Wheaton, MD (IMG) (Images of America)
Title: From countryside to bustling community: Local woman chronicles Wheaton's transformationAuthor: Amber ParcherPublisher: GazetteDate: 3/25/09Before the traffic-clogged roads, townhouse developments and talks of a downtown center, Wheaton was a rugged 18th-century farm owned by an Irish stone mason, consisting of exactly five working oxen, 40 sheep, 16 swine and eight slaves.But digging up that information wasn't easy for Kensington resident Laura-Leigh Palmer, who featured Robert Brown's 1797 farm in the introduction to her newly released book, "Wheaton." The book was published by Arcadia Publishing, a national company that specializes in books of local history. "Wheaton" is part of the company's "Images of America" series of vintage photo history books.The book chronicles the community's humble beginnings, its Civil War-era settlements, the communication age that brought fame to Wheaton and the ensuing World War II housing boom through vintage photos Palmer dug up.The former president of the Wheaton and Kensington Chamber of Commerce and owner of asap graphics, a graphic design business, set out to investigate what lured people to Wheaton in the first place after attempting to update the chamber's community guide in 2003 and coming up empty-handed."There weren't any sources to go to," she said about trying to research the history of Wheaton for the guide.A year later, Palmer stumbled on an archive of half-century old newspaper articles from the area in the chamber's office, and her quest began.The self-professed history buff found that the name Wheaton came from George F. Plyer, a Union veteran who settled in the area, which was then just a countryside, after the Civil War. Plyer wanted to honor Gen. Frank Wheaton, the commander of the Union's defense of Washington, D.C., at Fort Stevens in 1864.People who followed Plyer to Wheaton had a desire to live a rural lifestyle — a mindset that still permeates many suburban dwellers in eastern Montgomery County.Unlike most suburban developments in the nation, Wheaton, Palmer notes, was primarily a middle-class neighborhood from the beginning, as people began settling there in the late 19th-century to be close to their government jobs.But Wheaton stayed fairly quiet until World War II. Just before the war, Palmer estimates, only 29,000 people were living in the area. By the 1960s, that number had quadrupled, she said.Massive subdivisions, schools, churches and roads were built practically overnight, laying the foundation for the community Wheaton is now, Palmer said."What amazes me is how fast the area grew in a short amount of time," Palmer said.But as Wheaton boomed, few people bothered to chronicle its past, Palmer said. Those who did had no format to share it. Centuries-old pictures, articles and documents remained in dusty attics until Palmer drew them out herself, she said.For several years, Palmer conducted countless interviews. Some of the subjects she met through chance encounters in the library history section.One of those, 75-year-old Mary Hertel, grew up in Kensington and put Palmer in touch with the people she knew as bus drivers for Montgomery Blair High School, neighbors and even a man who lived in the woods up from her housing development."I went to school with a lot of people from Wheaton, and there's nothing documented about them," said Hertel, now a Rockville resident.Even parts of Wheaton's slightly better-known history were hard to come by for Palmer.The first television transmissions in the nation were pr --Gazette