A stone abutment across Beach Drive, three hundred yards from the recreation building, is all that remains of a Bollman truss bridge originally 450 feet long and 70 feet high used by the Baltimore and Ohio, America’s first railroad. Chartered in 1827, the railroad’s first president was Phillip E. Thomas of Woodlawn in Sandy Spring. In 1865, Congress chartered the Metropolitan Branch of the B&O to carry passengers and goods from Washington to Point of Rocks, Maryland, where it continued on to Wheeling, West Virginia. The Metropolitan Branch crossed Rock Creek on an iron bridge supported by abutments fashioned from perfectly balanced Seneca sandstone. Built between 1866 and 1873, the bridge remained in use until 1900. A deed recorded in 1893 permitted the B&O Railroad to change the course of Rock Creek and conveyed the right-of-way for a new county road across the creek, which had been abandoned by 1916.