Aberdeen, Maryland

The farming community that would become Aberdeen sat at a crossroads in Harford County for more than a century before it had a proper name. A grant of eleven hundred forty acres was made to Edward Hall in seventeen twenty, and for generations the place was called Hall's Cross Roads. In eighteen fifty-two the Rogers family of Baltimore, who had close ties to the Earl of Aberdeen, Scotland's prime minister that year, renamed the community in his honor.

Aberdeen incorporated in eighteen ninety-two and grew steadily, but its modern identity arrived in nineteen seventeen, when the United States Army established Aberdeen Proving Ground just north of town. The largest military test and evaluation complex in the country, Aberdeen Proving Ground transformed the small Harford County crossroads into one of the most strategically significant addresses on the East Coast.