Northwest Washington, D.C.: Tales from West of the Park

(MLK).

INTRODUCTION

The northwestern edge of the District of Columbia gains its character from its proximity to the Potomac River on the west and Rock Creek on the east. The area west of the park is not only the site of embassies but also of the communities that comprise a significant segment of the people who live in the District of Columbia. Dating back to the eighteenth century, present-day Wisconsin Avenue, whose portions were once called High Street and Tenleytown Road, is the spine of this area, forming the main north–south road to Frederick, Maryland, and the west. Our story reflects the transportation system: first there was the ferry, then the port town, then the country estates above the port, then suburbanization with the use of the electric streetcar, then the automobile and now the Metro.

Even before Georgetown really existed, it was the way station on the route taken by General Braddock in 1755 on the fateful expedition from the port of Alexandria to the Forks of the Ohio River. The failure of that expedition led to the Seven Years’ War, the eighteenth-century world war that created the first great British Empire and laid the seed for the American Revolution. The newly founded southern portion of this area called Georgetown was an independent entity that preceded by a half century the formation in 1800 of the City of Washington. For its first 125 years, Georgetown was independent, although both were enclosed in the District of Columbia along with the unincorporated County of Washington. In 1871, the three were joined together, but it was just before the turn of the twentieth century did Georgetown’s streets become aligned with the numbering system of the city of Washington and acquire their present nomenclature.

Only after the turn of the twentieth century and development of the electric streetcar capable of scaling the hills above the coastal plain did the increasingly suburban, hilly area to the north become fully connected to the earlier settlement. The coming of the automobile tended to obliterate both the political and geographical boundaries. It is ironic that the complete obliteration of those surface boundaries by the underground Metro system now gives substance to those earlier boundaries with the resuscitation of neighborhoods.

The area along the Potomac River west of Rock Creek had been called as early as 1695 New Scotland Hundred. The unsuccessful attempts at Stuart restoration in 1715 and 1745 and the enclosure of the Highlands led to an increased emigration from Scotland. Scots had patented the land before the establishment of the town of Georgetown: Ninian Beall patented nearly eight hundred acres in his Rock of Dumbarton in 1703, and George Gordon his three hundred acres as part of Knaves Disappointment in 1734, known henceforth as Rock Creek Plantation. The streets of Georgetown continue to this day to reflect the boundaries of those land grants.

A town was laid out in 1752 as a sixty-acre tract to the west of Rock Creek at the head of navigation of the Potomac River on land bought from George Beall and George Gordon. It had been the site of a rolling house built in 1745 at the mouth of Rock Creek just south of present-day M Street and just a little to the west of present-day Wisconsin Avenue. Tobacco grown on the plantations inland was brought to this rolling house for inspection and grading. Some of the larger planters also became traders and settled in the town. The imprint of the colonial south remained strong in the port city even after the formation of the Federal City. This was evidenced by the taste for racetracks and gambling, the prestige of lawyers and attention to social castes.

The original plat had its northern boundary just above M Street. Over time, there were six additions of land to the north. One example was in 1785, during the flush of prosperity at the end of the American Revolution, when twenty acres on the western end were added. The men involved included Robert Peter and John Threlkeld. Peter, Stoddert, Dodge and Forrest were among the most important names of men in the years after the Revolution. The town of Georgetown was actually incorporated in 1789 with Robert Peter as its first mayor. By 1800, with the start of the adjacent Federal City as the seat of government, there was a ropewalk, paper factory, a textile mill, along with warehouses and stores. Its population was around three thousand. Much of the work done by Ellicott in his survey of the boundaries of the District of Columbia and by L’Enfant in his design of the streets of the City of Washington was done while living in Georgetown. However, the tobacco trade that had sustained colonial Georgetown became less important after the Revolution. The important British market was now closed, and the local soil had become depleted by tobacco cultivation.

On March 30, 1791, an agreement was made at Suter’s Tavern—on High Street between Water (K Street) and Bridge (M Street)—by George Washington and the original proprietors. He sought to deal with the conflicting interests of the proprietors owning land in the new District of Columbia near Georgetown and those more easterly near what became Capitol Hill. The result was to plan a city to encompass the entire area of the coastal plain.

The Federal style that characterizes Georgetown is a transition from the Georgian Colonial to awareness of the new country’s sources in its Greek and Roman forbearers. As the predecessor to the Federal City, Georgetown contains buildings whose history provides continuity with the plantation and mercantile origins of the Potomac Basin. It seemed to provide a model of what the Federal City was to become. The model envisaged by George Washington was a commercial seaport that would export the trade of the Ohio Valley. To that end, he initiated the Potomac Canal; later there was the C&O Canal to connect the port of Georgetown (and the Federal City) to the interior.

Although the water at its wharves was deep enough for sailing ships, the river was only barely navigable at Georgetown. The sand bars in the channel adjoining Georgetown required the sailing ships to lay over for a second flood tide to come into port—a problem not faced at the competing port of Alexandria downriver. These problems worsened with the introduction of the larger steamships in the early nineteenth century that could not navigate the upper Potomac beyond the Eastern Branch (Anacostia River). The Aqueduct Canal crossing the Potomac River was a further attempt to connect the Ohio Valley to the Potomac Basin. In despair of the viability of the port of Georgetown, Alexandria was connected to the C&O Canal.

