Biohazard Cleanup Near Springfield Bowie, MD

Bowie is an incorporated city in Prince George's County, Maryland, and with 58,329 residents in the 2020 census it is the largest municipality in the county and the fifth most populous city in Maryland.

Bowie is also the third largest city in Maryland by land area, covering about 20.5 square miles.

The city owes its existence to the railroad: in 1853 Colonel William Duckett Bowie obtained a charter from the Maryland legislature to build a rail line into Southern Maryland, and the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad began construction through the area in 1869.

Land speculator Ben Plumb laid out the settlement of Huntington City around the railroad junction in 1870, and the line, including a spur to Washington, D.C., was completed by 1872.

In 1880 Huntington City was rechartered as Bowie, named for Oden Bowie, the former Governor of Maryland and then-president of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, and the city was first incorporated in 1882.

Bowie's population grew from 54,727 in the 2010 census to 58,329 in the 2020 census, and the 2020 census counted 20,991 households and 21,560 housing units in the city.

Most of modern Bowie began in 1957, when Levitt and Sons bought the historic Belair Estate and built the planned community of Belair at Bowie; the town annexed the development in 1959 and re-incorporated as a city in 1963.

The Levitt community's street names are arranged in alliterative sections, a hallmark of the Bowie planned neighborhoods where the overwhelming majority of residents now live.

The Belair Mansion, built around 1745 as the home of Provincial Governor Samuel Ogle and later of Governor Benjamin Ogle, survives on the old estate and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The estate's Belair Stable was part of the Belair Stud, one of America's premier thoroughbred racing stables in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and Belair was the oldest continually operating racing horse farm in the country before it closed in 1957.