Montpelier Mansion (Laurel, Maryland)

Montpelier, Prince George's County, Maryland, United States, (ZIP Codes 20708, 20709) is a suburban community outside the corporate boundaries of Laurel. Located near the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, it was built in the 1960s and early 1970s by Levitt & Sons. There are four models of houses in the Levitt style, with mirror images giving eight different floor plans. The Montpelier area has a history dating back to 1685, when it was part of a land grant given to Richard Snowden, Sr. by Lord Baltimore. Richard Snowden arrived in Maryland as an indentured servant and eventually became one of the largest landowners. The Snowden family built and lived in the Montpelier Mansion which remains a symbol of their success, financially and socially. The Montpelier community is a Planned Unit Development (PUD) and as such it has registered covenants and restrictions as set forth in Governing Documents dated January 1998. The purpose of these covenants is to provide a structured means of maintaining standards.

South Laurel is an unincorporated area and census-designated place (CDP) in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States. Per the 2020 census, the population was 29,602.

Snow Hill is a manor house located south of Laurel, Maryland, off Maryland Route 197, in Prince George's County. Built between 1799 and 1801, the 1+1⁄2-story brick house is rectangular, with a gambrel roof, interior end chimneys, and shed dormers. It has a center entrance with transom and a small gabled porch. A central hall plan was used, with elaborate interior and corner cupboards. The original south wing was removed and rebuilt, and the home restored in 1940. The Late Georgian style house was the home of Samuel Snowden, part owner of extensive family ironworks, inherited from his father Richard Snowden. and is now owned and operated by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission as a rental facility.Snow Hill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Capitol Technology University (formerly Capitol College) is a private university in South Laurel, Maryland near Washington, DC. The university was founded in 1927 as the Capitol Radio Engineering Institute by a former US Navy Radioman. CREI changed its name to Capitol Institute of Technology in 1964, changed its name again to Capitol College in 1987, and assumed its present name in 2014. Capitol offers undergraduate and graduate programs specializing in engineering, computer science, information technology, and business. It is classified among "Special Focus Institutions—Schools of Engineering" and is a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education.

Oaklands or Contee was a slave plantation owned by the Snowden family, and remains as a historic home surrounded by residential development.

Birmingham Manor was a historic slave plantation home located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland The manor served the Snowden family for five generations. The property resided on the "Robinhood's Forest" land patent. The manor was built by Richard Snowden Jr. and constructed out of brick with shingle siding. A central hall was surrounded by fireplaces. A semicircle of barns held tobacco crops. A boxwood garden led to the cemetery. By 1790 the estate composed 10,000 acres. The house burned down on August 20, 1891 under William Snowden’s ownership. The fire broke open a hidden wood panel above a mantle that contained hidden family parchments just before they burned. A large tract of the estate became the Fort George G. Meade and the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center The Baltimore–Washington Parkway was built over the plantation site next to a general aviation airport. The family cemetery remains mostly inaccessible.

The Special Collection Service (SCS), codenamed F6, is a highly classified joint U.S. Central Intelligence Agency–National Security Agency program charged with inserting eavesdropping equipment in difficult-to-reach places, such as foreign embassies, communications centers, and foreign government installations. Established in the late 1970s and headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland, the SCS has been involved in operations ranging from the Cold War to the Global War on Terrorism.

