Anastasia bought several lots on Massachusetts Avenue, a block west of Dupont Circle and across the street from family friend from Nevada, Curtis Hillyer. She then contracted architect Robert Fleming, who had built Hillyer’s house, to build her a very large house. When completed, the house at 2122 Massachusetts Avenue had cost Anastasia more than $70,000 (over $2.3 million in 2025). Even though she was extremely rich, Anastasia was also known to be very frugal and sued Fleming for an unaccounted for $30,000 in the construction of the house.

As soon as they had settled in their new home, the sisters made it a point to get to know everybody in society. They went everywhere, no two of them ever attending the same event to ensure that one Patten would be at every social gathering. The sisters seemed to be interchangeable socially, with society pages daily listing the events attended by “Miss Patten,” but rarely, if ever, saying which one. Once back home, they would compare notes to make sure they were all equally up to date with the latest gossip. This led to the saying, “if you want any news in Washington, there is the telephone, telegraph, and the “tele-Pattens.”

Only two of the daughters, Augusta and Edythe, would ever marry. Katherine Augusta was the first to wed in 1887 to Missouri representative John Milton Glover. The wedding was held in the Pattens’s home chapel and the newlyweds then moved into the house with the rest of the family.

Anastasia Patten died in Portland, Maine in September 1888 at the age of only 44. She had gone to the Maine coast for health reasons, but once there, her health rapidly declined. Her remains were returned to Washington for a funeral at St. Matthew’s Cathedral before being sent to San Mateo, California for internment next to her husband in a mausoleum she had erected over his body. Friend and neighbor and Senator William Stewart served as one of the pall bearers.

Anastasia’s death caused a serious breach between Augusta and her sisters that was never mended. John Glover and Augusta sued the other sisters for Augusta’s share of her parent’s inheritance. But the sisters claimed that Augusta already received her share as Anastasia had already given Glover $100,000. Glover argued that it was simply a marriage gift and did not represent his wife’s share of the estate. The sisters demanded that the Glovers move out of the house. The legal battles went on for years and ended only when the other sisters agreed to pay Augusta $25,000 each to relinquish any further claims on their mother’s estate, but this by no means was equivalent to the amount she was originally due to inherit, which would have been no less than $1,000,000. The Glovers eventually found themselves in New York, where John then retired from political life.

The Patten house came to be known as the “Irish Embassy” or the “Irish Castle” because of the sisters’ devout Irish nature and devotion to Catholicism. They had a private chapel in the house built where priests would come to celebrate Mass for the sisters.

Sunday afternoon teas at the Patten home were the talk of the town, especially with the diplomatic set to whom the sisters catered. Jules Cambon, the French ambassador, referred to the remaining sisters in the house as Quatre Pattes—the four legs.

In 1901, Edythe Agnes Patten, with a pending $700,000 inheritance, married Civil War veteran Major General Henry Clarke Corbin. Corbin was a fifty-nine-year-old widower with three children, and Edythe was already well into her thirties. According to her mother’s will, Edythe could not get possession of her share of the inheritance without the consent of her three sisters, which they gave. Five years prior to this engagement, Edythe had been engaged to another gentleman; however, even with the wedding date already announced, her sisters did not give their consent, and the engagement was broken off.

Widely covered by the press across the country, Edythe’s wedding ceremony was officiated by Cardinal Gibbons in the elaborately decorated drawing room in the Patten home. The three other sisters were Edythe’s only family present. The wedding guests included President Roosevelt, his daughter Alice, representatives of the official and diplomatic corps, and local society.

In 1905, the Corbins travelled to the Philippines with William Howard Taft’s Second Philippine Commission to establish a civilian government. Once there, Corbin took command of the Division of the Philippines— the core U.S. infantry division of the United States Army's Philippine Department.

After Corbin retired, the couple moved to their newly built house at 1701 Twenty-second Street Northwest, only an few blocks away from Edythe’s sisters, and spent the weekends at Highwood, Corbin’s new country house in Chevy Chase, DC that was designed by Corbin’s close friend and famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and completed in 1907. The Corbins had one daughter, also Edythe, who would become a prominent member of the next generation of young Washington socialites.

Henry Corbin died in 1909, and Edythe leased out both the downtown and the Chevy Chase houses and moved back in with the three sisters still living in the Massachusetts Avenue house.

