We're part of Heritage Days June 27-28!
Heritage Days is a countywide festival weekend celebrating the historic, cultural, and outdoor recreation sites in Montgomery County, Maryland. Celebrating its 27th anniversary and Montgomery County’s 250th birthday, this year’s event will be held on Saturday, June 27th and Sunday, June 28th and features more than 30 museums and parks.
We’re number 8 on the program! Join us!
The Bethesda Meeting House Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Donations welcome!
Watch 2024's fabulous start
to the preservation of the Bethesda Meeting House!
A huge thank you to the dozens of volunteers who made 2024 such an incredible year for the Bethesda Historical Society and Bethesda Meeting House Foundation. As you can see from this video, we accomplished an amazing amount and we could not have done it without you!
Listen to Hank Levine discuss the history, the present and the future of the Bethesda Meeting House.
On the PreserveCast podcast, which brings you stories from around the world about the people who are doing the work to preserve, interpret, and save our past. Each weekly episode makes the case for the value, relevance, and importance of history in our lives.
Find the link to the podcast here
PreserveCast is powered by Preservation Maryland, a non-profit organization that believes the future is richer when it understands the past.
Contact us at bethesdahistory@gmail.com
Our mailing address:
4300 Montgomery Avenue, #104, Bethesda, MD 20814
Visit our sister site BethesdaHistoricalSociety.org
Past, Present and Future of Bethesda Meeting House
Watch Hank Levine, president of the Bethesda Meeting House Foundation, present an illustrated tour of this iconic building’s history, architecture and significance.
Click here to watch the one-hour video on Youtube.
Hank’s presentation begins at the 3:10 mark.
Bethesda Meeting House
You’ve probably driven by the small white church on a knoll overlooking Rockville Pike on your way to downtown Bethesda and may have wondered how it came to be and who occupies it now.
This is the Bethesda Meeting House, built in 1850, where Abraham Lincoln is said to have spoken or worshiped, where Confederate soldiers briefly camped before a skirmish with Union soldiers, and which became the “church that named Bethesda” 153 years ago.
Over the years, the site was occupied by a Presbyterian congregation, a wealthy DC socialite who gained some renown as an artist, a Catholic missionary order, and finally a small Baptist group that died out a few years ago and left the church and its adjacent parsonage abandoned and in sad decay. The site is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and was one of the original sites on the 1979 Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation.
Last December, the Bethesda Historical Society purchased the three-acre site, thanks to a generous donation from a Bethesda couple who prefer to remain anonymous. Since then, the Society has worked, with extraordinary help from the community, to clean up the property, secure the premises, make urgent repairs, and arrange for the surveys necessary before restoration can begin and the eventual use of the property decided.
The Bethesda Meeting House site is a unique historical treasure that deserves to be preserved for future generations. Offers to help us are welcome.
Contact us at bethesdahistory@gmail.com
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