African American Communities Along the C&O Canal

Founded by freed people after the Civil War in Cabin John, Maryland, Gibson Grove built a school, a lodge of the Order of Moses and a church — until the Capital Beltway cut it in half in the 1960s.

Rock Spring was a small African American community above the Potomac near Glen Echo, Maryland, home to hotel workers and laborers near the Black-owned Jones Hotel, until suburbs and parkways pushed it out by the 1930s.

Tobytown, near the C&O Canal in Montgomery County, was built on land bought by formerly enslaved families in the 1870s. It prospered, then was declared a pocket of poverty — and its historic homes were razed from 1967.