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Friendsville is a town in Garrett County, Maryland, United States. The population was 539 at the 2000 census.
Friendsville is located at 39°39′44″N 79°24′19″W / 39.66222°N 79.40528°W / 39.66222; -79.40528 (39.662127, -79.405251)[1].
According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.9 square miles (2.4 km²), all of it land. The Youghiogheny River flows through the town and is renowned by the whitewater kayaking/rafting community as the take-out for the famous Upper Yough run.
Name and History
Friendsville is named after its first European settler John Friend, who came to what is now Garrett County before the Revolution. Many of John Friend's descendants live in Garrett County today, and the headquarters and library of the Friend Family Association are in Friendsville because of this connection.
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Upper Youghiogheny River
The Youghiogheny River, or the Yough for short, is a tributary of the Monongahela River, approximately 122 mi (195 km) long, in the U.S. states of West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. It drains an area on the west side of the Allegheny Mountains northward into Pennsylvania, providing a small watershed in extreme western Maryland into the tributaries ofthe Mississippi River.
The Youghiogheny rises in northern West Virginia, in Preston County southeast of the town of Kingwood and near Backbone Mountain. The headwaters are approximately 10 mi (16 km) north of the headwaters of the North Branch of the Potomac River.
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| Rafting on the Upper Yough in Friendsville MD with Precision Rafting |
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It flows NNE into Garrett County, Maryland. Known as one of the best rafting rivers east of Mississippi, it continues north past Friendsville and roughly parallel to the West Virginia border, separated by approximately 3 mi (5 km). This river enters southwestern Pennsylvania on the border between Fayette and Somerset counties. It flows northwest through a gap in Chestnut Ridge and then past Connellsville. It joins the Monongahela River from the southeast at McKeesport, southeast of Pittsburgh.
Upstream from Confluence, Pennsylvania, approximately 6 mi (10 km) north of Pennsylvania border, the river is impounded by the 184 ft (56 m) high Youghiogheny Dam to form the Youghiogheny River Lake, a reservoir that stretches upstream into northern Maryland. The dam was completed in 1944 primarily for flood control. |
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