Silver Spring, Maryland
Silver Spring is a census-designated place in southeastern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, near Washington, D.C. Although officially unincorporated, it is an edge city with a population of 81,015 at the 2020 census, making it the fifth-most-populous place in Maryland after Baltimore, Columbia, Germantown, and Waldorf.
Downtown Silver Spring, located next to the northern tip of Washington, D.C., is the oldest and most urbanized area of Silver Spring, surrounded by several inner suburban residential neighborhoods inside the Capital Beltway. Many mixed-use developments combining retail, residential, and office space have been built since 2004.
Silver Spring takes its name from a mica-flecked spring discovered there in 1840 by Francis Preston Blair, who subsequently bought much of the area's surrounding land. Acorn Park, south of downtown, is believed to be the site of the original spring.
Geography
As an unincorporated census-designated place, Silver Spring's boundaries are not consistently defined. As of the 2010 census, the U.S. Census Bureau gives Silver Spring a total area of, which is all land; however, the CDP contains some creeks and small ponds. This definition is a 15% reduction from the used in previous years.Silver Spring contains the following neighborhoods: Downtown Silver Spring, East Silver Spring, Woodside, Woodside Park, Lyttonsville, North Hills Sligo Park, Long Branch, Indian Spring, Goodacre Knolls, Franklin Knolls, Montgomery Knolls, Clifton Park Village, New Hampshire Estates, Oakview, and Woodmoor.
The U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Postal Service, Silver Spring Urban Planning District, and Greater Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce, each use their own slightly different definitions. The Postal Service in particular assigns Silver Spring mailing addresses to a large swath of eastern Montgomery County sometimes called "Greater Silver Spring", including Four Corners, Woodmoor, Wheaton, Glenmont, Forest Glen, Forest Glen Park, Aspen Hill, Hillandale, White Oak, Colesville, Colesville Park, Cloverly, Calverton, Briggs Chaney, Greencastle, Northwood Park, Ashton, Sandy Spring, Sunset Terrace, Fairland, Lyttonsville, Kemp Mill, a portion of Langley Park, and a portion of Adelphi. The area that has a Silver Spring mailing address is larger in area than any city in Maryland except Baltimore.
Landmarks in the downtown area include the AFI Silver Theatre, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a branch of The Fillmore, and the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Greater Silver Spring includes the headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the U.S.
Parks and recreation
Four major creeks run through Silver Spring: from west to east, they are Rock Creek, Sligo Creek, Long Branch, and Northwest Branch. Each is surrounded by parks offering hiking trails, playgrounds, picnic areas, and tennis courts. On weekends, roads are closed in the parks for bicycling and walking.Northwest Branch Park also includes the Rachel Carson Greenway Trail, named after Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring and a former resident of the area. It continues north to Wheaton Regional Park, in Wheaton, which is home to the Brookside Gardens.
The Jessup Blair Park, south of downtown, has a soccer field, tennis courts, basketball courts, and a picnic area. There are similar local parks throughout the residential parts of the community.
Demographics
2023
In 2023, the most populous races in Silver Spring are White / Caucasian, Black / African American, and Hispanic or Latino.In 2023, the most populous ancestries reported in Silver Spring are Central American, Subsaharan African, German, Ethiopian, and Irish, together accounting for 50.5% of all Silver Spring residents.
2020
As of the 2020 census, 81,015 people lived in Silver Spring. There were 32,114 households; their average annual income was $83,782.50.9% of the population was female.
33.3% of the population was White, 28% was Black or African American alone, 19.4% of the population was Other, 7.12% of the population was Asian, 6.68% of the population was claimed White, 3.16% was Multiracial, 1.08% was Multiracial, 0.47% was Black or African American, 0.29% was Asian, and 0.19% was American Indian & Alaska Native.
28% of the population identified as Latino.
As of 2019, 36.5% of Silver Spring residents were born outside of the United States, which is higher than the national average of 13.9%. Of these, the most predominant foreign-born people are from El Salvador, Ethiopia, India, and China.
