Today’s blog will be fairly short, I am just going to be addressing the names of some of the different streets and buildings across town.

Waters Landing Elementary School (or Drive or Community, as well as Waters Discovery Terr.) is named for the Waters family who were the first European settlers here in the 18th century and remained the largest landowners in Germantown well into the 20th century. One of their old wooden homes has been preserved out in Neelsville by the County as a historical site as have some of their gravesites across town.

Kinster Drive is named for an award-winning race horse that belonged to the Waters family around the turn of the 20th century.

Clopper Rd and Clopper Mill ES (the song that inspired “Country Roads, Take Me Home” by John Denver, Bill Danoff, and Taffy Nivert) is named for Francis C. Clopper who ran a very profitable mill near the border with Gaithersburg in the 19th century and helped fund the B&O Railroad that runs through town.

Liberty Mill Rd. is named for the Liberty Milling Company that was located by the B&O Railroad in the early 20th century.

Dawson Farm Rd. (and Dawsonville) is named for the farm owned by Americus Dawson and family in the 18th and 19th centuries in Germantown.

Mateny Rd. and Mateny Hill Rd. are named for Mac Mateny, the unofficial Mayor of Germantown in the early 20th century. I wrote a whole post on him a few weeks ago, but in short he ran a cattle farm and was very wealthy. One of his grazing hills was known as Mateny Hill.

Waring Station Rd. and Viaduct are named for the Waring family, wealthy plantation owners in the 19th century. They had a second stop of the B&O Railroad on their property at the time, hence the “station.”

Richter Farm Rd. is named for the Richter family, who owned a prosperous farm in that part of town. They were related to George Atzerodt, the confederate sympathizer who was part of John Wilkes Booth to kill the President. His job had been to kill the Vice President, but instead he ran away and was found at the Richter farmhouse a few days later. Hartman Richter, his cousin, was arrested for conspiracy but cleared of all charges when it was determined that he knew nothing of the plot.

Schaeffer Rd. is named for the Schaeffer family who bought the Dawson farm in the 19th century and ran a successful dairy farm there until 1965.

Dairy Farm Dr. is a reference to the Schaeffer Dairy Farm.

Blunt Rd. is named for the wealthy 18th and 19th century farming family in eastern Germantown.

Leaman Farm Rd. and Leaman Park are named for Solomon Leaman and his descendants, who ran a farm in town between 1850 and at least the late 1980s. They are descended from the earliest German settlers in the region.

Neelsville Village (and Church and Church Rd. and Middle School) are named for the Neel family, who settled the area in the early 1820s, built a Presbyterian church (which still stands) and a small town center sprung up along the intersection of Frederick Rd. and Brink Rd. The Village was known as Brink in its early days.

Watkins Mill Dr. is named for the Watkins family who owned, you guessed it, a mill around where Montgomery Village meets Germantown.

Father Hurley Blvd. is named for the Catholic Priest serving this area in the late 20th century.

Midcounty Highway is a slim part of a road coming off of Middlebrook Rd. that was originally designed to connect to the rest of the Midcounty Highway in Gaithersburg and Montgomery Village.

Hoyles Mill Village Park is named for Hoyles Mill, a mill on the border with Boyds owned and operated by the Musser family in the 19th century.

Germantown Rd. is named for the Germans who settled at the intersection of what is now Clopper and Liberty Mill Rd.s in the 1840s.

Seneca Valley HS and Great Seneca Creek ES and Lake Seneca ES are all named for the two creeks that serve as borders for Germantown on the north and south: Great Seneca Creek and Little Seneca Creek (which was flooded in the 1980s to become Lake Seneca). These, in turn, get their names from the Seneca Native Nation who traveled through and traded in this area before Europeans came.

Northwest HS is a reference to the part of the county that the school was built to serve: the Northwest.

Martin Luther King Jr. MS is named for the Civil Rights hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Roberto Clemente MS is named for famed baseball player Roberto Clemente, who was the first Latin American and Caribbean American to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Spark Matsunaga ES is named for United States Senator and World War II veteran Spark Matsunaga.

Ronald McNair ES is named for a NASA astronaut who was was the second African American to go to space. He was killed on his second mission when the Challenger exploded.

William B. Gibbs ES is named after a Civil Rights activist who lived and taught in Rockville, MD in the early-middle 20th century. He was the plaintiff in the case Gibbs v. Broome, which sued the county for equal pay for Black teachers in 1936. He was represented by the NAACP lawyer and, later, Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. The county had to settle in 1937 because their legal position was weak.

Capt. James E. Daley ES is named after Montgomery County Police Captain James Daly, who served for 19 years and was killed on duty trying to stop a bank robbery in Bethesda in 1976.

Montgomery College is named after Montgomery County, which is named after Richard Montgomery, a Revolutionary War general.

Fox Chapel ES — I actually couldn’t figure this one out, sorry about that.

Sally K. Ride ES is named for NASA astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman and LGBTQ+ person to have flown in space.

Kingsview MS is named for Kingsview Village.

S. Christa McAuliffe ES is named for NASA astronaut and teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was killed in the Challenger explosion alongside Ronald McNair. She was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2004.

I’m sure I’ve missed some, and for that I’m sorry.