roots and records
The birth of Montgomery County in 1776
By Knight Kiplinger
Montgomery County’ s sharing of the same birth year, 1776, with the United States, is like the unfortunate kid whose birthday falls on Christmas or Halloween. On the one hand, the birthday is easy to remember, but on the other, it will always be overshadowed by the larger celebration.
Amid the hoopla of the nation’ s semiquincentennial— that’ s Latin for half of a five hundredth birthday— here are a few things about our county’ s 250th anniversary( on either Sept. 6 or Oct. 1) that you should know:
We were one of the first two counties anywhere in America to be created by an elected body, not by a royal council.
And we were one of the first two counties in Maryland not named after a member of England’ s royal family( like Queen Anne or Prince George) or the aristocratic Calvert family( Anne Arundel, Frederick, Baltimore, etc.), to whom King Charles I granted the entire mass of Maryland, named after his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.
The two new Maryland counties of 1776 were the first in
Maryland, possibly in any of the 13 new states, to be named after American patriot heroes— one very much alive— Gen. George Washington, at that moment desperately fighting for the survival of his army in New York— and one very recently deceased, Gen. Richard Montgomery, killed in battle on New Year’ s Eve, 1775, in Quebec, Canada.
Rationale for a New County
The local men who proposed to the new Maryland House of Delegates the creation of Montgomery and Washington counties had no political grievance against immense Frederick County. Yes, they were largely men of Scottish and English descent, compared with many folks in Frederick, which had been settled by Germans coming down from Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. But they all got along fine, and two remarkable northern Frederick County leaders, Thomas Johnson— George Washington’ s confidante, Maryland’ s first governor, and a U. S. Supreme Court justice— and Charles Carroll— the longest-living signer of the Declaration of Independence— were revered national figures in the push for American independence.
But fundamentally, the motivation of MoCo’ s founders was more practical than political. Frederick County was huge, spanning the entire western half of Maryland from the Anacostia River in Prince George’ s County all the way west to the Allegheny Mountains, from the Pennsylvania border south to the Potomac.
The planters, small farmers and merchants of Frederick County’ s Lower District lived in and just north of the county’ s largest town, George Town on the Potomac River, in the rich farmland watersheds of Rock Creek and Seneca Creek. To do commercial and legal business they had to travel by horseback and wagon a long way north to Frederick Town, along the ancient George Town / Frederick Road( today’ s Route 355). They wanted a county seat closer to their homes--and a county government more responsive to the interests of the mid-Potomac region.
This plan of dividing Frederick into three counties is what Dr. Thomas Sprigg Wootton proposed to the new Maryland House of Delegates in Annapolis, on Aug. 31, 1776. His motion was tabled for a week, then passed by a small majority on Sept. 6. The new county came into being on Oct. 1.
Brave Maryland Soldiers
It was a tumultuous summer and fall in the nation and the state. Maryland was busy creating a new state government to replace the rule of a royal governor, who with
44 plenty I autumn harvest 2026