Perspective | What’s in a name: Is Rockville’s Agnew Drive named after Spiro?

— Nancy Traver, Silver Spring

Answer Man can say with some certainty that Agnew Road was not named after Spiro Agnew. But he cannot say for whom it was named.

Agnew Road first shows up on Montgomery County documents in 1940, said Sarah Hedlund, archivist/librarian at Montgomery History. At that time, Spiro Agnew had yet to enter public life. The Baltimore restaurateur’s son was working at an insurance agency during the day and going to law school at night, a schedule that would be interrupted by Army service in World War II.

Agnew Drive was — and is — part of a subdivision called Rockcrest that is nestled in the wedge between Veirs Mill Road and Rockville Pike. The street is on the first plat for the development, along with Crawford Drive, Paul Drive, De Beck Drive, Wade Avenue and Lewis Avenue. The development would later include Gail Avenue, too.

Street names do not burble up out of the ground like oil or reveal themselves like petroglyphs when the ground above is scraped away. They are bestowed by humans. The streets of Rockcrest memorialize some of those humans. Hedlund said she suspected Rockcrest’s streets would have been named after the developer’s family members or friends, “typical of real estate speculators of the time.”

The developer behind Rockcrest was Thomas O. de Beck. Born in Denmark in 1897, de Beck — also rendered in print as De Beck and DeBeck — immigrated with his family to the United States in 1912. By the early 1920s he was in Washington working in real estate. He advertised properties around the District, in such neighborhoods as Mount Pleasant, Cleveland Park and Petworth.

De Beck sold both single-family homes and small apartment buildings. Some of the homes he handled were advertised under a “Colored” heading, signaling that African Americans were allowed to buy them. Such were the practices of the day.

In 1935, de Beck married Gail Wade. The Wades were farmers in Barnesville, Md. Gail’s siblings included Crawford Wade. Critically, Crawford Wade was a partner with de Beck in the Rockcrest development.

So there are four of the street names: De Beck, Wade, Crawford and Gail. Another Wade sibling was J. Paul Wade. There’s another street name: Paul.

We’re left with Lewis Avenue and Agnew Drive. Answer Man poked around in Census records but could find no obvious inspirations for those names, no children or other family members. There was a tavern in Gaithersburg called Agnew’s Inn. Perhaps de Beck drove past it on the way to the Crawford farm. Or perhaps he and Wade Crawford hammered out Rockcrest details there.

In December 1940, de Beck’s Rockcrest Realty Corp. advertised a “big value in low cost homes.” The small, tidy homes were priced from $4,125 to $4,575. That included hardwood floors, venetian blinds, a Johns Manville roof and a sodded yard.

De Beck advertised another feature: Rockcrest was “an outstanding restricted community.”

Racial covenants prohibiting the sale of houses in some neighborhoods to anyone other than Whites were common in Montgomery County then. Before launching Rockcrest, de Beck had worked for the Federal Housing Administration as a “valuator.” In this role, he would have followed FHA guidance that urged mortgage underwriters to ensure neighborhood homogeneity.

A 1936 FHA underwriting manual explained that “adverse influences” could harm neighborhoods. The best way to guard against this was to prevent “the infiltration of … lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”

Thomas de Beck died in 1944. In 1960, Rockville celebrated its centennial. The Washington Evening Star noted that the town’s explosive growth had been spurred by the development of Rockcrest and its 184 homes.

“They said it couldn’t be done, but we never were in doubt a minute,” Crawford Wade told the Star.

An aside: Montgomery History’s Hedlund pointed out that Spiro Agnew did live in Montgomery County for a while. From 1972 to 1973, Richard M. Nixon’s then-vice president lived in Bethesda’s Kenwood neighborhood.

Do you live in a development with interesting street names? Are you a developer who memorialized family members, pets or childhood hobbies? Send the details — with “Street Names” in the subject line — to me at john.kelly@washpost.com.