Rock Spring: A Lost African American Community Near Glen Echo, Maryland

Rock Spring was a small African American community overlooking the Potomac River, about a mile northwest of the District of Columbia line, between Glen Echo and Brookmont in Montgomery County, Maryland. Many residents worked for hotels nearby, among them the Jones Hotel, which hosted members of Washington's Black elite and served as a local gathering place for Black Republicans.

A small community

The name appears as a place on only one map, published in 1917, where it is spelled "Rock Springs." A former resident, Frank Dalvert McKinney, remembered in a 1985 interview that it stood a block past the Sycamore Store at the top of the hill, on about 40 acres owned by a man named Frank Bock, who he believed owned and rented out all the houses there. McKinney recalled paying Bock $10 a month for his house in the 1930s. In the 1910 census, Frank A. Bock had some 20 African American families as neighbors.

Left: the 1917 map, the only one to name the Rock Spring community. Right: an 1894 map showing the Rock Spring Hotel, from which the community seems to have taken its name. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

The name seems to come from the Rock Spring Hotel, built around 1884; an 1894 map shows it on the northeast side of Conduit Road, south of Glen Echo Heights. Around 1900 it was run by a white man, Charles Arthur Brill, listed in that year's census as a "hotel keeper." Two local African Americans lived and worked there: John W. Lewis, a general laborer born in Virginia in 1860, and Cordelia Smith, a 24-year-old domestic worker from Virginia.

Mariah M. Gray

Next door to Brill lived Mariah M. Gray, the hotel's cook in 1900. Born in North Carolina around 1853, probably into slavery, she had moved to Montgomery County by 1870, where she married Daniel Gray and had eight children. She moved among several African American enclaves in the area — Graysville on River Road, named for her husband's family; Gibson Grove in Cabin John; and finally Rock Spring, where she lived until her death. Her path, from slavery to freedom and from South to North, was shared by many African Americans building lives for their families in those years.

Moses Jones and the Jones Hotel

Another of Gray's neighbors was Moses Jones, an African American hotel owner. From the late 1890s into the early 1900s he advertised his Jones Hotel in Glen Echo in newspapers read by Black Washingtonians, such as The Washington Bee and The Colored American, describing a wooded property and a "first-class resort" serving meals at any hour. Newspaper notices show the hotel hosted the local African American Republican chapter at least twice, making it an important gathering place for politically active Black Washingtonians and African Americans in lower Montgomery County.

A September 1900 advertisement for "an all day oyster roast" at Jones Park, part of the Black-owned Jones Hotel. The Colored American*. Library of Congress.*

The history of African American leisure and outdoor recreation is part of the story of civil rights: even amid ongoing struggle, African Americans found ways to enjoy life's pleasures.

The end of Rock Spring

By the 1920 census, the Rock Spring area had been absorbed into the neighboring Glen Echo Heights, though it remained a home for African Americans in domestic service, Mariah Gray among them. Three men that year worked as railroad laborers, two as chauffeurs and several as general laborers, and many women took in laundry.

The community did not last. By the 1930s its residents had been pushed out by expanding parks, the building of the Clara Barton Parkway and new suburbs built for upper- and middle-class white residents of Montgomery County.

Sources

• National Park Service, Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park: "Rock Spring (Glen Echo Heights), Maryland," part of the series African American Communities Along the C&O Canal, drawn from Heather McMahon, Historic Resource Study: African American Communities Along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal (National Park Service and WSP USA, 2022), which cites Barbara Martin's interview with Frank D. McKinney, The Washington Bee (1898, 1902), Patsy Mose Fletcher's Historically African American Destinations Around Washington, DC (2015) and maps of 1894 and 1917. McKinney's recollections are paraphrased.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.