Bethesda History on the Web
Lilly Coltman Moore Stone (1862–1960)
Lilly Stone was a pioneering businesswoman, civic leader, and preservationist whose life and work helped shape Montgomery County, Maryland.
Born near present-day Seven Locks and River Roads, she grew up amid the farms and early industrial enterprises that lined the Potomac and the emerging Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
Widowed in 1921 and facing the loss of her primary income, Stone turned to a dormant asset on her property: an old quarry opened in the 1830s by her grandfather, Captain John Moore, to supply stone for the C&O Canal.
In her early sixties, she reestablished the enterprise as Stoneyhurst Quarries and immersed herself in its day-to-day operations, earning a reputation as the “only woman quarrier” in the country during the 1920s. Under her leadership, Stoneyhurst supplied striking gneiss and mica schist for prominent projects, including the National Zoo’s original Elephant House, portions of Washington National Cathedral, the steps of the U.S. Botanic Garden, and the Post Office and Bethesda-Chevy Chase high school buildings in Bethesda.
In 1944, at age 82, she convened community members at her home to create a local historical organization that became the Montgomery County Historical Society, with Stone recognized as its founder and guiding force during its formative years.
Lilly Stone bridged the canal era and the suburban age, preserving the stories and landscapes that defined her community while running a demanding industrial enterprise well into old age.
Among the resources on the Web about Lilly Stone are:
Portrait of Lilly C. Stone, 1954
Carved in Stone: How a Bethesda farm woman overcame family hardships to build a thriving quarry business
Lilly Stone – A Daring Woman (YouTube video)
Early 1900s Photograph Taken at Stoneyhurst Quarries
Stoneyhurst Quarries – Montgomery History
The story of the Cabin John woman behind Stoneyhurst Quarry
Bethesda History on the Web
Discriminatory Covenants
Bethesda’s early- to mid-20th-century housing development was heavily influenced by racially restrictive covenants that excluded nonwhite and non-Christian buyers. Along with other “Downcounty” areas of Montgomery County inside the Beltway, Bethesda contained numerous housing subdivisions whose developers or homeowners included racial covenants in property deeds.
These provisions prohibited the sale, lease, or occupation of homes by members of specified racial, ethnic, and religious groups, including Black, Jewish, Asian, Armenian, Greek, Indian, Japanese, and Syrian residents. Developers in Bethesda and similar suburbs used these covenants to create racially homogeneous white neighborhoods under the belief that doing so would preserve property values and stability.
These private agreements were legally upheld after Corrigan v. Buckley (1928), which confirmed their validity, and remained common until Shelley v. Kramer (1948) made them unenforceable in court. Even so, they continued to appear in Bethesda-area deeds until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed them completely.
Montgomery County’s Mapping Segregation Project is building a database to show where such covenants existed—specifically focusing on the Bethesda region and other inside-the-Beltway neighborhoods. The effort will visualize patterns of racial exclusion and track demographic changes into the 21st century.
For more, see the Mapping Segregation Project
Bethesda History on the Web
Bethesda Post Office Mural from 1938
The Bethesda Post Office mural, titled “Montgomery County Farm Women’s Market,” was installed in 1939 as part of the New Deal’s Treasury Section of Fine Arts program, which commissioned artworks to enrich federal buildings during the Great Depression.
Painted for the 1938 Wisconsin Avenue post office in downtown Bethesda, the mural depicts local farm women feeding animals on one side and selling produce on the other, evoking the nearby Farm Women’s Cooperative Market that opened on Wisconsin Avenue in 1932. This imagery anchored the new federal building in the life of a once-rural community that was rapidly suburbanizing.
The mural’s commissioning drew attention at the highest levels of government. On December 12, 1938, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt personally visited the Treasury’s Procurement Division to review Robert Gates’s sketch for the Bethesda mural, calling it “charming” in her diary and praising post office art for increasing public appreciation of decorative and artistic values. Her endorsement underscored the federal belief that public art could both provide work for artists and cultivate civic pride during hard economic times.
Robert Franklin Gates, born in Detroit in 1906, trained at the Detroit School of Arts and Crafts, the Art Students League of New York, and the Phillips Gallery Art School in Washington, D.C., before emerging as a prominent New Deal muralist.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s he received several Treasury Section commissions, with the Bethesda mural as his first post office work, followed by Old Time Camp Meeting in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and Buckwheat Harvest in Oakland, Maryland. After World War II he joined American University’s faculty, eventually chairing the art department from 1953 to 1957, and became a central figure in Washington’s mid‑century art scene.
When the historic Bethesda post office was sold and postal operations consolidated, the Gates mural was removed to Postal Service storage, raising fears it might be lost. After a 17‑month absence, the work was restored to public view in the Bethesda–Chevy Chase Regional Services Center, preserving a rare local example of Depression‑era federal art and Gates’s legacy in Montgomery County.
Among the resources on the Web about the mural and Robert Gates are:
Post Office Art
Off The Wall: New Deal Post Office Murals
Another New Deal post office, sold and soon to close
New Deal Art Along Highway 219 (Robert Gates)
Robert Franklin Gates Archives
American University Museum lecture on the paintings and watercolors of Robert Franklin Gates (YouTube video)
Bethesda History on the Web
Community Paint and Hardware
Wilson’s Store and its successor Community Paint and Hardware served the hardware and household needs of Bethesda residents for nearly one hundred years through the community’s evolution from a hamlet to a modern city.
Over the years, it also functioned as the site of Bethesda’s only telephone, as a library and as a post office. The store closed in 1986 and the building, the oldest surviving commercial structure in Bethesda, was later moved a few blocks away to its current location on Middleton Lane.
Community Paint and Hardware was owned and managed for 55 years by generations of the Broadhurst family. In this video, Allen Broadhurst reminisces about his family and the store where he worked as a youth.
YouTube video “Remembering Community Paint & Hardware” by Montgomery Municipal Cable
History of “Community Paint and Hardware Store (Wilson’s Store)” on The Clio website
Bethesda History on the Web
Walter Tuckerman
Walter Tuckerman (1881-1961) was the most important civic leader in shaping early 20th-century Bethesda. In 1912, he purchased 183 acres of farmland which he developed into the Edgemoor neighborhood of downtown Bethesda.
Tuckerman served as a founder and first president of the Bank of Bethesda in 1919, a pivotal institution in the area’s rapid growth which facilitated substantial local development with its loans. Here’s a detailed biography written by Bethesda historian Bill Offutt.
https://montgomeryhistory.org/