In 1911 rumors swirled that Edythe was to marry millionaire financier and Taft supporter J.G. Schmidlapp whom she had met on the 1905 trip to the Phillipines. The engagement supposedly was to be announced at a reunion of the passengers of the Philippine trip at the Boardman mansion in DuPont Circle, but Edythe ended up not attending the event and the announcement was never made. One might wonder if the sisters did not give their consent again this time.

In 1934, Nellie Patten applied for a zoning change to be able to convert the property at 2122 Massachusetts Avenue into an apartment building. Larz Anderson, whose property next door was considered to be the most valuable in the neighborhood at that time, opposed the conversion. Neighbors claimed that Massachusetts Avenue west of Twenty-first Street was still one of the few remaining “high-grade” streets within the limits of the old city of Washington. There was no particular demand for apartments in the neighborhood at that time and such a building would be a disgrace to the neighborhood. But Helen continued to push and by 1936 was now seeking to completely raze the house to allow for the construction of an apartment building on the site. By this time, neighbors were beginning to recognize that that stretch of Massachusetts Avenue was already a string of boardinghouses and now thought that a “high class apartment building” would not be so detrimental to the neighborhood. The D.C. Zoning Commission approved Helen’s request.

Yet the grand Patten mansion and lot did not sell, and the old spinster sisters Mary, Josephine, and Helen continued on in the house, still hosting their high teas. Mathilde Townsend, now Mrs. Peter Goelet Gerry, would sometime make the trip across the street from the Townsend mansion to attend the teas and visit with her mother’s old friends.

By the time they finally sold the house in 1944, the Patten sisters were quietly living in a modest row house on the other side of Dupont Circle at 1726 Massachusetts Avenue.

Josephine died in 1945, and Nellie a year later. Edythe Corbin lived until 1959 when she died at the age of ninety.

Four years after her death, Nellie finally got her wish to have an apartment building on the site of the Patten mansion. In 1950, construction began on a $1 million, 312-unit building that still stands on the site today. The old house was so solidly built that it took almost three months to completely tear it down.

As a result, and as the federal government expanded in the 1960s and 70s, Washington added numerous brutalist buildings by leading architects that have become icons of that architectural movement.

Trump's executive order, which he revived on his first day back in office, mandates that federal buildings in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere should prioritize the "classical architectural style." This order aims to "beautify public spaces" by emphasizing designs that align with regional heritage and American classical traditions, all according to the White House's website.

Brutalism is certainly not a favorite architectural style for a lot of people, especially Trump. But is not up to any one to make a call on which architectural styles are better than others. Is it simply a coincidence that multiple federal departments or agencies with Brutalist-style headquarter buildings are now being targeted for closure, significant reductions, or to be moved out of town? I wonder if they all might be fairing better if their headquarters were classically Greek or Roman in design.

Five Washingtonians were first-class passengers aboard the Titanic for its fateful maiden voyage. They were Clarence Moore, Major Archibald Butt, Francis Davis Millet, Major Archibald Gracie, and Helen Churchill Candee. The following are their stories.

Clarence Moore, a noted sportsmen and horseman, had left Washington on March 16, 1912 to vacation in London and to purchase foxhounds for the Loundon Hunt in Leesburgh, Virginia, a live fox hunt that still continues today. On April 10, Moore, along with his manservant, boarded the Titanic at Southampton for the trip home.

Col. Archibald Gracie was a writer, soldier, amateur historian, and real estate investor. In early 1912, he had traveled to Europe on the RMS Oceanic alone, without his wife or their daughter. On the return trip, he boarded the Titanic at Southampton. Once aboard the ship, he seems to have assigned himself the role of keeping an eye on various unaccompanied older women, who included fellow Washington passenger Helen Churchill Candee, who had no need for Col. Gracie’s chaperoning.

Major Archibald “Archie” Butt, then age 46, was an American Army officer, aide to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, and close personal friend of Taft himself. Butt was concluding a six-week vacation in Europe along with a companion, 63-year-old Francis “Frank” Millet. Archie Butt boarded the Titanic at Southampton and Frank Millet boarded the ship at its stop in Cherbourg later that same day. They had shared a stateroom on their outbound voyage to Europe on the steamship Berlin, but took separate compartments on the Titanic. This may have been due the nature of their relationship, with Archie Butt feeling he was less likely to be recognized by the passengers on the Berlin; the high profile return trip on the Titanic would not provide the same level of anonymity for the pair.

