Montgomery Planning’s Historic Preservation Office is sponsoring a 15-mile bike ride as part of Heritage Days 2019, a free festival organized by Heritage Montgomery (download brochure). The tour will include several historic sites, including a grist mill, a Quaker meeting house and the Oakley Cabin African American Museum and Park. Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Brookeville Beer Garden (20315 Georgia Avenue, Brookeville, MD) for a 10 a.m. departure and expect to return to the same location at around 12 noon.
The majority of the loop is a low-stress route, but some sections consist of hilly terrain and two-lane roads lacking shoulders and are unsuitable for young children.
All participants need to bring their own bikes and helmets, and are required to sign a waiver before the bike ride. Download waiver.
RSVP for Heritage Days Bike Ride
The group ride will pass the following historic structures with some stops:
- Thomas Mill: Ruins of an early 19th-century grist mill located in Brookeville.
- Brookeville Academy: A stone, one-room school house, “sufficient for sixty pupils,” that was built around 1810.
- Sandy Spring Meeting House: A 1817 Quaker meeting house with an historic cemetery.
- Woodlawn: The manor house and its outbuildings illustrate Montgomery County’s agricultural history. The outbuildings consist of a 19th century stone barn (now home to the Woodlawn Museum), stone springhouse, tenant house and a 19th-century log building that may have served as slave living quarters.
- Olney Theater: A theater complex opened in 1938 as a location equally accessible from Baltimore and Washington, DC in a “relaxing county setting.”
- Oakley Cabin African-American Museum and Park: This location was the center of an African-American roadside community from the Emancipation era well into the 20th century and now serves as a living history museum.