Dinosaur Park is a park located in the 13200 block of Mid-Atlantic Boulevard, near Laurel and Muirkirk, Maryland, and operated by the Prince George's County Department of Parks and Recreation. The park features a fenced area where visitors can join paleontologists and volunteers in searching for early Cretaceous fossils. The park also has an interpretive garden with plants and information signs. The park is in the approximate location of discoveries of Astrodon teeth and bones as early as the 19th century.In the 18th and 19th centuries, the clays of the Muirkirk Deposit in Prince George's County, Maryland were mined for siderite, or iron ore. Iron furnaces located throughout the region melted down siderite to produce iron and steel used in construction and manufacturing. In 1858, African-American miners working in open pit mines were the first to discover dinosaur fossils in Maryland.Among the first scientists to explore the Muirkirk Deposit was Maryland state geologist Phillip Thomas Tyson. He brought some of the strange bones discovered in the iron mines to a meeting of the Maryland Academy of Sciences in 1859, where his colleagues identified them as dinosaurs. Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was also interested in Maryland fossils. In the winter of 1887, he sent John Bell Hatcher to search the iron mines. Hatcher recovered hundreds of fossils, including the remains of ancient turtles and crocodiles. In the 1890s, Smithsonian Institution scientists Charles Gilmore and Arthur Bibbins also visited Prince George's County, uncovering dinosaur teeth and other fossils that were added to the Smithsonian collection.In December 1995, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission acquired 22 acres near Laurel, encompassing several Muirkirk Deposit exposure sites. The park protects these sites from development and unrestricted collecting, and provides an outdoor laboratory where the public can work alongside professional and amateur paleontologists to help uncover the past.

The Beltsville Information Management Center (BIMC), formerly named the Beltsville Messaging Center (BMC) and the Beltsville Communications Center (also known as the Beltsville Communications Annex), is a United States Department of State facility located in Beltsville, Maryland, next door to the U.S. Special Collection Service (SCS). It serves as the primary relay facility for the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service and services the communications needs of various U.S. government programs and agencies, including the SCS.

The Gude House is a historic house located in Laurel, Maryland in Prince George's, Maryland, United States. The property was originally part of Snowden's New Birmingham Manor. Mary Tyson and her sisters, who had opened a seminary in Washington, D.C. in the 1800s, opened their second ("Alnwick") seminary in southwest Laurel in 1855 on part of the Snowden property they purchased, and the Society of Friends provided a non-secular curriculum. This three-story brick building was featured in an 1852 lithograph; fire destroyed the seminary building in 1920.The three-story brick building with a kitchen addition and second wing were built in 1856 by John D. McPherson who bought 50 acres of land just south of the Alnwick Seminary building from the Tyson sisters. In 1866 the property was expanded with 8 acres purchased from Samuel Register. In 1875, French horticulturalist Armand Jardin purchased the property, living onsite until 1904. In 1926, after a succession of short-term owners, William Gude purchased and restored the property which remained in his family until 1980. Gude was a greenhouse and retail flower shop owner. The property was subdivided in 1988 for commercial office parks at Laurel Lakes with 1.3 acres and the Gude house remaining.

Abraham Hall, constructed in 1889, is located on the northeast side of Old Muirkirk Road in the center of the historic African American community of Rossville, a section of Prince George's County, Maryland near Beltsville. It was constructed by the Benevolent Sons and Daughters of Abraham, an African American society that was established for the social welfare of its members. Originally known as Rebecca Lodge #6 of the Benevolent Sons and Daughters of Abraham, the building was constructed by John W. Jackson in 1889 in the burgeoning community of Rossville. Abraham Hall, an excellent example of a multi-purpose building associated with African Americans, served as a meeting hall, a house of worship, a school, and a social hall for African Americans living in a segregated society. The lodge hall functioned as the community black school, until a Rosenwald School was built in 1922.The structure is set back from the road on a 3.85-acre (1.56 ha) grassy lot with mature trees. It is a three-bay, two-story gable front frame lodge building with a brick foundation, wood lap siding with cornerboards, and a shake roof with a boxed cornice. A brick chimney rises from the northwest slope of the roof. Both the interior and exterior of the building were carefully restored between 1986 and 1991 using original materials or in-kind replacements.It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

The Laurel Sanitarium for Nervous and Mental Diseases was a prominent sanitarium, and later a women's nursing home, and landmark building along U.S. Route 1 in Laurel, Maryland. The sanitarium was founded in 1905 by Dr. Jesse C. Coggins and Dr. Cornelius DeWeese to treat patients with mental illness and addiction. It was converted to a women's nursing home in 1950. The facility closed after Coggins' death in 1963, and was demolished by controlled fire in 1964.