Potomac Heights, MD

Potomac Heights is a Charles County census-designated place built as wartime housing for workers at the Navy Powder Factory in nearby Indian Head. The homes went up between 1940 and 1943, mostly as compact rambler houses around a planned community. In 1947, residents formed a cooperative and bought the entire project from the federal government, turning defense housing into a resident-owned neighborhood. The 2010 census counted 1,117 people.

The cooperative structure still gives Potomac Heights its particular shape. Membership controls the right to occupy a home, while the Potomac Heights volunteer fire department, organized in 1950 from the mutual homeowners association, handles a piece of the community's civic life. That cooperative ownership is part of the neighborhood's identity, carried forward in the way the homes are held. Indian Head's naval facility remains the larger institutional neighbor, now focused on ordnance, energetics, and related research. Potomac Heights is a Southern Maryland neighborhood whose streets, older homes, fire company, and cooperative history all grew out of the same wartime industrial map.