Frank Millet was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1848. At the of 15, he was a drummer boy and served as an assistant to his father, a Civil War surgeon. Millet later graduated from Harvard with a Master of Arts degree. In addition to being an acclaimed artist and sculptor, he was also a writer, a decorated war correspondent, and served as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. In 1879, he married Elizabeth ("Lily") Greely Merrill in Paris, with Mark Twain serving as his best man. He and Lily had four children together, but were seldom together themselves.

The relationship between Archie Butt and Frank Millet has been much discussed, with some historians ultimately concluding that it was a homosexual one. On the surface, it may have appeared simply as an arrangement of convenience between two single men in Washington—Archie being a confirmed bachelor, and Frank’s family living abroad. Archie only ever referred to Frank as “my artist friend who lives with me." But, the two men were inseparable and were considered very much a couple by those who knew them.

Archie and Frank ultimately moved in together in 1910 into a large house at 2000 G Street NW. There, they set themselves up with a cook and two young live-in Philippine houseboys. Together, they would entertain with large parties that were attended by members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and President Taft himself. On one occasion, they threw an intimate dinner party to celebrate the completion of Frank’s portrait of Archie that was attended by President Taft, as well as their bachelor friends.

Helen Churchill Candee was an established literary figure, one of the country’s first professional interior decorators, and an activist for women’s rights. Although she had divorced her abusive husband and was raising two small children on her own, she managed to carve out a successful living as an author and journalist. One of her books, How Women May Earn a Living, became an international best seller, enabling her to afford a first class cabin on the world’s most expensive ship.

Helen Candee was traveling in Europe in the spring of 1912, completing research for her latest book, The Tapestry Book, when she received a telegram saying that her son had been injured in a car accident. From Paris, she hurriedly booked passage home on the Titanic, boarding at Cherbourg. On the voyage, she spent her time socializing with the other Washington passengers.

At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles south of Newfoundland, the Titanic struck an iceberg. Helen Candee was able to find a spot in one of the ship’s lifeboats, but had fallen and fractured her ankle in the process. She, along with another first-class passenger, Margaret “Unsinkable Molly” Brown, helped man the oars.

Unlike the other Washington men, Col. Gracie made it off the ship and survived by clinging to the rail of the topmost deck until the last. When the ship made its final plunge down to the sea floor, he was forced to let go and was caught in an eddy caused by the ship’s rapid sinking. After swirling around for what seemed an interminable time, he eventually came to the surface to find the sea a mass of tangled wreckage. Unhurt, he grabbed onto a wooden crate floating nearby until he managed to pull himself onto a large canvas and cork life-raft that had capsized. He immediately helped one man onto the raft, and then began rescuing those who had jumped into the sea and were floundering in the water. When dawn broke, there were thirty people on the raft, standing knee deep in the icy water and afraid to move lest it be overturned. Hours passed before they were picked up by the RMS Carpathia.

Accounts vary widely about the last minutes of the Washington men who remained aboard the ship. According to Col. Gracie’s testimony before a Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing soon after the tragedy, at around 2:00 a.m. Clarence Moore, along with Archie Butt, Frank Millet, and another first-class passenger, Arthur Ryerson, had returned to their usual table in the first-class smoking lounge to play a final hand of cards.

Frank Millet’s body was later recovered by the cable boat Mackay-Bennett and returned to East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He was still dressed in formal evening clothes of a light overcoat, black pants, and a gray jacket. On the day of Millet's funeral, President Taft sent a large floral blanket for Millet's coffin. The bodies of Clarence Moore and Archie Butt were never recovered.

Washington anxiously waited for news about survivors of the Titanic. Not since the Spanish-American War had a national disaster held Washington at such a level of painful suspense. It was not until the RMS Carpathia reached New York that Washington knew the fate of its residents who had boarded the ship. When news reached Washington that Clarence Moore, Archie Butt, and Frank Millet were not on the ship, the city went into semi-mourning. Dinner parties at embassies and private homes were canceled.

Archie Butt’s first memorial service was held in the Butt family home with 1,500 mourners. President Taft spoke at the service. At a second memorial service, Taft broke down in tears shortly after starting his eulogy and had to end it abruptly. Taft also skipped the season-opening Washington Senators game in 1912 out of grief for Butt.

Col. Gracie became so obsessed with determining the cause of the Titanic’s sinking that his health failed. He fell into a coma on December 2, 1912 and died of complications from diabetes two days later—only eight months after surviving the sinking, becoming the first adult survivor to die. According to a New York Times article at the time of his death, his last words were reportedly, "We must get them into the boats. We must get them all into the boats." Gracie also died before he could finish correcting the proofs of his book, The Truth about the Titanic, which was published in 1913.

