Gaithersburg
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Gaithersburg is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland. As of 2004, the city had an estimated total population of 58,091, making it the second largest in the state. 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 home to the neo-traditionalist new town of Kentlands, Maryland, designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, which was an important early example of the new urbanism movement. Other new urbanist communities in Gaithersburg include Lakelands, the Washingtonian Center, Crown Farm and Watkins Mill Town Center.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is headquartered in Gaithersburg. Other major employers in the city include Hughes Network Systems, IBM, ACE*COMM, Lockheed Martin Federal Systems, MedImmune, and Sodexho.
Gaithersburg began in 1765 as a small agricultural settlement known as Log Town. In 1850, the post office was named “Forest Oak.” The town officially became “Gaithersburg” when it was incorporated on April 5, 1878, five years after the B&O Railroad built a station there.
In 1899, Gaithersburg was selected as one of six global locations for the construction of an International Latitude Observatory as part of an international project to measure the earth’s wobble on its polar axis. The Gaithersburg Latitude Observatory is (as of 2006) the only National Historic Landmark in the City of Gaithersburg. The Gaithersburg Latitude Observatory and five others in Japan, Italy, Russia and the United States gathered information that is still used by scientists today, along with information obtained 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.