Living in Takoma Park
Humans first crossed the Bering Strait from Asia between 25,000-14,000 years ago. People may have started living in the Maryland area very soon after the crossing. This was during the Pleistocene Epoch when giant mammals such as saber-toothed cats, mammoths and mastodons also shared the land.
Around 11,000 years ago the earth experienced a massive climate change. As the earth warmed, most of the giant mammals became extinct but people survived by adapting in may ways, resulting in the development of villages and a less nomadic lifestyle.
A thousand years ago, there were many America Indian tribes in Maryland. They grew beans, hunted and fished, and traded extensively with each other. The Piscataway are the tribes that are the most likely to have been living here and on the land that is now Takoma Park when Europeans started settling the New World.
Not much is known about American Indians in Maryland. Starting in the 1600's, many Piscataway and other local tribes left their land and moved along the Potomac River because of disease outbreaks or their land being stolen or 'bought' by Europeans. In the 1700's the Maryland Assembly set up reservations on less desirable land like Zekiah Swamp and, by later that century almost all American Indians had left Maryland, most likely to New York and eventually Canada. Some of their decendents live here today.
Starting in the 1800's, Benjamin Gilbert, a Washington DC real estate developer, bought 90 acres of land around a small train station located on the B&O Railroad's Metropolitan Branch. Gilbert developed Takoma Park and marketed it to city officeworkers as country living, a 6-mile commute from the city, with clean water and fresh air.
Marker can be reached from Fenton Street, on the right when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
