Just a few steps down a path to the Northwest Branch in Silver Spring, the roar of traffic on Columbia Pike and the clamor of the nearby Trader Joe’s parking lot disappear. They’re replaced by the rush of water tumbling over smooth boulders and the burble of eddies downstream. Towering sycamore branches click and creak in the breeze. A few birds flit and sing in the shade.
The words of writer and environmentalist Rachel Carson might come to mind: “Hearing can be a source of…exquisite pleasure. …Take time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean—the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams.”
It’s not a bad place to create the world’s first museum devoted to Carson and her ecological philosophy. A determined effort is underway to establish Springsong Museum in a historic building overlooking this spot.
Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the world to the danger of pesticides, lived most of her adult life in Silver Spring and, briefly, in Takoma Park. However, her tie to the area is not widely known among residents, says Rebecca Henson, an environmental policy analyst who lives in Silver Spring and is leading the work to launch Springsong. Nearly $2 million has been raised for the estimated $8 million project, including a $1.25 million state bond and about $500,000 in private donations, according to Henson.
With the support of Montgomery Parks and elected officials such as Maryland state Sen. Will Smith (D), who sponsored the bond initiative last year, Henson’s team of 20 community members, architects, exhibit planners and Carson specialists is aiming for construction to begin after the county planning board approves it and for the museum to open by the end of 2026.
Henson began ruminating on the idea in April 2021, more than a year into the pandemic and a few months after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Carson’s themes of connection and allowing space for awe in our lives…was just too great and too powerful of a message not to celebrate and jump into, and especially that she lived all over this part of the county,” Henson says. Carson’s last home, where she wrote Silent Spring, is a little more than 2 miles upstream from the museum site. There is evidence that the writer enjoyed being in the woods along the Northwest Branch. She was 56 when she died in 1964 of complications from breast cancer.
Plans call for the museum to be in an unoccupied red brick building owned by Montgomery Parks and located in Burnt Mills East Special Park, just north of University Boulevard. The now vacant structure was part of a water filtration system operated by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Montgomery Parks would lease the building to the museum, according to David Tobin, manager of public-private partnerships for the parks. Henson’s group is seeking permits to begin work on the structure. “It’s very complex, but we’re allocating a lot of staff time to work collaboratively and help this succeed,” Tobin says.
The museum planners intend to use Carson’s life and philosophy as inspirations to explore ideas of connection and wonder through exhibits, gardens and programs for all ages. The space would highlight the Native American history of the location, the old mill that used to grind grain there, the relationship with a nearby African American community before desegregation, and the clean-water heritage of the site.
For now, the only structure in the county dedicated to Carson’s legacy is her last home, at 11701 Berwick Road in Silver Spring, though it’s not regularly open to the public. Anyone can make an appointment to visit, says Diana Post, who is president of the Rachel Carson Landmark Alliance and has preserved the home with her husband, Clifford C. Hall. It includes research materials and some furnishings similar to items Carson had. Last year, 60 people visited, Post says, but there could be more this year with the planned post-pandemic return of the annual open house in September. The home “offers the feeling of Rachel Carson,” Post says. “You feel this kind of peace and closeness to nature and simplicity.”
Outside the home, at the foot of a long wooded slope, the Northwest Branch continues its patient flow—as it did when the Nacotchtank people fished there and when Carson lived and died there—bending downstream on its course to where an ambitious museum may one day tell those stories to new generations.
This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.
