Georgia At Sligo

A Downtown Is Born

FROM COAL AND HORSE FEED TO ICE CREAM, a variety of businesses have prospered at the corner of Georgia and Sligo avenues. The earliest documented business was Wilkins & Jordan, dealers in flour, feed, hay, grain, wood, coal, fertilizers, and plaster. Howard L. Wilkins and William W. Jordan established their business in 1901, “…when there was but one other house in sight.” 

By 1917 this business was owned by James H. Cissel, who was also president of Silver Spring National Bank. In 1923 Cissel sold the business to Howard Griffith and Thomas W. Perry, who specialized in coal, feed, and builders’ materials.

Newsworthy establishments

The establishment of Silver Spring’s first bank and newspaper, traditional institutions required for a community to grow and prosper, occurred on this corner with the opening of the Silver Spring National Bank in 1910 and publication of The Maryland News in 1928.

Construction of the two-story brick bank cost $4,984 ($119,000 in 2017 dollars). Its opening allowed Silver Spring residents and merchants to conduct financial transactions that benefited the local community instead of customers taking their business to Bethesda, Rockville, Kensington or the District of Columbia where the nearest banks were located. The bank remained in operation at this location until 1925 when it relocated to 8252 Georgia Avenue.

In 1927, Silver Spring businessman E. Brooke Lee and Bethesda Chevy Chase Gazette editor and publisher Robert I. Black established The Maryland News as a bi-weekly, county-wide newspaper whose mission was to report “All the News of Montgomery County.” The following year The Maryland News building opened on this corner at 8081 Georgia Avenue where the newspaper was composed and printed until 1953. Publication ceased in 1976.

Swiss Chocolate memories

In 1938 John Nash Gifford founded the Gifford Ice Cream Co. when he converted one of the former coal and feed structures at 8101 Georgia Avenue into a plant for the manufacture and sale of ice cream. The high-butterfat ice creams were beloved, and, for four decades, many dates that started at Crisfield's Seafood Restaurant (which opened in 1945 and continues today) proceeded to Gifford’s for a Swiss Sundae or chocolate shake. Eventually there were eight Gifford shops in the D.C. area. But the company dissolved after John’s son, Robert, who, when facing bankruptcy and other business problems, disappeared in 1985 with the company’s money. The Gifford’s name and recipes were sold repeatedly in ensuing years, and finally purchased in 2011 by Gifford’s Ice Cream in Maine, which, coincidentally, is in no way related to the Maryland company or family.