Vintage Rockville, Showing Its Ages

It began as a 19th-century subdivision of rainbow-hued, bric-a-brac-adorned Victorian houses, but today, Rockville's West End is a microcosm of suburban development.

Sandwiched around the original Painted Ladies are American Foursquares, popular in the early 1900s; bungalows dating to the 1920s; Arts and Crafts cottages from the 1930s; World War II-era revivals; 1950s Cape Cods; and ramblers and split-levels from the 1960s. In recent years, assorted infill houses, some modest, some grand, have filled the remaining vacant lots or replaced older homes.

"You can see the whole history of Rockville through this area, and that's what is so charming about it," said Eileen McGuckian, executive director of Peerless Rockville, a nonprofit community-based preservation organization. "West End is a place where the town evolved."

The West End, which began as West End Park, was the creation of Washington lawyer Henry N. Copp, who had previously developed the early Montgomery County exurb of Garrett Park. In 1890, Copp bought about 500 acres of what had been the Julius West Farm, subdivided it into a neighborhood of circles and boulevards lined with lots of one-half to three acres, and began selling to commuters.

Rockville was 16 miles from the District of Columbia -- a long trip by horse and buggy. But Copp banked on the ease of traveling to downtown Washington thanks to the B&O Railroad. West End Park residents were within walking distance of the Rockville station. The trip to Union Station was 45 minutes.

"Getting on the train was enticing," McGuckian said. "The alternative, a horse and carriage down Rockville Pike, was crude transportation. [The road] wasn't paved until 1920. The train was everything."

Copp's promotional booklet, "Peerless Rockville: How to Get Health, Wealth, and Comfort," cited plenty of other advantages: "An altitude of 500 feet, unapproached train service, and an organized community of about 1,500 people, are the claims upon which its superiority is based. While people in Washington are restless and sleepless during the sultry nights of summer, the residents of Rockville are quietly sleeping beneath coverlets and being refreshed for their next day's duties. There is no malaria here, and rarely a mosquito. . . . A location in cool Rockville . . . promotes sound sleep at night. . . . Mind and body are so refreshed next day as to enable a man to think and work fast, and make more money than he otherwise would."

According to McGuckian, Copp was so taken with his new subdivision that for a time he lived there himself. Over a decade, he sold about 220 lots before economic hardship forced him sell the rest of the property at auction in 1900.

Today the original West End Park, much of it included in the West Montgomery Avenue Historic District, is part of what is known as Rockville's West End. To stay abreast of issues such as development and traffic, approximately 1,535 households belong to the West End Citizens Association.

On a recent walk through the neighborhood, John Brewer, 67, an independent computer consultant and former association president who has lived in West End for 30 years, pointed to several houses that were converted to commercial use in recent years.

"We have what I call residential erosion around the edges," he said.

"You lose residences, you lose people."