The Bethesda Meeting House was founded as a Presbyterian church in 1820 along the newly-paved Rockville Pike. After a fire destroyed the original building, it was rebuilt in 1850, and a manse (parsonage) was added around the same time. The church has remained mostly unchanged for the past 175 years, except for some updates to the front façade. The parsonage was remodeled in the 1880s and has since been expanded and modernized.

In 1871, the church’s pastor convinced the new postmaster in downtown “Darcy’s Store” to rename the area “Bethesda” after the church, which was the most recognizable landmark nearby. Because of this, the Meeting House became known as “the church that named Bethesda.”

By 1926, as the local population soared with the rise of automobile travel, the Presbyterian congregation moved to downtown Bethesda where there was more space and parking. For the next 20 years, the property was not used for religious purposes—the only such period in its nearly 200-year history. During that time, a wealthy Washington, D.C. socialite and prominent Republican converted it into a country estate, one of many along Rockville Pike at the time.

In the mid-1940s, she sold the property to a Catholic missionary society, which attempted to sell it to a developer for apartment construction. However, the County Council denied their rezoning request. In 1952, the Temple Hill Baptist Church, a small congregation from Rockville, purchased the property and used it as their place of worship for the next 70 years.

Their minister, Rev. William Adams, successfully placed the 3-acre site on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, and added the adjoining 1-acre cemetery to the Register a year later. Unfortunately, he was unable to raise enough funds for maintenance of the historic site, and the buildings continued to deteriorate over the next 35 years after his death. When the succeeding pastor passed away in 2022, the small congregation—then down to just a few members—disbanded.

The religious board overseeing the property tried to sell it to developers but found no interested buyers. When Montgomery County began issuing fines for neglecting the historic property, the board offered it at a deeply discounted price to the Bethesda Historical Society.

The Society then created the Bethesda Meeting House Foundation, a nonprofit organization that, with help from a generous Bethesda couple, purchased the site in December 2023.