This week’s post will be a little bit different. Rather than cover a historical figure or moment in Germantown, I’d like to analyze a much more basic question that informs how we understand our history: Where is Germantown???

I don’t mean to ask where the CDP is located, so much as where it begins and ends. Meaning, what are Germantown’s borders?

The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it would seem.

First, it is important to know that Germantown has no official status beyond “census designated place” — it is not a city (something I will explore another time here) nor a town nor a business district nor a legislative district unto itself in the Maryland General Assembly.

This means that the closest thing to an “official border” we have is the parameters of the CDP, which are pretty expansive relative to some of the maps I’m going to explore later in this post.

This is that map:

It encompasses the areas bounded by Great Seneca Creek in the Southeast and Little Seneca Lake & Creek in the Northwest, although the East and West appear a little more arbitrary. Those borders come from the greenbelt, which was outlined in Germantown’s two Master Plans

That CDP map corresponds pretty closely to maps from the most recent Germantown Master Plan (1989), which you can see below:

These borders are slightly narrower than the CDP map, chopping off a bit of the Southwest near Brownstown, but overall it seems to be based on the same basic principle of the waterways and greenbelt as borders.

The problem with these maps though is that they both conflict with the next closest thing we have to official boundaries: addresses. Looking at the top map, you will notice that the center of the Soccerplex lies outside of Germantown (in Boyds) as does the majority Brownstown and (although you can’t see it highlighted) Butlers Orchard. All of these places (and the homes therein) have Germantown addresses. And they’re not the only ones: several homes in the Southwest and Northeast that are outside of the borders of Germantown according to these maps have Germantown addresses. This would point to a far more expansive Germantown than any of the above maps show.

That being said, there is at least one home within what I will call “Germantown Proper” (well within the boundaries I outlined above) that has a Boyds addresses: The Redwall Castle discussed in my post last week, which is confusingly listed as both a Germantown and a Boyds home on different websites. To this end, I have heard much of Kingsview Village referred to as “old Boyds” by long-time Germantown residents.

Arguably the biggest challenge to to the prevailing “Greater Germantown” concept I have outlined above is google maps, which shows this measly area as Germantown:

This is much smaller than the previous two maps, removing all of Kingsview Village as well as most of Clopper and Neelsville Villages. To be candid, I have no idea what the boundaries on this map are based on, but anyone who searches Germantown in google maps gets this “Lesser Germantown.”

I could conclude this post here and say simply that I have no concrete reason as to why Germantown’s borders are this squishy. It would be honest to end on the notion that because Germantown has no official status, its borders have not needed to be defined in a consistent way across the board — BUT (!!) as we are historians here, I would like to look back on our history for a moment to explore why this area in particular might be so difficult to confine:

Germantown is actually composed of several small towns that were not really united in a meaningful way until the middle of the 20th century. In the Northeast, Middlebrook (or, as it was formerly known, Steptown) and Neelsville were simply stops on the road (Rt. 355) from Georgetown to Fredrick until they were connected with Darnestown in the 1840s (something I’ve written about before). Then, when a small “German-town” emerged at the crossroads of Clopper and the Darnestown-Neelsville Road (now Germantown Road), it was simply another small town nestled between several massive farms and other little towns. If you had asked any of the farmers who lived here at any point during the 19th century what community they were a part of, they might as easily have said Neelsville, Steptown/Middlebrook, Clarksburg, Brownstown (after the Civil War), or even Darnestown. It was only with the introduction of the Railroad that the economy of the region became centralized around the Germantown portion of the region. Suddenly the economies of these small towns were tied up in this area. Local churches sprung up, schools, banks, etc. appeared around the train station — this pushed the growing sense of Germantown as the large, overriding community here.

The technological and transportation developments of the ensuing half century only furthered this unification, which was pretty solid by the time the 1966/67 Germantown Master Plan was accepted. Yet, there remained a vagueness in the borders between Boyds, Browntown, and Germantown as neither of the former two were considered fully fleshed out/independent communities at the time. Residents of this southwestern region may have had differing opinions themselves to this end, but I have been unable to find any records thus far.

The result is a confusing conflict between Greater and Lesser Germantown, which is unlikely to be resolved any any point in the near future without incorporation.