Brighton of a century ago hummed with activity: a general store, post office, stage stop and stable, blacksmith shop, wheelwright shop, cattle scales, corn cannery, shoemaker shop, black Methodist church, white Episcopal church, black school and white school, and a population of perhaps 150 persons--larger at the time than Bethesda or Olney. Every day the stage from Laurel stopped at the store with mail and passengers and turned around for the return trip.

Many residents were blacks whose forebears had been slaves on area farms and whose descendants still own homes: Hills, Awkards, Davises, Greens, Neugents, Powells, Wrights. Near the intersection of today's Gold Mine Road and New Hampshire Avenue were meadows where black athletes played Negro League Baseball and held week-long summer religious gatherings. Among white families were the numerous Browns--farmers and storekeepers--and Peirces, Hartshornes, Leas, Iddings, Gartrells, Hollands, and Hottels.

Residents' increasing mobility saw Brighton's commerce siphon off to Ashton and more distant entrepots. More change came with completion of Brighton Dam and Road and the severing of the old Patuxent crossing on Green Bridge Road, on the Walter F. Wilson farm. With Brighton Dam Road, rural Brighton became a busy crossroad that now boasts a traffic light.

Brighton Dam nears completion in this 1942 photo, taken from the Howard County side. It already backs up water. Built to provide water to an area fast mobilizing for World War II, the dam was dedicated by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in 1944. Remus Lyles, who grew up on a farm flanking the gorge and whose father helped clear trees for the reservoir, watched German prisoners of war help in the clearing, and soldiers patrol the top of the strategic new dam.