BGuthrie Photos: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park

MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] ACORN_970803_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] ACORN_970803_02.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] ACORN_970803_03.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[4] ACORN_970803_04.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] ACORN_970803_06.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] ACORN_970803_09.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. ACORN_970803_01.JPG: Silver Spring; Spring itself Silver Spring gets its name because Francis Perkins Blair, the editor of the Washington Globe newspaper, came out with his daughter in 1842 and discovered a spring in the heavily-wooded area north of Washington DC. There were glints of silver color in the water and he purchased the land around the spring, built a home, and named the area Silver Spring. The Blairs were an influential family in national politics. Francis' son Montgomery Blair moved to the area in 1853. He was a lawyer who's free-soil views moved him into the Republican party. He was Scott's counsel in the Dred Scott Case. He was Abraham Lincoln's Postmaaster General for four years, resigning at Lincoln's request to keep peace in the cabinet. After the war, Montgomery opposed the Radical Republicans in their persecution of President Andrew Jackson and he eventually rejoined the Democratic party. Francis Blair Jr was another son. He founded the Free-Soil party in Missouri. He was instrumental in saving Missouri and Kentucky for the Union by directing, without authority, the capture of the St Louis arsenal. He was later involved in the John Fremont affair. (Fremont had run for President as the first Republican candidate. He was given control of Missouri and ran it in a haphazard manner with poorly conceived contracts. On August 30, 1861, he declared martial law and freed the slaves of anyone who oppsed him. Lincoln asked him to modify this and he refused, forcing Lincoln to revoke it. Lincoln sent Montgomery Blair, General Meigs, and David Hunter to advise Fremont. Fremont started losing battles and Lincoln told him to turn his command over to David Hunter. Fremont later lost battles in Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign and was relieved of command in June 1862.) By Chattanooga and the Atlanta campaign, Francis was a Corps commander. He spent much of his private fortune to support the Union and was financially ruined after the war. He fought the with Radical Republicans after the war and eventually ran for Vice President in 1868. He was a US Senator in 1871-1873. When the Confederate troops under Early came through this area to attack Fort Stevens, they too stopped at this stream, which is now just a trickle, commemorated here by a little well and a marker: COMPLEMENTS TO SILVER SPRING FOR THE QUARRIES OF ALFRED DAY HIGHLANDS ROCK CREEK 1872 They also destroyed Francis Blair's mansion.
2. ACORN_970803_02.JPG: Silver Spring; Acorn Park Here's a picture of Acorn Park, which is the little park created to highlight the silver spring in "Silver Spring". The marker is there to the right.
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Wikipedia Description: Acorn Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Acorn Park is a park in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland that features an acorn-shaped gazebo and an artificial grotto. The site is thought to be the location of the mica-flecked spring that inspired Francis Preston Blair to name his estate "Silver Spring."

The gazebo was constructed in 1842 by Benjamin C. King.

Blair's son-in-law, Samuel Phillips Lee, had the stone grotto built at the site of the spring in 1894. It originally contained a statue of a Grecian nymph.

It was purchased by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in 1942, and refurbished and rededicated in 1955 .

The park is located at the intersection of East-West Highway and Newell Road, in south Silver Spring.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2016_MD_SS_Acorn: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park (33 photos from 2016)
- 2013_MD_SS_Acorn: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park (20 photos from 2013)
- 2010_MD_SS_Acorn: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park (16 photos from 2010)
- 2007_MD_SS_Acorn: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park (9 photos from 2007)
- 2005_MD_SS_Acorn: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park (6 photos from 2005)
- 2004_MD_SS_Acorn: MD -- Silver Spring -- Acorn Park (5 photos from 2004)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Park (Local)]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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