Maryland Route 550
highway in Maryland
Maryland Route 550 (MD 550) is a state highway in the U.S. state of Maryland. The state highway runs 24.43 miles (39.32 km) from MD 26 in Libertytown north to Pen Mar Road in Fort Ritchie. MD 550 runs southeast–northwest across central Frederick County, connecting Fort Ritchie in the northeastern corner of Washington County and Libertytown with the towns of Thurmont and Woodsboro and the smaller communities of Creagerstown and Sabillasville. South of the highway's junction with U.S. Route 15 (US 15) in Thurmont, the state highway passes through the wide valley of the Monocacy River; to the north, the highway passes along the northern edge of Catoctin Mountain and crests South Mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
MD 550 was built in two main sections. The highway from Thurmont to Blue Ridge Summit was constructed in the mid-1920s as Maryland Route 81 (MD 81). MD 81 was extended west to Fort Ritchie in the mid-1930s. MD 550 was constructed from Libertytown to Woodsboro in the mid to late 1930s. A second disjoint section of the state highway was built from Creagerstown to Thurmont in the late 1930s. The two segments of MD 550 were united when the designation was assigned to the highway between Woodsboro and Creagerstown in the mid-1950s.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maryland Route 550” is highway in Maryland. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maryland, Route and highway, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2480614. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maryland Route 550” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.