Brickyard (Cropley): A Vanished African American Community Near the C&O Canal

Near Carderock, Maryland, just north of the C&O Canal, stood a little-known African American community called Brickyard. Despite its name, Black families settled there before the brickyard opened. The area was later called Cropley, after the brickyard's owners, and in 1928 developers of a segregated subdivision renamed it Carderock, the name it keeps today.

Part of an 1894 map, "The Vicinity of Washington, D.C.," showing the Cropley post office along Conduit Road. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Cropley and the brickyard

• Cropley became a postal address in the 1880s, named for Richard Lambert Cropley and Arthur Bird Cropley, Georgetown flour merchants and grocers who owned more than 500 acres in the area.
• By the mid-1880s the brothers had moved into ceramics, and in 1894 Arthur Cropley transferred 56 acres south of Conduit Road to the Potomac Brick & Tile Company, which he co-owned with his older brother. The business likely gave its name to Brickyard Road and to the Black community.

A community older than the brickyard

• On June 12, 1884, landowner Robert W. Stone sold a half-acre to three African American men — Lawton Garner, William Gibbs and Joseph Toney — trustees of a new school for Black children, who planned to build a schoolhouse there.
• Since Black settlement came first, the name "Brickyard" is likely misleading: the community didn't grow up around brickyard jobs. The 1900 census bears this out. Gibbs and Toney were neighbors to 14 other Black households among several white ones; eight Black men worked on the Washington Aqueduct and seven on the railroad — and none in the brickworks.
• The aqueduct likely drew the community: in 1884 the Army Corps of Engineers brought in some 500 workers to extend the aqueduct dam across the Potomac near Great Falls and Carderock — the same year the school was founded, which could be taken as Brickyard's founding date too.
• A 1917 real estate atlas shows two churches and a school on Conduit Road at an unnamed private road (perhaps today's Mountain Gate Drive). The only Black landowners shown were Joseph Toney (2.5 acres) and C. Frye (5 acres).

The Washington Aqueduct spillway at Great Falls, about 1861–65; some Cropley residents later worked on the aqueduct's 1884 expansion. Andrew J. Russell, Library of Congress.

Shut out of Carderock

The brickworks ran until 1928, when the Woodside Homes Corporation bought all the Cropley land between the river and Conduit Road and platted the Carderock subdivision. Its newspaper ads in the late 1920s and early 1930s offered two- to five-acre "estates" with "carefully revised restrictions" — ten deed covenants, one of which barred any person of color from owning or renting there. Brickyard's residents could not move in.

A 1928 advertisement for the Carderock subdivision; racial covenants kept African Americans out. Evening Star, July 1928, via Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

The Great Depression wrecked the plan: the company made only 11 sales before selling the land to the federal government in 1935.

• The land south of the canal became part of the C&O Canal National Historical Park, opened in 1940. From 1938 to 1942 it hosted two segregated Civilian Conservation Corps camps of African American enrollees, who helped turn the canal's first 24 miles into parkland.
• Between the canal and Conduit Road, the U.S. Navy built the David Taylor Model Basin in 1938 and 1939.

What remains

By 1930, only a few Black households were left on Conduit Road, though Mount Glory Baptist Church had an active congregation into the 1940s. The school was torn down before 1949, and the second church between 1949 and 1957. In 1963 the Clara Barton Parkway cut through the Mount Glory property, and its graves were moved to the historic Black Galilean Fisherman's (Lincoln Park) Cemetery in Rockville.

Nothing of Brickyard is visible on the landscape today — one more community lost in a country where neighborhoods rise and vanish quickly and change hands between Black and white, rich and poor. What stands before us now does not always tell us what was there before.

Sources

Based on "Brickyard, Cropley (Carderock), Maryland," part of the National Park Service series African American Communities Along the C&O Canal, drawing on the Historic Resource Study by Heather McMahon (National Park Service and WSP USA Inc., 2022); a work of the United States government in the public domain.