Brighton of a century ago hummed with activity: a general store, post office, stage stop and stable, blacksmith shop, wheelwright shop, cattle scales, corn cannery, shoemaker shop, black Methodist church, white Episcopal church, black school and white school, and a population of perhaps 150 persons--larger at the time than Bethesda or Olney. Every day the stage from Laurel stopped at the store with mail and passengers and turned around for the return trip.

Many residents were blacks whose forebears had been slaves on area farms and whose descendants still own homes: Hills, Awkards, Davises, Greens, Neugents, Powells, Wrights. Near the intersection of today's Gold Mine Road and New Hampshire Avenue were meadows where black athletes played Negro League Baseball and held week-long summer religious gatherings. Among white families were the numerous Browns--farmers and storekeepers--and Peirces, Hartshornes, Leas, Iddings, Gartrells, Hollands, and Hottels.

Residents' increasing mobility saw Brighton's commerce siphon off to Ashton and more distant entrepots. More change came with completion of Brighton Dam and Road and the severing of the old Patuxent crossing on Green Bridge Road, on the Walter F. Wilson farm. With Brighton Dam Road, rural Brighton became a busy crossroad that now boasts a traffic light.

Then came a train of disasters. The Civil War strangled the flow of southern cotton. An 1868 flood swept away houses. The end came in the 1889 deluge that also caused the Johnstown flood. Richard H. Lansdale, a grandson of Thomas and future miller, recalled walking as a child away from the wrecked town with a pillow under one arm and a chicken under the other. Today Triadelphia's foundations slumber beneath the reservoir that bears its name.

Brighton Dam nears completion in this 1942 photo, taken from the Howard County side. It already backs up water. Built to provide water to an area fast mobilizing for World War II, the dam was dedicated by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in 1944. Remus Lyles, who grew up on a farm flanking the gorge and whose father helped clear trees for the reservoir, watched German prisoners of war help in the clearing, and soldiers patrol the top of the strategic new dam.

Henry Stabler's Roslyn faces west over the verdant Hawlings valley, a view he probably chose when building in 1843. Just south of Roslyn was a cattle scales and a small road leading east to a black village and a ford across the Patuxent along which drovers herded livestock to Baltimore. Owned by the Arthur Carrs and then the William Krickers, Roslyn today is the home of Vernon and Caroline Kricker Hussman and the site of their Christmas tree plantation.

Thirty-three rooms, four fireplaces, and 71/2 baths fill sprawling Gittings Ha Ha, seen here from the air. Land records of the 1750s indicate that Amey Holland owned a log cabin on the site, which William Washington Brown expanded into a modest farmhouse in the late 1700s. Today's spacious and landscaped home was designed by owner Henry L. Breuninger in the 1930s. The estate's name stems in part from Thomas Gittings, who obtained the land patent. The Ha Ha? Apparently no evidence exists of the traditional sunken fence, but one speculation holds that in the course of frequent revels, tipsy guests would attempt to walk a brick wall behind the house and invariably fall off, provoking laughter from watchers.

Edward Peirce built Riverton before building Fairfield, probably just before sailing off in the 1849 California gold rush. His parents Joshua and Hannah had lived in a log cabin on the site in "this land of hills" since 1822. Here their barn burned in 1841, leading to formation of the Mutual Insurance Company. Pierre DuPont's famed Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania occupy the original Peirce farm in Chester County. In 1860 Riverton was purchased by the Janneys, who lived there for nearly three-quarters of a century. It passed then to the Leishears and in 1955 to Mary and Roger Brooke Farquhar III. Today it is owned by Tim and Sally Eller.

Ethereal Fairfield wears the softened look of time and ivy in this 1880 photo. Edward Peirce built Fairfield in 1856 for father Joshua and sister Ann, using stone quarried on the land. When Edward Peirce finished building he was broke: A loan of five dollars enabled him to marry Moravian Sophie Kummer. Her acquisition of a piano--the first in Sandy Spring--helped break down Quaker opposition to music; soon she found herself giving piano lessons to neighborhood children. Their daughter Fanny married William A. Iddings, who became the parents of Deborah Iddings Willson. Fairfield is now the home of Jill Minar.