Montgomery County

This book provides a visual overview of the history of Montgomery County, MD, through a series of photos taken over many decades. I found it informative and gives a solid picture of the county's rural roots. Overall it was an enjoyable and entertaining read. However, I started losing interest somewhere in the middle when all the photos end up being of house after house, barn after barn. It would have made it more interesting to insert some photographs of some some of the early residents of the county - the people who inhabited these houses. Minor improvements would be to include the exact coordinates of each photograph so it can be looked up on a Google Map. Having a date on each photo would also be useful. Finally, while I appreciate the author's concerns over the increasing urbanization of the county, I got irritated towards the end of the book by his incessant grieving tone over the loss of farms and agricultural land. Get over it! Sometime before those farms came into place, the land used to be forest. Why doesn't he grieve over the loss of the forest to build the farmland in the first place? Who is to say farm is better than city or forest is better than farm? While there is merit to his argument, I prefer that a book like this should be free from judgment and attitudes. I bought it to learn about the county's history, not to spend 50% of each caption reading the same lecture over and over.

Montgomery County, Maryland consists of roughly 500 square miles on the Northwest border of Washington, D.C. It is best-known today for the affluence and high education levels of its residents. As a long-time resident of Washington, D.C. I am familiar with Montgomery County. I live in D.C. within easly walking distance of Silver Spring and in fact lived in Silver Spring, the community that borders Washington D.C. north of Georgia Avenue, itself for some years. The books of photographic local history in the Images of America series have frequently helped me to see the familiar with new eyes. Michael Dwyer's book on Montgomery County (2006) brought home to me images of a region that I know in ways I had not known it before. Dwyer is a historian for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. In the early 1970s he conducted a historical survey of resources in Montgomery County and in the adjacent Prince Georges County. He uses many of the photgraphs resulting from this survey in this book. Dwyer's photos deliberately have an aura of the commonplace. In the introduction to this volume he writes "[p]articular emphasis was paid to structures and scenes that were perhaps not the most elegant but rather the ordinary places often overlooked." Dwyer emphasizes the rural background of Montgomery county rather than the busy urban and suburban communities that will be most familiar to people today. I was reading this book the other day on the subway on my way home. I got into a conversation with a fellow-passenger who was reading the book over my shoulder. We had a pleasant conversation about the photos and about the extent to which the county had changed. Dwyer offers a survey of Montgomery County in 128 pages of photos and annotations. Early in its history Montgomery County was overwhelmingly rural. Tobacco was the chief cash crop, and the county was also dotted with mills. Slavery was common in pre-Civil War Montgomery County. Thus, the county offered substantial sympathy to the Confederacy during the Civil War even though the Blair family of Silver Spring was instrumental to Lincoln's war effort. Dwyer offers many rare photographs of Montgomery County, including photos of old slave quarters, during these early years. The portions of the book I most enjoyed were those that focused on the urban development of the County. Dwyer offers photos of early Silver Spring, Bethesda, and other communities I know showing streetcar lines, roads, community landmarks and old stores and homes. I was moved by his several photographs of African American housing during the many years in which Montgomery County was heavily segregated and overwhelmingly white. This too, together with its pro-Southern stance, is sometimes easily forgotten in thinking about Montgomery County and its past. The larger portion of Dwyer's book consists of photographs of farms and rural areas in the upper parts of Montgomery County -- those at a greater distance from Washing

Masterful photography by a premier regional historian. It simply doesn't get any better than this. Without the documentary photographs of probably several thousand sites taken by the author over the last 35+ years, and his detailed knowledge of most of them, much of our heritage likely would have been lost. The photographs are distinctive, highly perceptive, often subtly iconic, and always well-crafted classic images of our heritage.