Although the ankle injury Helen Candee sustained while fleeing the sinking Titanic required her to walk with a cane for almost a year afterwards, by March 1913 she was able to join other feminist equestriennes in the "Votes for Women" parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, riding her horse at the head of the procession that culminated at the steps of Capitol Hill.

Two years after the Titanic tragedy, Helen Candee joined the Red Cross in Italy, during the start of World War I. A decade later, she was living in Beijing, where she became involved in the Chinese Civil War on the side of the Nationalists against the Communists, sending periodic dispatches from the front lines to the New York Times. She was nearly seventy years old at this time. After being decorated by the king of Siam for her 1924 book, Angkor the Magnificent, she retired to her summer home in York Harbor, Maine, where she died in 1949 at the age of ninety.

Memorials to the Titanic Victims

Of the two memorials to the Titanic victims in Washington, the first to be installed was a White House fountain in honor of Archie Butt and Frank Millet. The officially-given reason for the fountain was to honor the two Titanic dead who had been part of the federal government. While Butt was an Army officer and aide to both presidents Roosevelt and Taft, Millet had a mostly symbolic governmental role as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts.

In 1913, friends of Archie and Frank had raised enough money, and with the authorization of Congress, commissioned a memorial fountain for the two. President Taft approved sculptor Daniel Chester French’s design for the memorial and its location on the ellipse just beyond the White House South Lawn, where he could easily see it. It still stands there today.

For the second Titanic memorial, there was a design competition and the winning design by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was selected in 1914. The architect for the memorial was Henry Bacon, who previously designed the Lincoln Memorial. The memorial was finally installed in its original location along the Potomac River at the foot of New Hampshire Avenue in 1930, and dedicated in May 1931.

Some thirty years later, in order to make room for the Kennedy Center, the memorial was removed, placed in storage, and then later reinstalled at its current location at the Southwest Waterfront Park in 1968.

The collapse of the Knickerbocker Theater's roof in Washington, DC on the evening of January 28, 1922 brought tragedy not only to those inside, but also later to its owner and architect. Reborn as the Ambassador Theatre the following year, it would continue to survive until the 1960s.

The Knickerbocker Theater once stood on the southeast corner of Eighteenth Street and Columbia Road NW. It was built in 1917 for the Knickerbocker Theater Company, owned by businessman Harry Crandall. At one point, Crandall owned a chain of 18 theaters in Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.

When it was completed, the Knickerbocker Theater was the largest theater of its kind in Washington. In addition to serving as a movie house, it was also used as a concert and lecture hall, with ballrooms, luxurious parlors, and lounges.

The Knickerbocker Theater was designed by architect Reginald Wyckliffe Geare. Due to the war, there was a shortage of the heavy-weight steel roof trusses and weaker ones were substituted for what was needed to support the theater’s flat roof. Also, structural brick was replaced with hollow brick for most of the exterior walls, not able to provide the necessary load bearing support for the heavy, flat roof. Geare ultimately approved these modifications to his original plans.

On January 27, 1922, Washington experienced its largest snowstorm on record. By the next morning, the total snowfall had reached eighteen inches, and when the storm tapered off the next morning, the official total was twenty-eight inches. Temperatures stayed in the low to mid-twenties during most of the storm.

On the evening of January 28, 1922, seeking a respite from the cold and snow, neighborhood residents flocked to the Knickerbocker to see the 1921 silent movie Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. Due to the low temperatures during the storm, snow had rapidly been accumulating on the theater’s flat roof. 

During the intermission of the movie, the weight of the snow split the roof down the middle, bringing down the balcony as well as a portion of an exterior wall, burying dozens of people. 

By midnight, 200 rescue workers were on the scene, and that number increased to more than 600 by 2:30 a.m. Nearby residents, including the theater’s architect, Reginald Geare who lived just a few blocks away, helped pull bodies from the debris and fed the rescuer workers. Geare’s knowledge of the building’s design —and the shortcuts he took in its construction—proved invaluable in the rescue work.

In all, 98 people were killed and 133 injured. This disaster still ranks as one of the worst in Washington, D.C. history, and the storm is still known today as the Knickerbocker Storm.

In 1922, Reginald Geare, along with four other men, was indicted by a grand jury for manslaughter. Geare was charged with failing to draw the plans and designs of the theater in a skillful manner and failing to exercise proper supervision of work while the building was being constructed. None of the men were ultimately convicted.

