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A federal judge on Monday rejected a request to open a blocked road that has been at the center of a Sandy Spring property dispute.

The sides disagree whether the road exists; without the road, the landowners cannot get addresses that are needed to build on their property.

U.S. District Court Judge Roger W. Titus noted that a neighbor, Christine Hill Wilson, who installed a chain across the unpaved "Farm Road," has removed that barrier and the need for immediate action.

Titus also expressed doubt that civil rights were violated and said the issues appear to be questions of Maryland real estate law.

Although he did not rule on that issue, Titus urged that free mediation, available to settle cases in federal courts, be considered to resolve the dispute. The defendants include the county planning agency, Hill Wilson and an engineering and survey firm accused of fraudulently submitting documents to remove the road from records.

In June, Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Nelson Rupp dismissed a suit filed by some of the plaintiffs, saying that they should have known the road had been erased.

Donald Melvin Temple, who is representing plaintiffs in the federal case, said he would talk with his clients about mediation and called the first hearing in federal court a victory because it aired "a lot of evidence about the taking of Farm Road."

"Developers want this land. …There is a private governmental and collaborative interest in forcing the plaintiffs from their [land]," Temple told the Greenbelt court.

"What is worse is that the county has allowed this to happen and not intervened, and I hope it is not because they are black," Temple said in an interview later.

County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) has urged the Planning Board to acknowledge the road so that landowners can get addresses and fire and rescue services required before they can get permits to build there.

Planning officials rejected his request as not in their purview.

"If every one of those neighbors marched in with a binding legal document that said ‘this is our access,' we'd happily issue addresses," the planning agency's general counsel Adrian R. Gardner said Tuesday.

County attorney Leon Rodriguez helped the plaintiffs find civil rights lawyers to aid their case.

The plaintiffs, descendants of freed slaves who say they and their ancestors had long used the passage to get to their land, have submitted a new survey that shows the road does not cross Hill Wilson's land as she had claimed.

She told the court she did not know that the road did not cross her land when she put up the posts and chain.

Titus said Hill Wilson's lawyers say she has agreed to move, on request, vehicles her family has parked on the road which appears to cross the property of the Sandy Spring slave museum.