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The first major campaign of the American Revolution was an ill-conceived attempt to conquer and annex British Canada. In a disastrous assault on Quebec City on New Year’ s Eve, 1775, Gen. Montgomery— only 37 years old— was mortally wounded leading his troops.
He was the highest-ranking early casualty of the new war. Of the 20-some cities and counties in the U. S. named after Richard Montgomery, our Maryland county was the very first.
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The new county seat, with a modest, newly built court and jail, was called simply Montgomery Court House. It went by various informal names in the ensuring decades— Williamsburg after the family that owned and sold all the lots around it, Wattsville after Watts Branch, and finally Rockville after Rock Creek in 1801.
The men who created the new Montgomery County were not aristocrats like the Tory Loyalists or, with
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a few exceptions such | ||||
A New County Seat |
as Henry Griffith and |
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Richard Brooke, the | ||||
So the new county had a name, but it still needed a place to do official business— a county seat with a courthouse, jail and offices |
Portrait of Gen. Richard Montgomery, studying a map of
Canada, before the ill-fated invasion of 1775.
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largest landowners and slaveholders of the region. But like virtually all leaders of the new Republic in the |
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. What better place than a tiny cluster of buildings, around a tavern at the intersection of the only two major roads in the new, lightly settled rural county?
One road ran north-south between George Town and Frederick Town( today’ s Route 355), and the other ran east-west from Bladensburg in Prince George’ s County to the mouth of the Monocacy River in the far west of the new county— the road we know today as Route 28.
At the intersection of those two roads in central Montgomery County stood a public house, then known as Hungerford’ s Tavern. It was there two years earlier, on June 11, 1774 that Wootton— a
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physician, planter and respected delegate in the colonial government— and nine other local leaders of Lower Frederick County, including wealthy Quakers Evan Thomas and Richard Brooke, met and passed resolutions in support of the rebels in Massachusetts, where England had imposed new taxes and closed the port of Boston.
The Marylanders at the tavern called for ending commerce with England, but stopped short of urging a war for American independence. The Hungerford Resolves were one of the earliest shows of solidarity with Boston anywhere in the colonies, before similar Resolves in nearby Fairfax and Loudoun counties, Virginia.
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agrarian South, they were men of means. They typically owned a few hundred acres of farmland and a dozen or more enslaved workers.
They and their descendants— families like Wootton, Magruder, Beall, Brooke, Wade, Offutt, Griffith, Bowie, Willson and many others— had been active in colonial civic life and remained so deep into the 19th century.
And that’ s the simple story of the founding of Montgomery County.
Happy 250th Birthday to us all!
Knight Kiplinger, who lives in Seneca, is board chair of Historic Medley District, the history education and preservation organization of western Montgomery County.
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