By Marc Fisher
Sunday, December 25, 2005; C01

W hen Shelley Winkler first came to the Washington area, she and her husband, renting in Silver Spring, couldn't get used to the suburbs. "I'd call my friends and cry: 'You have to get in your car to blow your nose in Montgomery County.' "

Then, during her eternal search for a house, Winkler stepped off a MARC commuter train and into Washington Grove, a tiny town on the edge of Gaithersburg.

"I felt like I'd stepped out of Manhattan into a 19th-century Victorian village," Winkler says. She told herself: "I don't know what this is, but I am living here."

More than half the town is forest, 200-year-old oaks and poplars that, seen from the air, form a lazy green butterfly surrounded by gray and brown swirls of suburban development. This is The Town in the Forest, where at least 10 Victorian cottages -- most with peaks reaching toward God -- are home to descendants of the original settlers who built the Grove in the 1870s as a Methodist retreat.

When Winkler, a lapsed lawyer, bought a place in the Grove seven years ago, she joined a community of about 400 people, including potters, sculptors, painters, musicians and the usual lawyers, government workers and paper pushers.

"I feel like I live at camp," says Winkler. She does. In the 19th century, Methodists often spent weekends and summers at camp meetings featuring preachers and country air. The Grove became a stop on the Chautauqua circuit, where Methodist meetings evolved into secular camps for families seeking exposure to self-improvement lectures, theater and song -- a phenomenon Teddy Roosevelt called "the most American thing in America."

The Grove draws few visitors now, but it retains a powerful sense of belonging. "You lose so much when you just build houses and there's nothing there to create community," Winkler says. The Grove does not have that problem: Signs at entrances to town say: "Property of Town of Washington Grove. Many things are permitted. A few are prohibited."

Deeds on the original houses forbade owners from taking down any tree. They also banned card playing, dancing and non-whites, or, as the Methodists worded the restriction, "anyone of a race whose death rate is of a higher percentage than that of the white or Caucasian race."

"I didn't know if I'd fit in," says Winkler, who is Jewish. "I don't even have a peak on my house. I can't be close to God."

Washington Grove is 215 houses, nearly all facing 50-foot-wide walking paths. It remains a railroad town, served by a commuter line (five stops and 34 minutes on the MARC train to Union Station). Cars are tucked behind the houses, on roads used for journeys into the paved world.

Although the houses are small--the standard original cottage was 14 feet by 28 feet -- the Grove extends everyone's living space. Winkler's children spend much of their time in McCathran Hall, a cupola-topped octagon where the Grove sponsors summer camp, dances, classical concerts, movie series and town meetings (residents may even vote to overturn their council's decisions). "We spend so much of our lives in here, it's like the family rec room," Winkler says.

If the kids aren't at the hall, they might be at Maple Lake, a swimming hole made from an old ice-making facility, where the town offers free swimming lessons. (The lake is for Grove residents only; when Winkler's friend Joli McCathran has to ask unofficial visitors to leave, they sometimes challenge her: Do you know everyone in Washington Grove? "And I have to say, 'Well, yes, I do,' " she says.)

Or perhaps the kids are over at the Acorn Library, a cozy, quiet spot in Betsy Klinger's converted garage, where little ones pop in anytime -- they all know the combination -- to read or borrow books, on the honor system.

The developing world has pushed hard up against the Grove's borders, and the intercounty connector, the long-threatened highway linking I-270 with I-95, is supposed to swoop along the town's southern boundary.

The Grove, unlike communities that rely on restrictive government regulation to hold on to their history, fights for its heritage with no legal protections. "It's a remarkable example of self-preservation," Winkler says, "of individual decisions to preserve."

That commitment is why people such as Winkler come to the Grove, and it's why they rarely leave.

This is the last in a series of columns on why people live where they live.