On January 10, 1880, George W. Peck, a 22-year-old Black man who lived and worked in Beallsville, Maryland, was lynched near this site by a white mob in an act of racial terror. That morning, after he was accused of assaulting a white girl on the farm where he worked, a local constable arrested him and brought him to Odd Fellows Hall in Poolesville. An angry crowd gathered through the day, dispersed after dark, and returned before midnight, seizing Peck as he was being moved to another location. The mob put a noose around his neck, dragged him to a vacant lot across from Poolesville Presbyterian Church, and hanged him from a locust tree, denying him his rights to judge and jury. The next morning, as parishioners arrived for Sunday services, his body was cut down and buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave, and a jury of inquest found that he died "at the hands of parties unknown." Black residents later reinterred his body in the consecrated grounds of a nearby African American churchyard in an act of solidarity. On November 3, 2019, inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative, the wider community gathered to collect soil from the site of Peck's lynching as a gesture of racial healing, remembrance, and reconciliation. His killing was part of the wider history of racial terror lynching in Maryland and the United States after the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1950, at least 6,500 Black people were killed in racial terror lynchings across the United States, a legacy of injustice that can still be felt today. Although Maryland remained in the Union, more than 87,000 Black people were enslaved there when the Civil War began in 1861, and because the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 applied only to states in rebellion, enslavers in Maryland sought to retain their human property until the state abolished slavery by constitutional amendment on November 1, 1864. After the war, during Reconstruction, racial violence was used nationwide to intimidate Black people and reinforce racial hierarchy and segregation, as lynch mobs ignored the legal system, often abducted victims from jails, prisons, and courtrooms, and carried out hangings, shootings, burnings, and mutilations before large crowds while police rarely intervened and protective laws were rarely enforced. At least 38 racial terror lynchings have been documented in Maryland, including three in Montgomery County: George Peck in 1880 in Poolesville, John Diggs-Dorsey in 1880 in Rockville, and Sidney Randolph in 1896 in Rockville.