Summit Hall Farm, a 251-acre ridge-top farm in the heart of Gaithersburg, was officially named and patented in 1857 by John T. and Sarah DeSellum. Its 500-foot elevation and panoramic view attracted settlers since colonial times and probably inspired the name. The property's history reaches back more than two centuries, beginning as part of a large tobacco plantation in the 1750s, then as the small community of Logtown in the 1770s, later as a prosperous farm briefly occupied by the Confederate Army in 1864, and in the 20th century as a model of scientific farming, astronomy, and agronomy. The first local owner was Baltus Fulks, a shoemaker who owned lots in Logtown in the early 1770s. By 1828, his daughter Catherine and her husband James DeSellum had bought Fulks' lots and added land until the holding totaled 242 acres. Their children, John T. and Sarah DeSellum, inherited the farm in 1847 and experienced Civil War plundering by Jubal Early's Confederate troops. John DeSellum also set aside land for a schoolhouse, Ascension Church, and the Gaithersburg Latitude Observatory. Fulks and DeSellum family ownership continued when Ignatius T. Fulks bought the property in 1886. Frank and Zoe Wilmot purchased Summit Hall in 1936, and during their ownership their son William created one of the first commercial turf farms in the United States there. In 1982, the City of Gaithersburg bought 57 acres of the historic farm. The property today includes rolling green lawns, reflective ponds, a swimming pool, a miniature golf course, and an activities building, along with historic resources including a two-story part-log house that may date to the colonial Logtown era, an 1860s tenant house, a 19th-century family cemetery and granary, and a log smokehouse believed to be the oldest standing structure in Gaithersburg.