The coming of the railroad spurred rapid growth in Montgomery County after the Civil War.  As the county seat, Rockville was guaranteed a stop on the new rail line and as a suburb of the nation’s capital, it attracted real estate promoters who purchased nearby farms and divided them into hundreds of building lots.  Before the rail line opened (1873), Rockville’s corporate boundary went a bit farther west of Van Buren Street.  Less than two decades later, the town stretched to Watts Branch, near the present-day interstate highway.  Bridging that gap was West End Park.

The new subdivision was the vision of Henry N. Copp, a Washington educator and attorney.  In 1889-90, Copp purchased 469 acres of farmland west of Forest Avenue and north of the Darnestown Road (now West Montgomery Avenue).  West End Park may have been named for its location or for the Julius West family, whose home stood about where Beall Elementary School is now

Copp’s promotional booklet, Peerless Rockville: How to Get Health, Wealth, and Comfort, extolled Rockville’s virtues.  “As a winter sanitarium, summer resort, and all-the-year-round place of residence, Rockville stands without a rival.  An altitude of 500 feet, unapproached train service, and an organized community of about 1500 people, are the claims upon which its superiority is based…  There is no malaria here, and rarely a mosquito….Rockville embraces a quiet, refined, and hospitable people…  A location in cool Rockville…promotes sound sleep at night during the winter.  Mind and body are so refreshed next day as to enable a man to think and work fast, and make more money than he otherwise would…”

Quarter-acre lots cost $300 to $400, and the Sentinel’s gossip column reported contracts for new houses ranging from $2,000 to $6,000.  The plat of West End Park (1890) showed blocks filled with lots from one-quarter to three acres in size, wide boulevards, circles, and “the pretty stream of water known as Watt’s Branch.”  Copp’s booklet pictured local churches, nearby businesses, and elaborate Victorian homes already under construction.  Alas for West End Park, the 1890s saw a series of economic depressions.  By 1900, all but the 220 lots that had previously been sold were auctioned at the door of the Red Brick Courthouse. 

Through the twentieth century, West End Park grew in spurts -- bungalows in the teens and twenties, 1930s Colonials, revival styles in the 1940s, small frame and brick Cape Cods in the 1950s, ramblers and split levels in the 1960s, and Victorian look-alikes in the 1980s and 90s -- resulting in a pleasant visual medley.  Although struggling with issues of traffic and “mansionization,” West End Park is a vibrant neighborhood of which Henry Copp would be proud.