Geare’s career as an architect was destroyed by the disaster. Although he fought to reestablish his career, he would never be able to recover from the blow and committed suicide in 1927 by turning on the gas in an attic room at his home in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of the city.

Crandall was not deterred by the Knickerbocker disaster. In 1923—only a year later—he hired architect Thomas Lamb to build a new theater in the shell of the ruined Knickerbocker Theater, now to be called the Ambassador Theatre. Lamb retained Geare’s original Knickerbocker façade, but the rest of the theater was new. The 1,800-seat theater opened on September 20, 1923 with the Warner Bros. film “Main Street.”

With his theater empire going bankrupt, Harry Crandall committed suicide in 1937 after he lost his final comeback project in Cleveland Park that had opened as Warner Brothers’ Uptown Theater the year before.

By the 1950’s, the Ambassador Theatre was struggling and there were multiple attempts to keep the theater in use, including as a psychedelic dance hall in the 1960s. The balcony was used to house multiple projectors and black lights to splash the walls with colors and images. This became a stand alone show of its own with tickets priced at $1.50 on week nights, $2.50 on weekends.

The mezzanine level of the dance hall hosted a head shop selling lava lamps, posters, as well as other hippie paraphernalia. The concert hall also sometimes functioned as a community center reaching out to neighborhood kids for special matinees and served as a staging area for the anti war march on the Pentagon.

In August 1967, Jimi Hendrix and his band The Jimi Hendrix Experience performed at the Ambassador for five consecutive nights. Tickets for the show started at $1.50.

The psychedelic dance hall lasted for only about six months. The Ambassador finally shut down in 1968 and the following year it faced the wrecking ball—not to the dismay of many in the neighborhood.

Perpetual Savings & Loan Association constructed a bank on the site with a public plaza in 1978. It eventually became SunTrust Bank, and then Truist Bank before Truist moved its services across the street. 

In 2016, Hoffman & Associates proposed building a six-story residential building on the site. The proposed development was controversial and led to community pushback and court proceedings. Ultimately, Truist donated the property with the now-shuttered bank branch and plaza to the nonprofit organization Jubilee Housing.

Jubilee has unveiled plans for an all-affordable housing development with a seven-story and penthouse development with approximately 50 residential units. The project includes retail spaces on the first level, and a community room in the penthouse. The plaza area in front of the building would remain a space for community events.

In 1794, Massachusetts real estate investor James Greenleaf, with the help of a letter of recommendation from George Washington, bought 3,000 lots from the District Commissioners at a bargain price of $66.50 each, committing to build 70 houses at a rate of twenty a year to be ready in time to house members of Congress when they arrived in the city in 1800.

In 1795, Greenleaf started construction of the “Six Buildings” on the 2100 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, NW as part of his purchase agreement with the Commissioners. In addition, he also formed a syndicate with Robert Morris and John Nicholson to sell some of the other 3000 lots he bought from the Commissioners. They then sold 500 of those lots to Thomas Law at four times what Greenleaf had originally paid. This infuriated Washington who thought the Commissioners should have been able to get a much higher price than they did.

Greenleaf eventually found himself heavily in debt. Land sales were not occurring fast enough, nor at prices high enough to allow him to meet his mortgage payments to the Dutch banks who had financed his lot purchases. Morris and Nichols ended up buying Greenleaf out of his share of the syndicate. But they too were in over their heads financially and couldn't live up to all the purchase contracts with the Commissioners, leaving unfinished houses throughout city, including the Six Buildings. All three would eventually end up in debtor's prison.

Morris and Nichols sold the unfinished Six Buildings to Isaac Polock for $34,000 (the equivalent of over $857,000 in 2025) with the condition that he complete them to meet the requirements of at least one of their contracts with the Commissioners.

Polock, the first documented Jewish resident of Washington, had only just arrived in town from Newport, Rhode Island, where he had made a fortune in real estate. Upon his arrival in Washington, he immediately began buying up lots. The prospect of six lots with partially completed houses on them, and with the new government due soon in town in need of housing, must have made Morris and Nicholson’s high asking price seem worth the risk.

Numbering 2107 to 2117 Pennsylvania Avenue, the six, three-story, 3 bay, brick buildings with single dormers and deep English basements were completed and occupied by the end 1797. A seventh house, very similar to the other six, was added on the east end of the row in 1800 by William Worthington, whose family then occupied the house for over 50 years

Polock took the western-most house at 2117 Pennsylvania Avenue for himself and lived there until his death. He was succeeded in the house by Richard Rush, a friend of John Adams, who lived there while serving as the United States Attorney General between 1814 to 1817.

