Friendsville: Garrett County's Oldest Town

John Friend arrived at the mouth of the Youghiogheny River in seventeen sixty-five, well before the Revolution, making the settlement he founded the oldest in what would become Garrett County. The area had drawn Native American peoples for thousands of years, and archaeological finds from Archaic and later Woodland cultures suggest this riverbank was a gathering place long before Europeans appeared. Friend's name stuck to the town, and over the following decades German, Swiss, and Amish families moved down from Somerset County in Pennsylvania, filling the surrounding ridges with small farms. The community today is better known as a put-in point for Youghiogheny River whitewater, but the town itself predates the county it sits in by more than a century.