If you've walked or biked the loop along Oaklyn Drive, past the golf course and toward the wooded stretch near the community's bridle paths, you've seen the fence. Chain-link, a little rusted at the joints, wrapped around a low barn that hasn't had a horse in it since the end of 2023. Most people in Avenel know the basic outline by now. The barn closed. There was a meeting. There was a petition. Then, mostly, quiet.
What most residents haven't connected is that this barn was never just a barn. It's the last visible piece of a deal cut in the 1980s that decided, before a single house in Avenel was sold, that this specific patch of ground might one day hold a sewage treatment plant. The golf course you drive past every morning exists in its current footprint partly because of that deal. And the reason nobody can tell you what happens to the barn next is that the deal itself only just changed, in a way most of the neighborhood hasn't fully absorbed yet.
A Golf Course Built as a Buffer
Before Avenel was villages and a clubhouse, it was the 1,018-acre Avenel Farm, working land tied to the largest short-horned cattle operation in Maryland. The barn on the property dates to the 1940s and was reportedly the largest single-story barn in the state at the time it was built.
In 1988, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission bought 395 acres out of that farm with one purpose in mind: a future Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. WSSC conveyed 225 of those acres to what would become TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm, so the golf course itself functioned as a planned buffer between a working treatment facility and the homes going up around it. WSSC kept the remaining 170 acres, including the ground under the barn, in reserve for the plant that was never built.
For nearly four decades, that 170-acre parcel sat in a strange kind of limbo. WSSC let the equestrian center keep operating on it, supporting the barn and its riding trails since 1992 without direct public or private funding, according to WSSC's own account of the arrangement. The horses stayed. The plant never got built. But the reservation never went away either, and neither did the question of what would happen to the barn the day WSSC decided it needed the land for something else, or decided it didn't want to keep maintaining a structure it never intended to be in the barn business.
Why the Lease Actually Ended
The trigger wasn't the treatment plant. It was the barn itself. In May 2023, WSSC's Facilities Division and an outside structural firm, Rathgeber/Goss, flagged the barn as unsafe. That same month, WSSC notified the longtime equestrian center manager, Nancy Evans, who had run the operation for more than 40 years, that her management agreement would need to end. She was given six months to vacate.
WSSC spent roughly $100,000 on emergency stabilization work that June to keep the barn usable through the summer. It wasn't enough to change the outcome. The lease ended effective December 1, 2023, and all equestrian operations stopped.
The community's response was immediate. A Change.org petition asking WSSC to reverse course drew more than 2,000 signatures. Hundreds of residents showed up to a community meeting at the TPC clubhouse on December 4, where WSSC's General Manager, Kishia Powell, and Real Estate Development Administrator Tina Benjamin walked through photos of the damage: leaning walls, rotting wood, sections disconnected from the foundation. WSSC spokesperson Chuck Brown put the reasoning plainly at the time.
"We have serious safety concerns not only for people but also for the animals."
Montgomery County Council President Andrew Friedson got involved within days, pressing WSSC to hold the meeting in the community rather than downtown, and later said the engagement process that should have happened before the decision was made had not occurred. WSSC extended the manager's move-out deadline to June 2024 and waived rent for the extension, but the barn itself stayed closed.
The Meeting Nobody Expected to Change Anything
By February 2024, WSSC had shared a structural review from October 2022, a full year before the closure, that the community says it hadn't seen before. In June 2024, WSSC issued formal Requests for Information covering two separate questions: who might operate an equestrian program on the site, and who might rebuild or rehabilitate the barn itself. Responses were due by September 6.
What came back exposed just how unresolved the basic facts still were. In a September 2024 letter to WSSC, longtime Potomac equestrian advocate Neal Gillen laid out the problem: two engineering reviews, one commissioned by WSSC and one by the Avenel community, put the cost of a full barn rehabilitation more than $4 million apart.
| Estimate | Amount |
|---|---|
| WSSC emergency stabilization work (2023) | approximately $100,000 |
| Lower rehabilitation estimate | approximately $1 million |
| Higher rehabilitation estimate (WSSC's consultant) | approximately $5.6 million |
That gap is the reason nothing has moved. A $1 million project and a $5.6 million project are different conversations entirely, and as of the most recent public updates, WSSC and the community still hadn't settled on which number is real, let alone who pays it.
The Reversal That Matters More Than the Barn
The more consequential news came a year later, and it had nothing to do with the barn's condition. At a public meeting on September 16, 2025, WSSC officials, including Deputy General Manager David McDonough and General Counsel Nina Hickson, told the community that the utility had evaluated four potential uses for its 170 acres: water treatment, wastewater treatment, water storage, and a maintenance depot. Over a 20-year planning horizon, none of them penciled out.
That finding is what actually changes the picture in Avenel. For 37 years, every conversation about this land happened under the shadow of a plant that could still, in theory, get built. WSSC's own 2025 assessment removes that shadow, at least for the next two decades, and opens the door for the commission to formally declare the property surplus under its standard disposition guidelines. A West Montgomery County Citizens Association recap of the meeting, published in its October 2025 newsletter, confirmed the shift and noted that WSSC "may declare the site as surplus property."
That's a bigger deal than a barn getting fixed or not. It means the land Avenel has lived next to since before its first house sold is, for practical purposes, no longer reserved for the use that shaped the neighborhood's original layout.
What's Actually Left Unsettled
None of this has resolved what happens to the barn itself. As of the most recent reporting, the structure remains fenced off, still restricted for safety reasons, with no announced decision on rebuilding, replacing, or repurposing it.
The demand side of the argument hasn't gone away either. Gillen's letter to WSSC noted that basic stall boarding in Montgomery County runs from roughly $1,000 to $1,200 per month, climbing to about $3,000 with daily grooming and training included, and that most county barns carry waiting lists. That demand has only tightened. The Potomac Horse Center in North Potomac has since closed, which the WMCCA newsletter flagged as leaving Avenel's shuttered facility as one of the few equestrian options left in the area outside the county's Agricultural Reserve.
So the honest version of where things stand is this: the 37-year threat that shaped Avenel's golf course, its buffer zoning, and its barn's precarious maintenance history has likely lifted. What replaces it, whether that's a rebuilt barn, a different use for the 170 acres, or years of continued vacancy while WSSC works through its surplus process, is still an open question. If you're the kind of resident who tracks the fence line on your daily walk, the next milestone to watch for is whatever WSSC does with that surplus designation, not another round of barn photos.
If you've been in Avenel long enough to remember when the barn was still active, or you're weighing what a property near that stretch of the community might be worth to you down the road, Ted Duncan has spent decades tracking exactly this kind of detail across Potomac's neighborhoods. Let's Connect if you'd like a grounded read on how a specific address, village, or transition in Avenel actually holds up under scrutiny.
