Central Maryland

In its most primitive state almost 10,000 years ago, a part of what is now Rockville Pike began as a Native American trail. Given its proximity to the “Potowmack,” Monocacy, and Patuxent rivers, this north-south path was a convenient and bountiful passageway for tribes such as the Senecas, Piscataways, and Susquehannocks.

The statue of the Madonna of the Trail—one of 12 such monuments lining the National Old Trails Road—was erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1929 and marks the beginning of the frontier trail. (The statue is now located in front of the Wisconsin Avenue post office in downtown Bethesda.)

The road’s original starting point in the port of George Town in the 1740s was essential to local farmers and traveling pioneers alike. The town of Rockville—known in the 1780s as “Williamsburgh” after the prominent land-owning Williams family or as “Montgomery Court House” from 1776 to 1820—was a central link to the roads to Bladensburg, Frederick, and Georgetown, as it still is today.

Near Rockville Pike, colonials gathered at a “revolutionary political center” known as Charles Hungerford’s Tavern. On June 11, 1774, well-known Marylander Thomas Sprigg Wootton met with fellow colonials at the tavern to create the “Hungerford Resolves,” declarations against the British blockade of Boston Harbor following the Boston Tea Party. Sadly, the original tavern no longer remains, but a commemorative plaque marks the site near the corner of Washington and Jefferson streets.

In 1805, the Washington Turnpike Company charged tolls to passing travelers, “stage coaches, herded cattle and sheep, and horses,” to fund roadway repairs, as author Eileen McGuckian explains in her book, Rockville: Portrait of a City. The pike finally saw improvement in the late 1800s when it became a state road under the State Roads Commission.

According to Rockville’s historic preservation organization Peerless Rockville (of which McGuckian is the director), the pike was an ideal route for slaves fleeing the South. Historical documents show evidence of escaping slaves using the sidelines of Rockville Pike and stopping in nearby houses on the Underground Railroad. Just a stone’s throw away from the pike lived the enslaved Josiah Henson, whose 1849 memoirs inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s revolutionary novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The cabin, still attached to an 18th-century dwelling, remains in its original location on Old Georgetown Road, but is not yet open to the public.

The Civil War brought heavy traffic to the pike as both Union and Confederate soldiers used the road for transport and to scavenge local farms for supplies. The site of present-day Richard Montgomery High School was home to a campground of 10,000 Union soldiers by the end of June 1861. In 1863, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalrymen seized a 12-mile-long train of 200 soldiers and their 125 wagons on Rockville Pike, delaying their arrival at Gettysburg.

St. Mary’s Catholic Church is one of the remaining landmarks from the 19th century, standing on the corner of Veirs Mill Road and Rockville Pike. The four-acre site, bought by Father James Redmond in 1813 for $300, was a central location for the priest as he tended to five parishes and ministered on horseback to those working on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

The church, now on the National Register of Historic Places, swelled in activity as Rockville grew. In 1854, as host to various immigrant populations, it listed its Stations of the Cross—all beautifully restored today—in German, French, English, and Italian.