Even though I had visited Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Garden sometime around 2010 or 2011, using a Groupon that David and I had randomly gotten online, it was last year's visit with my Mom (featured in the picture above) that brought back the memory of this hidden gem right on our backyard.

Hillwood is a house museum on the Northwest area in Washington, D.C., right above Rock Creek Park, nestled in between the daily hustle and bustle of Connecticut Avenue, one of D.C. major thoroughfares, and the quiet beauty of Rock Creek Parkway, the two-lane road that traverses D.C.'s own national park.  

Right where the beltway gently bends to the right, after the Mormon Temple on the left, when travelling on the inner loop, lies one of the many hidden gems in our larger DC metropolitan area: The National Park Seminary. 

This place has fascinated me ever since I drove by it, years ago, during my morning commute to Rockville, avoiding the traffic build-up on Jones Bridge Road. 

The National Park Seminary Historic District is located in the Forest Glen neighborhood of Silver Spring, walking distance to the Forest Glenn Metro station (around 25 minutes), stretching to both sides of Linden Lane, between ​Sacks Street and Smith Drive, in close proximity to the Forest Glen Annex of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

The area is a conglomeration of condominium units, single-family homes, town houses, and apartments. Most of the condo units and the single-family homes are historically restored buildings, courtesy of a partnership between The Alexander Company and EYA. The Alexander Company specializes in "historic preservation, urban revitalization, adaptive reuse, and urban infill development", according to its website, and EYA is a local housing developer. Building townhouses around this historical site  created a financial foundation to restore the structures of the Seminary complex, which were slowly but surely decaying.