The Six Buildings were among the few at the time that were near enough to the White House that, while designed as residences, were large enough and could be quickly converted for use as government offices. Due to overcrowding in the Treasury Building, they became the temporary home to the Navy Department, and for a short time to the Department of State. The Navy Department occupied the building at 2107 Pennsylvania Avenue, which also served also as a pied-à-terre for Navy Secretary Benjamin Stoddert.

It is unknown which of the Six Buildings the State Department actually occupied. Although Richard Rush offered the Madisons his own house, the historian Allen C. Clark in Life and Letters of Dolly Madison (published 1914) claimed that the Madisons likely lived at 2113 Pennsylvania Avenue. This house may have served as their private residence with the State Department in another building, or they simply had rooms in the office building itself. Nevertheless, the State Department would soon move to the large corner house of the Seven Buildings at 1901 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Narsworthy Hunter, Delegate of the Mississippi Territory, who was the first member of Congress to die while in office, lived in and died in one the Six Buildings in March 1802. His funeral was the first publicly-funded funeral for a congressmen, and the members of both houses of Congress, their officers, and heads of departments, all walked in the funeral procession that started from his residence at the Six Buildings.

Samuel “Sam” Houston resided at 2107 Pennsylvania Avenue, probably while he was in Congress from 1823 to 1827, and living in the same house the Navy Department had previously occupied. Some other prominent residents of the Six Buildings were General James Wilkinson, General and Chief of the Army in 1796, John Francis Mercer, the first president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Co., and William Seward, possibly when he was serving as a Senator from New York.

By the later part of the 19th century, the Six Buildings were no longer the high-end residences they once were. Victims of the spread of commercialism along the city’s major corridors, over time they gradually became a mix of storefronts, rented rooms, and apartments.

A.E. Breitzell’s Oyster House opened on the side of the buildings at 2105 Pennsylvania Avenue sometime in the later part of the 19th century. At some point in the early 1900s Albert Breitzell left the seafood business completely for the liquor trade.

The Circle Theatre, a landmark city institution, first opened in 1910 in the end building at 2105 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1935, it was enlarged into the neighboring lot at 2107 Pennsylvania Avenue (once occupied by the Navy Department and Sam Houston) to create an Art Deco style theater designed by the architectural firm of Albert B. Mullett & Co. The theater was enlarged again in 1968 into the neighboring lot to the west, razing a building that had earlier replaced one of the original Six Buildings that had once stood there.

In 1929, three of the Six Buildings located at 2111-2115 Pennsylvania Avenue were razed for the construction of the Marquette Apartments, which took the address of 2115 Pennsylvania Avenue.

By the mid 1980s the site of the original Six Buildings consisted of Gillies 21 Liquor Store, the Circle Theatre, the Marquette Apartments, the Group Health Association Building that occupied several lots, which included Isaac Polock’s end house at 2117 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the last of the Six Buildings at 2109 Pennsylvania Avenue, then home to a bar called Tammany Hall that was demolished in 1985, marking the end of the Six Buildings.

The Circle Theatre closed in September 1986 and was demolished with plans to erect a new 5-screen theater that was planned to open in December 1988. The new theater was never built and the site became a parking lot. At the time it was razed, the Circle Theatre had been Washington's oldest continuously operating movie theater.

In 1997, construction began on the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation building that now occupies the entire square.

Azor Nickerson was born in 1837 in Litchfield, Medina, Ohio, and was studying law when the Civil War broke out. He volunteered with the Eighth Ohio infantry regiment and was appointed a second lieutenant. He then was promoted to captain, leading his company in the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg and was wounded in both battles.

After the Battle of Gettysburg, Nickerson was nursed back to health by a Quaker family that lived near the battlefield. He later returned to Gettysburg and was on the platform when Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.

Nickerson married his first wife, Ella Nora Riegal, the daughter of the family that had cared for him in Gettysburg. After the war, Ella went with him to the western frontier where Nickerson was serving as aide-de-camp to Brigadier General George Crook. Ella died a few months after their marriage.

Nickerson then married his second wife, Emma Cecilia Derby, in San Francisco in 1870. President Rutherford B. Hayes, an old friend of Nickerson from Ohio, appointed him, now a major, as Assistant Adjutant General of the army in Washington, D.C. He and Emma moved to Washington and into a rented house in Logan Circle, the vogue neighborhood for retired Civil War military officers at the time.

