A Little Bethesda History
from William Offutt's Bethesda - A Social History
"All
of the early explorers and fur traders had noted the beauty
and richness of the Bethesda area. But Smith, Spelman,
Argall and even Henry Fleet may not have been the first
Europeans to see and praise the country. French Jesuits
mapped and described the upper Potomac and the Shenandoah
well before the Calverts claimed the land and attempted to
establish their palatinate. Swiss prospectors had searched
for minerals as far north as Harper's Ferry and established
a settlement on the Monocacy long before Baron Christoph de
Graffenried surveyed the region from Rock Creek to sugarloaf
in 1711 and discussed buying land at Little Falls from
Ninian Beall. Trappers and traders from New Sweden and New
Netherland built log outposts along the river and trails
years before English-speaking farmers started clearing
Bethesda's woods and planting their oft-shared crops.
The first
families to farm what would become the Bethesda region of
Montgomery County were, for the most part, tenants. Scots,
English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish migrated up the river from
the earlier-settled Tidewater when the land there became too
dear or too exhausted. Germans, Swiss and Dutch moved down
from Pennsylvania through Frederick and along the trail
later called the Great Road. They rented farms from the
usually-absentee landlords who had surveyed but seldom
settled their grants from the lord proprietor. The farmers,
Celtic or Germanic, paid their rents in tobacco, sired huge
families and cleared more land.
These early
farms averaged about a hundred acres. but the common
practice was to open and cultivate only a small fraction of
the land at first. Often they girdled the trees, killing
them, to let the sunlight onto their fields. Tobacco crops
annually required thousands of hours of backbending labor,
and it was an exceptional worker - free, indentured or slave
- who could tend much more than three or four acres of the
weed."