The plans for commerce from the Ohio Valley were eclipsed starting in the late 1820s with the failure of the Potomac Canal. The building of the Long Bridge (now Fourteenth Street Bridge) bypassed Georgetown by connecting Virginia directly with the Federal City. The latter began to grow much faster than Georgetown. There was a resurgence with the building of the C&O Canal in the antebellum era with wheat and lumber the major products and with water powered mills. However, the Civil War took a heavy toll on what is essentially a Southern town. After the Civil War, commercial development of the Rock Creek Valley ended; further, the rise of Baltimore as the port at the terminus of the B&O Railroad ended Washington City’s ambition to be the commercial center for the Potomac Valley. The canal still served to carry coal from Cumberland, and the area below M Street had the only industry in the District of Columbia. This industrial area along the Potomac persisted until the post–World War II period.

Until the Civil War, the mansions of the landed gentry from Maryland and Virginia provided the basis for the social life of the entire District. Georgetown was overshadowed by the nascent city to the east of Rock Creek only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when Washington developed as the national capital in the Gilded Age. In 1895, Georgetown lost its special identity when its street names were brought into conformity with those in Washington City. There was deterioration of the housing stock in many of the smaller houses without sanitary facilities. Built for persons working on the C&O Canal, for example, there were a large number of simple wooden houses particularly on the western edge of the town.

The Old Stone House on M Street stands out from the surrounding commercial buildings of the nineteenth century and is an example of an eighteenth-century artisan’s building, albeit in stone. First built in 1764 by a cabinet maker, the site was used at various times by a watch maker and a tailor. Unlike so many other buildings on M Street, its fabric remained intact and was restored by the National Park Service.

Old Stone House.

Tudor Place is unique in its period in having been designed by the architect William Thornton. It is representative of a group of great houses on large pieces of land, mainly on the east end, that still remain intact. However, the Greek Revival pedimented public buildings of the antebellum period in Washington did not lend themselves to domestic buildings. The mainly domestic architecture of Georgetown remained in the Federal style carried out by builder-architects for what was essentially a town of merchants and professional men. They are characterized by flat brick fronts with relatively few decorative elements superimposed.

Around 1850 in a fresh burst of prosperity, Italianate designs began to creep in with more prominent decorative elements with particular attention to overhanging cornices. There are examples of Italianate villas designed by leading architects of their time such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux. The work of John Renwick is exemplified by the Oak Hill Cemetery Chapel. Ammi B. Young’s stone Georgetown Custom House and Post Office of 1857 is a rare mixture of Greek Revival and Italian Palazzo, setting it apart from its brick neighbors. One of the relatively few public buildings, it was replicated in part only by the much later West Georgetown Public School. The rise of the Federal City to the east of Rock Creek in the post–Civil War era was solidified by the creation of a ceremonial core initiated by the McMillan Plan in the early twentieth century. It found its highest expression in the monumental Federal Triangle that moved the focus of the city away from its western side for the first time.

However, starting in the 1930s with the influx of young professionals working for the New Deal agencies, Georgetown underwent a renaissance and was the social center of the more sophisticated international capital Washington became. The uniqueness of Georgetown lies not only in its mansions but its totality of a place with entire streets intact. Its architecture was conservative in not following more fashionable Beaux Arts trends that were characteristic of Massachusetts Avenue and Sixteenth Street. Since the passage of the Old Georgetown Act in 1950, it remains an entity with an identity that surpasses other more recent neighborhoods that do not share its primacy in the history of the District of Columbia.

As pointed out by Trollope in the early nineteenth century, the higher elevation with its more healthful and cooler air attracted families away from the heat, smells and the malaria of the port city. From the very first years in the mid-eighteenth century, High Street of Georgetown led from the port via the ancient Indian trail to Tenleytown and then to the west. As early as the 1790s, the family of Uriah Forrest abandoned their (still extant) house at the court end of Georgetown to move permanently to Georgetown Heights. That house still remains at Rosedale, now surrounded by the suburb of Cleveland Park. The latter name in turn reflects the migration in the late nineteenth century of the then president when he and his new young bride joined the summer pilgrimage to the still rural area of country houses.

The coming of the electric streetcar along Tenleytown Road and Connecticut Avenue at the turn of the twentieth century opened the area to middle-class commuters and the breakup of the large country estates of the nineteenth century. Later the automobile led to the even greater closure of its semirural nature to that of city streets and shopping malls. The great burst of building in the post–World War I boom came to an only temporary end in the early 1930s. Soon after, despite the Great Depression elsewhere, Washington grew during the New Deal and during the mobilization for war. For example, the housing needs of the increased population during World War II transformed the ancient tract of Friendship and its intermediate stage of a country estate of the rich and flamboyant McLeans to the garden apartments of McLean Gardens.

Fortunately in the long run for our purposes, most of the post–World War II development occurred beyond the borders of the District. The names on the streets and many of the buildings that still remain reflect the people and places of the earlier history of this area. The coming of the Metro in the last quarter of the twentieth century has reestablished the value of living within the boundaries of the District and the viability of its communities in the twenty-first century.

The chapters follow an itinerary in time and space clustered and made meaningful by the spine of its major roads. It starts with the history of the ill-fated Braddock Expedition that crossed the Potomac from Alexandria in 1755 at the start of the French and Indian War. We explore the original portion of Georgetown connected with the south via Analostan Island; then as an industrial city and