After arriving in Washington, Nickerson fell in love with Lena Diller Carter, who was his wife’s twenty-four-year-old dressmaker. He then talked his wife Emma into going to Europe with their daughter to obtain medical treatment for herself and to enroll the daughter in school there, suggesting that it would be cheaper than in Washington and that it would save them some money. Emma was somehow convinced and left.

Nickerson wrote to Emma consistently for two years, sending her money and discouraging her from returning home. He also convinced her to sign over her rights to the deeds to lots of land they owned in Portland, Oregon, as well as in Washington, under the pretense of using the proceeds from the sale to purchase a house for them in DC.

With their property sold, in 1883 Nickerson bought a row house at 7 Dupont Circle and moved all of Emma’s belongings into it.

Next, Nickerson filed for and was granted a divorce from Emma in Pennsylvania on the grounds of abandonment, claiming that she refused to return from Europe. He also insisted that Lena marry him immediately, before her family could find out and whose disapproval of her marrying a divorcé might deter the marriage. This she did.

At this point, Nickerson had stopped writing to Emma altogether, and she started to get concerned. One day, she received an urgent telegram from her mother informing her about the divorce and urging her to return to Washington at once. When Nickerson learned that his wife was returning home, he had the title to the Dupont Circle house transferred into Lena’s name to protect it from Emma’s claims on his own property.

Upon her return to the U.S., Emma filed to annul the divorce in a Philadelphia court, and the details of Nickerson’s philandering were openly aired, tarnishing what was otherwise a bright military record. A warrant was issued for the immediate arrest of Nickerson in preparation for his court-martial for obtaining a fraudulent divorce and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

With the annulment in hand, Emma filed for divorce, alleging adultery. At this point, everyone suddenly realized that Nickerson was missing. Robert Todd Lincoln, then Secretary of War, hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to track Nickerson down.

The Pinkerton agency put Nickerson’s Dupont Circle house under constant surveillance, and Lena’s comings and goings were watched closely. All mail sent to the house was intercepted and read. Nickerson was finally tracked down in a small mill town in Ontario, Canada, and Robert Todd Lincoln signed a warrant for his arrest, assuming that Nickerson could easily be lured back over the border. This proved not to be the case.

Divorce proceedings dragged on, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, and in 1887 Emma Nickerson was finally granted a divorce on the grounds of adultery and cruelty. The next year, Nickerson once again (and legally this time) married Lena Carter in Niagara Falls. The couple remained in Canada until the end of 1890, when they returned to Washington and took up residence with Lena’s mother.

For the remainder of his days, Nickerson fought to have his name restored to the rolls of retired army officers. That finally occurred the week of his death in 1910, when Congress passed a bill restoring his commission. When he died, he was the last surviving person who had sat on the platform when President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery along with Lena, both his third and fourth wife.

For the upper classes during the Gilded Age, winters were the time of the “social season” that took place between Thanksgiving and the beginning of Lent in several of the larger east coast cities. The season was marked by exclusive dinner parties, balls, house concerts, and other events. The Wadsworths would often travel from upstate New York for extended periods of time to participate in the seasons in Boston, New York City, and Washington.

When Herbert inherited a large amount of money from an uncle, now even richer and with no children of their own, the Wadsworths decided to move to Washington to build a grand winter home that would serve as a major social and entertaining center during the season in Washington.

Although many other wealthy Americans at this time arrived in Washington not knowing anyone and hoping to establish themselves socially, the Wadsworths already had family in the city. Herbert’s cousin, James Wadsworth, had been in Congress since 1881, and Martha’s late sister, Nelly, or Madame De Smirnoff, had been a well-known Washington socialite. Nelly’s daughter, Nelke, remained in town.

By the time they started looking for real estate in Dupont Circle, there were only two lots available directly on the circle itself— the most prestigious location in the neighborhood—that were large enough to accommodate the size of mansion they wanted to build. One was the site of Stewart’s Castle that was due to be demolished. The other was the abandoned Holy Cross Episcopal Church that had stood on a pie-shaped lot between Massachusetts Avenue and P Street NW for 25 years. In 1896, Charles Van Wyck’s widow, Kate, sold the lot, along with its deconsecrated church, to the Wadsworths.

The Wadsworths chose local architect Frederick Brooke to design a house for the pie-shaped lot, although Martha often claimed she had designed the house herself. In addition to the Wadsworth’s house, Brooke's other notable works include the renovation of Dumbarton Oaks for the Blisses, the District of Columbia War Memorial, and the British Ambassador's residence, which he co-designed with Edwin Lutyens.