2010
Note: For the 2010 census, the boundaries of the Silver Spring CDP were changed, reducing the land area by approx. 15%. As a result, the population count for 2010 shows a 6.6% decrease, while the population density increased 11%.As of the 2010 census, there were 71,452 residents, 28,603 total households, and 15,684 families residing in the Silver Spring CDP. The population density was. There were 30,522 housing units at an average density of. The racial makeup of the community, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, for residents who self-identified as being members of "one race" was 45.7% White, 27.8% Black or African American, 0.6% American Indian and Alaska Native, 7.9% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and 13.2% "Some Other Race". 4.8% of the CDP's residents self-identified as being members of two or more races. Hispanic or Latino residents "of any race" comprised 26.3% of the population. Like much of the Washington metropolitan area, Silver Spring is home to many people of Ethiopian ancestry.
There were 28,603 households, out of which 27.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 37.6% were married couples living together, 11.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 45.2% were non-families. 33.6% of all households were made up of individuals living alone, and 16.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.49 and the average family size was 3.21.
In the census area, the population was spread out, with 21.4% under the age of 18, 9.4% from 18 to 24, 37.1% from 25 to 44, 23.8% from 45 to 64, and 8.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 33.8 years. For every 100 females, there were 94.9 males, and for every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92.2 males.
The median income for a household in the census area was, and the median income for a family was.
History
Before European settlement, present-day Silver Spring had been inhabited by various indigenous peoples for about 10,000 years. Among them were the Piscataway, an Algonquian-speaking people who may have established a few villages along Sligo Creek and Rock Creek.19th century
In 1840, Francis Preston Blair, who later helped organize the modern Republican Party, along with his daughter, Elizabeth, discovered a spring flowing with chips of mica believed to be the now-dry spring visible at Acorn Park. Blair was looking for a site for his summer home to escape the summer heat of Washington, D.C. Two years later, Blair completed a 20-room mansion he dubbed "Silver Spring" on a country homestead. In 1854, Blair moved to the mansion permanently. The house stood until 1954.By 1854, Blair's son, Montgomery Blair, who became Postmaster General under Abraham Lincoln and represented Dred Scott before the U.S. Supreme Court, built the Falkland house in the area.
By the end of the decade, Elizabeth Blair married Samuel Phillips Lee, third cousin of future Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, and gave birth to a boy, Francis Preston Blair Lee, who went on to become the first popularly elected Senator in U.S. history.
During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln visited the Silver Spring mansion several times, where he relaxed by playing town ball with Francis P. Blair's grandchildren.
In 1864, Confederate States Army General Jubal Early occupied Silver Spring before the Battle of Fort Stevens. After the engagement, fleeing Confederate soldiers razed Montgomery Blair's Falkland residence.
At the time, there was a community called Sligo located at the intersection of the Washington-Brookeville Turnpike and the Washington-Colesville-Ashton Turnpike, now named Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road. Sligo included a tollhouse, a store, a post office, and a few homes. The communities of Woodside, Forest Glen, and Linden were founded after the Civil War. These small towns largely lost their separate identities when a post office was established in Silver Spring in 1899.
By the end of the 19th century, the region began to develop into a town of size and importance. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Metropolitan Branch opened on April 30, 1873, and ran through Silver Spring from Washington, D.C., to Point of Rocks, Maryland.
The first suburban development appeared in 1887 when Selina Wilson divided part of her farm on present-day Colesville Road and Brookeville Road into five- and ten-acre plots. In 1892, Francis Preston Blair Lee and his wife, Anne Brooke Lee, gave birth to E. Brooke Lee, who is known as the father of modern Silver Spring for his visionary attitude toward developing the region.
20th century
In the early 20th century, E. Brooke Lee and his brother, Blair Lee I, founded the Lee Development Company, whose Colesville Road office building remains a downtown fixture. Dale Drive, a winding roadway, was built to provide vehicular access to much of the family's substantial real estate holdings. Suburban development continued in 1922 when Woodside Development Corporation created Woodside Park, a neighborhood of plot home sites built on the former Noyes estate in 1923.In 1924, Washington trolley service on Georgia Avenue across B&O's Metropolitan Branch was suspended so that an underpass could be built. The underpass was completed two years later, but trolley service never resumed. It would be rebuilt again in 1948 with additional lanes for automobile traffic, opening the areas to the north for readily accessible suburban development.
