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View search results on mapThe headquarters and primary location for the US Census Bureau, the agency that, every ten years, attempts to count every person living in the country, as well as processing census data used to analyze social and economic conditions in America, is located in Suitland, Maryland, six miles south of the Capitol in Washington DC. The Bureau moved to the site in 1941, the first occupants of the newly developed Suitland Federal Center.
The Department of State, headquartered across the street, recently took over this leafy and historic 12 acre site, also known as Potomac Hill, and Navy Hill. This was the location of the original Naval Observatory, which operated from 1844 to 1893, when the new Naval Observatory site opened, two miles north of here. The Navy continued to use this site, which has a dozen old and historic buildings on it, primarily as a hospital, until 1942.
Warrenton Training Center Site D is part of the federal governments continuity of operations programs, meant, initially, to sustain the government after an all out nuclear attack.
This historic observatory in the heart of Embassy Row in Washington DC opened in 1893, moving from its original location at Foggy Bottom. It is the official source of precise time for the Navy, which is especially important for calculating longitude for ship navigation, historically. As the observatory at Greenwich, England, is to location, the US Naval Observatory is to time, at least for the USA.
This old neoclassical building holds the original copies of the formative documents of the nation, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are on public display in the rotunda of the building, encased in helium chambers behind bullet-proof glass. The building was constructed over several years, and finally completed in 1937, just north of the Mall.
The Dalecarlia Water Treatment Plant, located at DC’s most upstream point on the Potomac, cleans the water that comes into it from the adjacent Dalecarlia Reservoir, which is the primary drinking water reservoir for Washington DC. The 50 acre reservoir spans the boundary between DC and Maryland, and is filled by two pipelines bringing water to it from the Potomac River.
The Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant is the main sewage treatment plant for Washington DC. It is operated by DC Water, which claims that is the largest advanced wastewater treatment plant in the world. This may be because it has secondary treatment system that substantially reduces its nitrogen output, in order to help preserve the water quality of Chesapeake Bay, located downstream.
What used to be Bolling Air Force Base is now merged with Naval Support Facility Anacostia to become Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. It originally served as a defensive air base for the nation’s capital, but now its runways have been developed, enabling only helicopters to land there, which they do with some frequency, as this is one of the principal bases used by Marine One, the fleet of helicopters used by the President.
The Naval Research Laboratory is one of the oldest and largest diversified scientific organizations in the country, involved in basic and applied science, relevant to naval technologies. It was established in 1923, and is headquartered on the Potomac, at the southern end of Washington DC, where it has a dense R&D campus.
Washington Navy Yard is one of the oldest Naval shipyards in the country, established in 1799, and was Washington’s first industrial neighborhood.
This campus, on a bluff across the Potomac from the CIA, is home to a few federal intelligence entities, including the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, National Intelligence University, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The campus was established in 1945, as an extension of the Army Map Service’s facilities next to the nearby Dalecarlia Reservoir.
This technical building, located on the edge of the Dalecarlia Reservoir, was Building Number 1 of the Army Map Service, which moved here in 1942, to ramp up military map production for World War II. In 1945 mapping operations expanded north a half mile to the Brookmont campus, which grew over the years into the headquarters of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). This isolated building continued to serve NIMA, and was renamed the Ruth Building after Charles H.
The Carderock site, on the Potomac river upstream from Washington DC, is one of eight Naval Surface Warfare Center locations. It is unique as the location of the David Taylor Model Basin, one of the largest ship model test basins in the world. Contained in a building more than half a mile long, it was built in 1939, and is used to develop ship hull shapes (in the same way a wind tunnel is used to develop aircraft). There are several other test basins at the site as well.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Animal Center in Dickerson, Maryland, is an isolated animal research center, developed on 500 acres of former farmland. It has several buildings and labs, housing animals used by various NIH research programs. The campus is home to behavioral research and animal holding programs.
Camp David is the famous federal Presidential retreat located in Catoctin Mountain Park, near Thurmont, Maryland, 60 miles by helicopter from Washington DC. Built as a WPA project in the 1930s, the retreat was converted to exclusive presidential use by FDR in 1942, who called it Shangri La. The rustic cabins at the camps have been replaced over the years with semi-rustic-looking bungalows that have the luxuries demanded of heads of state.
An underground mountaintop AT&T location, one of several Project Office sites, used for secure federal communication systems.
This is a point where you could be in three states at once. It is one of 35 points in the USA where three state lines meet on land (another 27 are in water). There is a stone monument here, originally placed there in 1910, and another placed in 1967 by the Boy Scouts, commemorating the bicentennial of the completion of the survey of the Mason and Dixon line here in 1767.
This is a point where you could be in three states at once. It is one of 35 points in the USA where three state lines meet on land (another 27 are in water). This point is marked with a stone monument. It is the northwest corner of a piece of land, around a square mile in size, known as the Delaware Wedge, which was in dispute for more than a century.
An airfield north of Baltimore, at Middle River, became a major aircraft production site when the Martin Company sold its Cleveland plant, and built one here in 1930.
Hart Miller Island is a thousand acre island made by linking small existing islands with a containment dyke for dredge spoils. Since 1983 it has been an important dump for material dredged from Baltimore Harbor. It is also a state park.
While the port of Baltimore is usually ranked as the tenth or less biggest ports by tonnage and value, it often ranks as one of the largest “roll on/roll off” ports in the nation, due, primarily, to the high amount of auto importation.
This division of the nation's second largest defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, is engaged in providing systems for intelligence and situational awareness to the military, including radar, sensors, aerial reconnaissance, and information integration systems. The company supplies the AWACS system to the US, for example, and other integrated observational systems fed by satellite, aircraft, and ground sensors.
This is one of the principal engineering locations for the Mission Systems division of Northrop Grumman, developing radar and other surveillance and sensing systems for the US military. The division is one of four principal divisions of the company, and is headquartered a mile north of this plant.
This remarkable and singular museum is located in an office park next to BWI airport, and tells the story of military radar and electronic warfare systems. It was founded by former workers of the Westinghouse Defense and Electronics Center, which was located nearby (and was purchased by Northrop Grumman in 1996). The museum was officially established in 1980, and was relocated here in 1992.
An offsite location for the National Security Agency, with three buildings, known as FANX 1, FANX2, and FANX 3. It is a secure location, in a commercial office park area whose tenants include the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, the TSA, the Center for Development of Security Excellence, the National Electronics Museum, and is bookended by the principal locations of Northrop Grumman’s Mission Systems Division.
This is the primary location of NIH, the federal government’s medical research agency, said to be the largest biomedical research agency in the world. It is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. NIH had its origins as the Marine Hospital Service in 1798, to provide care to merchant seaman, and by the 1880s, was primarily concerned with screening passengers on arriving ships for infectious diseases.
Known as APHIS Building 580, this complex of greenhouses and lab buildings is one of dozens of unusual sites scattered around the 7,000 acres of the US Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center.
This site has been used as a training center by the Secret Service since 1971. Though training for agents also takes place at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, this facility is for more specialized training in the service.
The Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory is a 210 acre field site for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, located a few miles south. The site, staffed by a dozen people or less, has numerous small structures and instruments associated with a variety of programs. These include the Solar System Exploration Division; a Satellite Laser Ranging facility; and Very Long Baseline Interferometry; GPS: and GLONASS.
The Special Collections Service, a CIA/NSA information gathering entity, operates a hilltop facility here, next to a US State Department communication facility known as the Beltsville Annex, to which it is connected. The Special Collections Service is a secretive entity, engaged in intercepting information on matters of national security.