Maryland Forestry Service

About forestry service, 15536, Crystal Spring, PA, US, Maryland

Frederick is a city in and the county seat of Frederick County, Maryland, United States. Frederick's population was 78,171 people as of the 2020 census, making it the second-largest incorporated city in Maryland behind Baltimore. It is a part of the Washington metropolitan area and the greater Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area. The city is located at an important crossroads at the intersection of a major north–south Native American trail and east–west routes to the Chesapeake Bay, both at Baltimore and what became Washington, D.C., and across the Appalachian Mountains to the Ohio River watershed. Frederick is home to Frederick Municipal Airport (IATA: FDK), which accommodates general aviation, and Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army bioscience and communications research installation and Frederick County's largest employer. == History == === Pre-colonization === Located where Catoctin Mountain, the easternmost ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, meets the rolling hills of the Piedmont region, the Frederick area became a crossroads long before European explorers and traders arrived. Native American hunters, possibly including the Susquehannock, the Algonquian-speaking Shawnee, the Seneca, the Tuscarora, or other member tribes of the Iroquois Confederation followed the Monocacy River from the Susquehanna River watershed in Pennsylvania to the Potomac River watershed and the lands of the more agrarian and maritime Algonquian peoples, particularly the Lenape of the Delaware Valley and possible of the Piscataway and Powhatan of the lower Potomac River watershed and Chesapeake Bay. This became known as the Monocacy Trail or the Great Indian Warpath to the western Piedmont in North Carolina. Such northern tribal hunting parties may also have traveled along other watersheds in Virginia toward the Chesapeake Bay, such as those of the Rappahannock, James, and York Rivers. === 18th century === The earliest European settlement was slightly north of Frederick in Monocacy, Maryland.