Takoma-Silver Spring High School, built in 1924, was the first high school for Silver Spring. The community's rapid growth led to the need for a larger school. In 1935, when a new high school building was erected at Wayne Avenue and Sligo Creek Parkway, the school was renamed Montgomery Blair High School. In 1998, the school was moved again, to a new, larger facility at the corner of Colesville Road and University Boulevard. The former Blair building became a combined middle school and elementary school, housing Silver Spring International Middle School and Sligo Creek Elementary School.
The Silver Spring Shopping Center, built by developer Albert Small and Silver Theatre, designed by theater architect John Eberson, were completed in 1938 at the request of developer William Alexander Julian. The Silver Spring Shopping Center was one of the nation's first retail spaces with a street-front parking lot, defying conventional wisdom that merchandise should be in windows closest to the street so that people could see it. The shopping center was purchased in 1944 by real estate developer Sam Eig, who helped attract large retailers to the city.
Before the 1950s, Silver Spring was known as a sundown town, in part because of influential land owners. The North Washington Real Estate Company designed to be white-only, written in its deeds to prevent the sale of land to anyone else. The Fair Housing Act outlawed this practice in 1968, almost two decades after Shelley v. Kramer made racial covenants unenforceable. A 1939 deed for a property owned by Rozier J. Beech in the Sixteenth Street Village subdivision of Silver Spring said, "No negro, or any person or persons of whose blood or extraction or to any person of the semitic race whose blood or origin of racial description will be deemed to include Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians, Syrians, Greeks and Turks, shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant." In practice, covenants excluding "Semitic races" were primarily used to discriminate against Jews, as Montgomery County did not have significant Armenian, Greek, Iranian, or Turkish populations at the time.
In all, housing in more than of greater Silver Spring was blocked off to Blacks, Jews, Armenians, Persians, Turks, and Greeks, who were considered non-white at the time.
By the 1950s, Silver Spring was the second-busiest retail market between Baltimore and Richmond; major retailers included the Hecht Company, J.C. Penney, and Sears, Roebuck and Company. In 1954, the 1842 Blair mansion "Silver Spring" was razed and replaced with the Blair Station post office. 1960 saw the opening of Wheaton Plaza, later called Westfield Wheaton, a shopping center several miles north of downtown Silver Spring. It captured much of the town's business, and the downtown area began a long period of decline.
On December 19, 1961, a segment of the Capital Beltway was opened to traffic between Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard East.
On August 17, 1964, the final segment of the Beltway was opened to traffic, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held near the New Hampshire Avenue interchange, with a speech by Gov. J. Millard Tawes, who called it a "road of opportunity" for Maryland and the nation.
Washington Metro rail service into Washington, D.C., helped breathe new life into the region starting with the 1978 opening of Silver Spring station. The Metro Red Line followed the right-of-way of the B&O Metropolitan Branch, with the Metro tracks centered between the B&O's eastbound and westbound mains. The Red Line heads south to downtown DC from Silver Spring, running at grade before descending into Union Station. By the mid-1990s, the Red Line continued north from the downtown Silver Spring core, entering a tunnel just past the Silver Spring station and running underground to three more stations: Forest Glen, Wheaton, and Glenmont.
Silver Spring's downtown continued to decline in the 1980s. The Hecht Company closed its downtown location in 1987 and moved to Wheaton Plaza while forbidding another department store to rent its old spot. City Place, a multi-level mall, was established in the old Hecht Company building in 1992, but it had difficulty attracting quality anchor stores and gained a reputation as a budget mall. In the mid-1990s, developers considered building a mega-mall and entertainment complex called the American Dream, similar to the Mall of America, in downtown Silver Spring, but were unable to secure funding. A bright spot for the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration consolidating its headquarters to four new high-rise office buildings near the Silver Spring Metro station.
A February 16, 1996, train collision on the Silver Spring section of the Metropolitan line left 11 people dead. A MARC commuter train bound for Washington Union Station during the Friday evening rush hour collided with the Amtrak Capitol Limited train and erupted in flames on a snow-swept stretch of track.
The Maryland State Highway Administration started studies of improvements to the Capital Beltway in 1993, and have continued, off and on, examining a number of alternatives since then, including HOV lanes and high-occupancy toll lanes.