Olney

Discover Olney

Olney, along with its smaller neighbors Sandy Spring and Brookeville, lies in the northeast of Montgomery County, Maryland. All three are quiet, wealthy towns and exurbs of Washington, D.C., home to a good-sized Quaker population, and with a more rural, slower-paced character than other suburbs of D.C. This area's first European settlement was a Quaker community in Sandy Spring in the early eighteenth century. Nearly one century later, a Quaker couple of the names Thomas and Deborah Brooke founded both the town of Brookeville and the village of Olney (named after the hometown Ms. Brooke's favorite English poet, William Cowper). During the first half of the nineteenth century, Sandy Spring in particular was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, as the Quakers (the Society of Friends) were devoted abolitionists and early proponents of racial equality in America. Long a sleepy agricultural area, Olney in the second half of the twentieth century outgrew its neighbors by a large margin, becoming a home for affluent D.C. commuters.