A new park is opening in Potomac on Nov. 5.
The grand opening of Greenbriar Local Park will held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., featuring soccer games, a guided walking tour, crafts, a ribbon-cutting, and free Ben and Jerry’s ice cream courtesy of Glenstone Museum, according to Montgomery Parks.
The county park, at 12525 Glen Road, covers 25 acres; 16.5 acres are undisturbed, and of that, 15 acres are forest, Project Manager Linda Komes said.
The park has a large stone and cedar pergola with seating, a basketball court, a grass volleyball court and parking for 67 cars. It has a stone and cedar picnic shelter with a stone seating terrace and four 8-foot long tables.
According to the parks department, all the stone used to build the walls and columns in the park was sourced from Tri-State Quarry—the last operating stone quarry in Montgomery County.
The park also has a 225-foot by 360-foot natural grass soccer field. The field will be named for former Montgomery County Planning Board Chair William H. Hussmann Jr., at the request of William Rickman Jr., who contributed $300,000 toward construction of the field. Hussmann died in 2010 after a career in business and government.
A looped trail measuring about two-thirds of a mile courses through the park. About 95 percent of the plantings are native species, including oaks, maples and redbuds, Komes said. The remaining plantings are perennials, she said.
The park also has two themed playgrounds. One, designed for ages 2 to 5, features the “Cap’n Crabby” fishing boat and a poured-in-place rubber surface that’s easy on the feet and designed to look like a Chesapeake Bay beach, the parks department said.
Children, aged 5 to 12, can play on a playground that features a clatter bridge, tunnel slide, track ride, peak rock climbers and talk tubes, the parks department said.
The 25-acre park has been in the works since 1980, when the land was listed on the Potomac Master Plan to be acquired as a park, Komes said. The county purchased the land in 1992. The park waited in a queue until 2005, when the county Planning Board approved a park facility plan. Design started in 2011 and was completed two years later.
