Historic Silver Spring

Images of America: Historic Silver Spring celebrates the community's past, beginning with founder Francis Preston Blair's 1840 discovery of the mica-flecked spring and the 1873 arrival of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Vintage photographs document the progressive growth of the "Main Streets," Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road, and the construction of the Silver Spring Armory and National Dry Cleaning Institute in 1927 and the Silver Theatre and Silver Spring Shopping Center in 1938. The volume culminates with modern pictures of downtown Silver Spring's 21st-century revitalization, which continues to preserve the past and secure the future of the area. In a pictorial journey through the community's Central Business District and bordering residential neighborhood, East Silver Spring, Historic Silver Spring honors the people and places that have come before.

Author Jerry A. McCoy is a public librarian for Washington, D.C., history special collections at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library’s Washingtoniana Division and the Georgetown Branch Library’s Peabody Room. A resident of downtown Silver Spring since 1992, McCoy founded the Silver Spring Historical Society in 1998 and co-produced with Final Cut Productions the 2002 local Emmy-nominated documentary Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb. His monthly history column, “Silver Spring: Then & Again,” appears in the Silver Spring Voice.