Several pits for gold mining once existed in what is now Black Hill Regional Park, part of a wave of gold mining fever in Montgomery County between 1850 and 1950. At this open-pit extraction site, miners used simple picks and shovels, but ore containing gold was rarely found here because the Appalachian gold belt passes through Maryland farther west at Great Falls on the Potomac River. In 1947, George Chadwick of Washington Grove bought the property as a summer retreat and named it Gold Mine Farm. In the 1950s, Chadwick installed a cement floor and temporarily converted the mine into a bomb shelter. M-NCPCC purchased the property in 1965.