Preparations Under Way for Kentlands 25th Anniversary Celebration

The 25th anniversary of the first residents settling in the Kentlands won’t happen until February 2016. That doesn’t mean the community is waiting that long to recognize it, though.

The Kentlands 25th Anniversary celebrations are scheduled to get underway this upcoming February—two years before the anniversary date—giving the community 25 months to celebrate its 25-year history.

The Kentlands Community Foundation has already begun planning and fundraising for the festivities, which will feature one event per month from February 2014 to February 2016, concluding with a gala to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the community’s first residents.

The 25 events were all designed by the foundation to get the community involved and they range from small gatherings to larger community celebrations. The kick-off event will be a “soft launch,” featuring a town hall-style discussion between the Kentlands’ original planners, sociologists and lifetime residents of the community.

There will be plenty of large-scale celebrations, though. The city has planned a 25th anniversary edition of Kentlands Day in May 2014, a Fourth of July parade, a Kentlands Day House Tour of all the area’s original homes in May 2015, and a 5K race in September 2015. There will also be a 25th anniversary picnic of the opening of Rachel Carson Elementary School in September 2015. 

Other planned events include a scavenger hunt, a walking tour of Halloween decorations, Project Harvest, a “Go Green” cleanup day, a music festival, Oktoberfest, the loading of a time capsule and an oversized timeline, which will feature residents creating a life-size personal and community timeline on the street.

“It’s really intended to embrace community and activate community,” said John Schlichting, who is the Director of Gaithersburg’s Planning and Code Administration and the co-chair of the 25th Anniversary events. “Get more people involved in the community. That’s one of the hallmarks of a community like Kentlands. It sort of breeds neighborly-ness and involvement and volunteerism.”

Before it kicks off those events though, the Kentlands will honor the 25th anniversary of the Kentlands charrette. A New Urbanist development—urban designs featuring walkable neighborhoods—in the United States, the Kentlands was designed in a charrette process on the lawn of the Kentlands Mansion in 1988, a process defined as an intense process of planning a construction project.

“It was really quite groundbreaking,” Schlichting said. “Kentlands is the first year-round, New Urbanist community in the country. And, since Kentlands there are thousands of New Urbanist communities around the country. But Kentlands was the first.”

The Kentlands Community Foundation will recognize the efforts of those designers and planners on June 16 of this year. There will be a Champagne Celebration & Concert held at the Arts Barn and the Kentlands Mansion, featuring live music and appearances from the original town architects.

It’s all in an effort to raise the Kentlands awareness of community. The Kentlands Community Foundation wants to honor the developments original planners and lifetime residents, Schlichting said, but it also wants to showcase that sense of community to its newer residents.

That’s why they’re not picking a day, a week or even a year to celebrate the community’s 25th anniversary. It’s been around for 25 years, so why not honor it for 25 months?

“We’ve kind of seen a little bit of a downtick in terms of that type of aspect in the community,” Schlichting said. “We want to engage some of the newer residents who weren’t around at the beginning and didn’t understand how significant the planning effort for Kentlands was.”