MoCo History

Burned down in the 1970s, Germantown Train Station was rebuilt to its 19th century splendor, the vision of a famous Baltimore architect.

Today, Germantown Train Station is used as a waiting room for commuters and has a coffee shop, Alafia Crossing, operated by Bota King. More than 800 passengers board the trains that leave the MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) train in Germantown every weekday morning, a stop along the Brunswick Line that travels from West Virginia to Washington, DC.CSX Transportation owns this line of rail. But the tracks used to be part of a Baltimore & Ohio network dating back to the 19^th century.

The peace of the little village of Germantown was broken by the sound of gunshots on January 20, 1932. Robbers had entered Horace Waters’ store at around 7 p.m. They shot and killed Mr. Waters, a prominent citizen of Montgomery County, and wounded his clerk

Horace Waters was known to carry a large amount of cash, and often loaned money to local people in need, both white and black. He operated a general store in Germantown at the corner of Germantown Road and Clopper Road for more than 50 years. A grandson of one of the first settlers of the area, William Waters, Horace was a director of the Farmer’s Banking and Trust Company of Rockville and well respected in the community.

Today we call all places where people are buried cemeteries, but it is actually a fairly recent term that first appeared in America in the 1830s with the first corporate Memorial Parks. Before that there were burial grounds—municipal burial grounds, churchyard burial grounds and family burial grounds. Burial grounds are sacred places. They mark where our ancestors lie, commemorate the special, and memorialize the unique, but they are also primary sources that can tell us about birth and death dates, where a person lived, who was related to whom, and social customs surrounding death and burial.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when Montgomery County was still frontier or at least very rural, people died they were buried on thier property when they died. Almost every farm had its own burial ground. In towns and urban areas, the dead were buried on church or town property in churchyards or graveyards. As cities and towns grew, these places for the dead grew overcrowded and at the same time people began to realize that decaying matter spread disease. So, the burial grounds had to move outside the city. Official Cemeteries were established outside cities and towns beginning in the 1830s. These were either voluntary associations or private, often for-profit, corporations. The organization would purchase the land then sell burial plots, keeping a trust fund for future upkeep. Sometimes these cemeteries were created as parks, landscaped with exotic trees and flowers and having wandering paths, benches and gazebos creating a pastoral atmosphere for the “contemplation of death and life.” Lovers strolled and families picnicked in these park cemeteries.

By Susan Soderberg of the Germantown Historical Society

It was just before the election in 1920 and several men were gathered informally at the Waters General Store in Germantown discussing the pros and cons of the various candidates. When it came up that a local citizen, John Bolton, was refusing to vote, one of the men, Guy Vernon Thompson, volunteered to try to persuade him to do his civic duty.