History

Excerpts from "The Silver Hill - Morningside Neighborhood" at the website of Steve DePalma of the Harvard Medical School. Not dated, but probably written in the early 1970's. The same site has articles on Hillcrest Heights, Iverson Mall, and other nearby areas.

The old road leading out of the District of Columbia into the Silver Hill-Morningside Neighborhood led to the tiny village of Silver Hill, located a mile or so from the County's border with the nation's capital. Travelers during the Civil War period who used this road (first known as Naylor Road or Walker Road because it led to the Naylor and Walker farms) would have found a tavern at Silver Hill where the road branched. One segment trended northeast to Suitland and was known for a long time as the Silver Hill-Suitland Road (now Silver Hill Road). Another segment continued southward and branched again, toward Oxon Hill and toward Camp Springs. Sometimes this segment was called Oxon Hill Road, and later part of old Branch Avenue, but today it is part of St. Barnabas Road (Rt. 414).
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Maps of the early 1900's indicate few changes in the type of settlement until transfers of land took place in the 1930's for the sale of building lots. One parcel on which lots were offered for sale was within the old village site of Silver Hill. This small subdivision was given the name of Silver Hill Park. Another small subdivision, fronting on St. Barnabas Road, was called Swanland Heights; the plat for this small cluster of 20 lots was filed in 1938 by a member of the Swann family, prominent landowners in this section of the County. Still another was Fleischman's Village; it occupied part of a large tract fronting on Old Branch Avenue (just south of Suitland Parkway) which had been purchased by the Fleischman family in the 1930's, and in the following decade approximately 70 lots were available in this subdivision. Later, in the 1960's, some of the remaining ground was utilized for apartment construction.
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The past ten years have been marked by fewer increases in single-family home construction and by the introduction of apartment development, with the latter rendered feasible by the installation of sewer lines along Henson Branch, the construction of new Branch Avenue (Rt. 5), and the opening of the Capital Beltway in 1964. Multi-family development includes the large Carriage Hill apartment complex near the intersection of new Branch Avenue and Suitland Parkway, three garden apartment complexes on Silver Hill Road (east of new Branch Avenue), two apartment complexes near the Suitland Parkway interchange with the Capital Beltway, and a grouping of townhouses near the Auth Road crossing of the Beltway. Multi-family units now considerably outnumber the single-family type, accounting for 60 percent of the total number of dwelling units.