At approximately 3 p.m. on April 5, 1923, an unprecedented tornado tore through Silver Spring, injuring four people, destroying five houses, and partially wrecking a dozen others, but miraculously killing no one.
The county’s Historic Preservation Office has opened up a new online archive system that allows users to search a digitized slide and photograph collection as well as digitized Historic Area Work Permits.
About 50 people braved the fall’s first blustery streak last Saturday to sing and carry lanterns across the Talbot Avenue Bridge in the inaugural Talbot Avenue Bridge Lantern Walk.
Andrea Blackford visited the Talbot Avenue Bridge for the first time in early August. The Silver Spring civil rights landmark made an immediate impression.
Between 1850 and 1860, Francis Preston Blair, Sr. (1791-1876), advisor to U.S. presidents from Andrew Jackson to Ulysses S. Grant, enslaved up to 20 human beings at his Montgomery County home, “Silver Spring.”
It was a mild 61 degrees and a little before 8 p.m., April 17, 1917, when members of the Columbia Historical Society began to stream into the Gold Room of the Shoreham Hotel at the corner of 15th and H St., N.W., in Washington, D.C. Scheduled to speak that evening was Maj. Gist Blair, whose talk was titled “Silver Spring.” Blair was the grandson of Silver Spring’s founder, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., advisor to U.S. presidents from Andrew Jackson to Ulysses S. Grant, and son of Montgomery Blair, United States Postmaster General during the first term of President Abraham Lincoln.