About the Museum

The origins of Lyttonsville trace back to Samuel Lytton, one of Montgomery County’s earliest free Black landowners. In 1853, Lytton — who had previously worked for Francis Preston Blair, a prominent journalist and advisor to President Lincoln — purchased four acres of land from Leonard Johnson. He then sold parcels to African Americans, many of them formerly enslaved people or their descendants, laying the foundation for what would become a lasting community.

Though no photographs of Samuel Lytton are known to exist, records tell us something of the man. The 1850 census lists him as a 23-year-old laborer born in Maryland. He married Phyllis Cosbery in 1849, raised several children, worked as a farmer, and died in 1893. His name appears in local land records as a quiet but consequential act of community-building.

In the years following the Civil War, freed Black families throughout the region sought land, stability, and the chance to build independent lives. Small African American communities formed along the Washington, DC and Maryland border — and Lyttonsville was among them. Known earlier as Linden, the community developed as a tight-knit residential enclave shaped by extended family networks and multi-generational homeownership.

Residents supported themselves through agricultural labor, domestic work, and employment on nearby farms and estates. Over time, proximity to Washington, DC and access to the railroad opened new economic opportunities, and the community grew and evolved — while maintaining the close bonds that had defined it from the beginning.