MOO News issue I - 3rd Quarter 2024

From Farm to Park

Visitors driving to South Germantown Recreation Park view highways with speeding traffic and a multitude of homes and businesses to reach a park with open space and a variety of activities to choose from. Plus, the Park has one, long structure recalling its earlier life – the King Barn, which houses the MOOseum. From the M-NCPPS/Montgomery Parks website you learn that Parks began acquiring the land we now call South Germantown Recreation Park in the 1960s in order to preserve open space and provide the parkland for residents in northern MoCo. Most of the park’s 695 acres of rolling hills once belonged to the James and Macie King Farm.

Imagine the Past

Given the views of today, it is hard to believe that only 60 years ago much of Montgomery County was covered with dairy farms. Imagine arriving to what is now South Germantown Recreation Park by walking over rolling green pastures with grazing cows, growing corn and drying hay. That is what you would have seen from the 1930s-1960s.  Dairying was the most successful type of farming in the county in the mid-20 th Century. In one year, the county’s cows produced over 12 million gallons of milk that sold for more than $6 million. The dairy cow was “Queen of the County.”

James and Macie King bought the farm in 1913 and moved into the 1880’s home and farm with their small son. They converted the farm into a dairy farm and soon added two daughters to the family. After a fire in 1926 destroyed and damaged all 13 of their farm buildings, they began to rebuild. In 1930 they built this long barn, where 72 cows were milked twice a day, the only structure that remains of the dairy farm today.