Spring Garden: Hampstead and the Gist Road

The land here was known as Spring Garden, and it sat along one of the most important trade paths in colonial Maryland. Christopher Gist, the frontiersman and land agent who would later guide George Washington on his early western expeditions, marked this Indian path from Baltimore to Carlisle in seventeen thirty-eight, and the colonial government soon made it a public road. The trail had connected the Chesapeake to the interior long before any European walked it.

In seventeen eighty-six, Christopher Vaughn laid out the town of Hampstead on this ground, platting lots along what was by then a well-traveled road linking Maryland's growing backcountry to the port towns below. Maryland incorporated Hampstead in eighteen eighty-eight. The town grew slowly as a market crossroads, and its position on that old Gist road gave it just enough traffic to survive.