Montgomery County (Md.) was once home to thousands of slaves. - Text and Photos by Eugene L. Meyer - Bethesda Magazine, January/February 2007

Before the Civil War, Montgomery County has the land of the free and the slave.  At one point, there were 7,500 slaves in the county, and their owners had enormous political power.

Gradually, the landscape is changing. A few new million-dollar homes are rising on large lots in the fertile fields of the old Medley's Election District, comprising the bulging northwestern portion of Montgomery County...Even before the new homes, horses of the gentry had replaced the crops of grain that long sustained the people.

But scan the records for Sugarland Road, south of Poolesville. The old families, the Allnuts, the Byrds, the Darbys, are still there, as they have been since the middle of the 18th century. And at the corner of Sugarland Road and Sugarland Lane, a tiny white church and cemetery mark the center of what was once a thriving black community, of which only a handful of households remain.  In one of them lives Phillip S. Johnson III, the grandson of fomrer slave Phillip Johnson...

There they are, descendants of slaves and descendants of slaveowners living quietly, side by side in a world today little known in this predominantly suburban county of new now 1 million citizens...