to
Update
is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland. , the city had an estimated total population of 57,698, making it the fourth largest in the state behind Baltimore, Frederick, and Rockville. This city is located at 39°8' North, 77°13' West, to the northwest of Rockville, the county seat of Montgomery County. Gaithersburg was incorporated in 1878.
Gaithersburg is urbanistically diverse, encompassing a historic Old Town, multiple new urban communities, high-rise apartments, and many suburban subdivisions.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is headquartered in Gaithersburg. Other major employers in the city include IBM, ACE*COMM, Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services business area headquarters, MedImmune (recently purchased by AstraZeneca), and Sodexo.
The city is also the location of the 220th Military Police Brigade of the United States Army Reserve.
Gaithersburg began in 1765 as a small agricultural settlement known as Log Town near the present day Summitee Hall on Ralph Crabb's 1725 land grant "Deer Park", gaining the name Gaithersburg a few years later. The northern portion of the land grant was purchased by Henry Brookes, and he built his home 'Montpelier' there in the late 1780s or early 1790s. His son-in-law, Benjamin Gaither, inherited a portion of that land, and by the 1850s the area had ceased to be called log town and was known to inhabitants as Gaitherburg.
The Forest Oak Post Office, named for a large tree in the town, was located in Gaither's store in 1851. However, when the railroad was built through town the new station was called Gaithersburg, an officially recognized name for the community for the first time. The town incorporated under its current name in 1878. Gaithersburg boomed during the late 1800s a churches, schools, a mill, grain elevators, stores, and hotels were built. Much of this development focused around the railroad station.
In 1873 the B&O Railroad constructed a station at Gaithersburg, designed by Ephraim Francis Baldwin as part of his well-known series of Victorian stations in Maryland. Rapid growth occurred shortly thereafter, and on April 5, 1878 the town was officially incorporated as the City of Gaithersburg. In 1899, Gaithersburg was selected as one of six global locations for the construction of an International Latitude Observatory as part of a project to measure the earth's wobble on its polar axis. The Gaithersburg Latitude Observatory is (as of 2007) the only National Historic Landmark in the City of Gaithersburg. The observatory and five others in Japan, Italy, Russia, and the United States gathered information that is still used by scientists today, along with information from satellites, to determine polar motion; the size, shape, and physical properties of the earth; and to aid the space program through the precise navigational patterns of orbiting satellites. The Gaithersburg station operated until 1982 when computerization rendered the manual observation obsolete.Over the past two decades into the twenty first century Gaithersburg has become a diverse city with a sizable hispanic population in the historic OldeTowne district.