Bethesda is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its broadcast from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which in face took its pronounce from Jerusalem’s Pool of Bethesda. The National Institutes of Health’s main campus and the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center are in Bethesda, in adjunct to a number of corporate and government headquarters.

As an unincorporated community, Bethesda has no official boundaries. According to the 2020 U.S. census, the community had a sum population of 68,056.

Bethesda is located in a region that was populated by the Piscataway and Nacotchtank tribes at the grow old of European colonization. Fur trader Henry Fleet became the first European to visit the area, reaching it by sailing taking place the Potomac River. He stayed subsequently the Piscataway tribe from 1623 to 1627, either as a guest or prisoner (historical accounts differ). Fleet eventually secured funding for other expedition to the region and was forward-looking granted proprietary rights to 2,000 acres of land in the nascent colony and became a aficionada of Maryland’s colonial legislature. Raids from the Senecas and Susquehannock resulted in the instigation of the Maryland estrangement of Rangers in 1694 to patrol the frontier.

Most settlers in colonial Maryland were tenant farmers who paid their rent in tobacco, and colonists continued to further farther north in search of fruitful land. Henry Darnall (1645–1711) surveyed a 710-acre (290-hectare) area in 1694 which became the first land enter upon in Bethesda. Tobacco crop growing was the primary habit of sparkle in Bethesda throughout the 1700s. The city avoided seeing deed during the Revolutionary War, although it became a supply region for the fledgling Continental Navy. The inauguration of Washington, D.C. in 1790 deprived Montgomery County of its economic middle at Georgetown, although the event had Tiny effect on the small farmers throughout Bethesda.