Germantown, MD news and local guide

George Atzerodt, a conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, had lived in Germantown as a boy after his family came from Prussia. After Booth shot Lincoln, Atzerodt, who had refused to carry out his assigned attack on Vice President Andrew Johnson, fled to his cousin's farm near Clopper Road, where soldiers found him on April 20, 1865; he was hanged at Fort McNair on July 7, 1865. Germantown had no public school until after the war, when a one-room schoolhouse was built in 1868. The Bowman Brothers Mill burned in 1914, and its successor, the Liberty Mill, opened in 1918 and brought electricity to the area, the first in northern Montgomery County. With eight silos it became the second-largest mill in Maryland and supplied flour to the Army in World War II, but it decayed after the war and was destroyed by an arsonist on May 30, 1972. The baseball pitcher Walter Johnson lived on a farm there from 1935 until his death in 1946. Sources Wikipedia: Germantown, Maryland