owners of the River Road homes in the 1940s. It shows information from the census, including names, occupations, when the property was bought, and that it was demolished.

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This article was updated on June 14, 2026.

References

Kathan, David, Amy Rispin, and L. Paige Whitley. 2017. “Tracing a Bethesda, Maryland, African American Community and Its Contested Cemetery.” Washington History, Fall 2017, vol. 29, no. 22, pp. 25–41. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90015022

McMahon, Heather. 2022. “Historic Resources Study: African American Communities along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal.” National Park Service History. Washington, D.C., and Lower Montgomery County, Maryland: National Park Service. https://npshistory.com/publications/choh/hrs-african-american-communities.pdf

Pekow, Charles. 2024. “Erasing the Dead and the Living - Montgomery Magazine.” Montgomery Magazine. March 19, 2024. https://www.montgomerymag.com/erasing-the-dead-and-the-living/.

Roberts, Steve. 2017. “Uncovering the ‘Lost Colony’ in Bethesda.” Bethesda Today. Bethesda Magazine. May 22, 2017. https://bethesdamagazine.com/2017/05/22/uncovering-the-lost-colony-in-bethesda/

Schoenfeld, Sarah Jane, Mara Cherkasky, and Brian Kraft. 2023. “Mapping Segregation Project, Racial Restrictive Covenants and Black Homeownership.” Https://Montgomeryplanning.org. Montgomery Planning, Montgomery County, Maryland. 2023. https://mcplanning.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=0d26456118d34a14b2d27aec8d6f2b1a.

Staton, Kendall. 2025. “Activists Have 5 Months to Prove Bethesda Development Sits on Historic Cemetery.” The Wash, September 15, 2025. https://thewash.org/2025/09/16/activists-have-5-months-to-prove-bethesda-development-sits-on-historic-cemetery/.

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.