Construction of the 3-1/2 story yellow brick house at 1801 Massachusetts Avenue began in 1900 and by the time it was completed in 1902, the final cost exceeded $85,000 (over $3.2 million in 2025). The pie slice–shaped house was designed specifically for entertaining. Two floors were entirely devoted to drawing rooms, one opening into the next, ending at a dramatic two-story ballroom with a musicians gallery.

When the Wadsworth were designing the house, the electric car was all the rage and was quickly embraced by the Wadsworths. The house featured a drive-through carriage entry that went straight through the house from front to back, off which was the main entrance to the house. Opposite the main entrance in the drive-through was an “automobile room,” one of the first parking garages in the city equipped with battery recharging equipment and a car wash. Martha’s first Riker’s electric car, which sat in the automobile room, is now in the collection of the American History Museum.

Martha was always busy organizing some type of social event, either beauty lessons, a barn dance, or even jiu jitsu classes. She was one of the first women in America to achieve the rank of black belt in jiu jitsu. She also once organized an ugliest baby photograph contest, and her own husband ended up being the winner.

Martha was one of the early promoters of the musical arts for amateurs in Washington. She offered singing classes held throughout the season in her ballroom. The classes consisted of forty society women, and they would give small concerts at the house on Saturday evenings.

On Thursday evenings, Martha would host small dances with musicians playing waltzes and polkas. For these, she demanded a commitment from her invited guests at the beginning of the season: either every Thursday or specific Thursdays to be selected by guests in advance. Many were dismayed to learn that they were not expected every Thursday, but were thus considered second tier by Martha. Dinner was served at ten in the evening, followed by the dance. For these dances, the ballroom was often so dimly lit that guests could not see one another. When the Lent season arrived, the weekly dances were replaced with a musicale.

In 1902, the Wadsworths financially backed the creation of Washington’s first orchestra, the Washington Philharmonic Orchestra. Washington now having its own orchestra spurred an interest in music and served as an inspiration for Washington’s society people, including the Wadsworths, to offer musicales in their homes. These quickly turned into fierce competitions. Julia Bradley tried to outdo everyone by building a private, 500-seat theater in her home and bringing in the biggest Metropolitan opera stars from New York.

With all the competition to best each other, everyone agreed that Phoebe Hearst had the best musicales with performers including the Austrian-American contralto Madame Schuman-Heink, violinist Jan Kubelik, and violinist Fritz Kreisler’s own string quartet. These performers often charged between $2,000 and $5000 for their appearances at such events. Mrs. Hearst could certainly afford their asking prices, and it undoubtedly drove up the prices for everyone else. Martha Wadsworth took a more frugal approach to her own musicales, often selecting and promoting local amateur musicians.

With no children of her own, Martha took a matronly and protective interest in many of the young society women and their overall wellbeing. This was demonstrated one night when Martha woke up to find Marguerite Cassini, the Russian ambassador’s daughter, dumped on an upstairs sofa.

At the age of seventeen, Marguerite had decided to end her life over a failed romance. That evening, she had her coachman drive from pharmacy to pharmacy, collecting small portions of poison that she claimed she wanted to use to put down her ailing dog. When she thought she had enough, she took it all in the back of the coach. Her last stop was a drug store on Dupont Circle, where she suddenly changed her mind and called out for help. The driver immediately turned into the Wadsworth’s nearby carriageway.

Marguerite was carried upstairs and laid out unconscious on a sofa. Martha immediately called the doctor, who told her the only way to save her was keep her awake until the poison wore off. Martha was up to the task. She had Marguerite carried into the ballroom, laid on the bare floor and set to work slapping and punching her, rolling and dragging her across the room, and finally getting her to walk. Marguerite said she would preferred to die than continue to suffer through Martha’s treatment, begging to be allowed to, but Martha was determined that she would not. When morning came, Martha had won, and Marguerite lay on the floor still alive and sleeping soundly.

As the Wadsworths grew older, they spent less and less time in Washington. In the 1910s, they began to spend some of the winter months in South Florida rather than at their home in Washington—the winters in Miami preferable to those in upstate New York and Washington. In Florida, they also invested in additional real estate, purchasing two islands south of Miami between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean: Caesar’s Rock and Meigs Key.

The Wadsworth’s Washington home was used in 1918 by the local chapter of the Red Cross and then only sporadically by the Wadsworths after the war when they were in town. It then stood empty for twelve years.

In 1932, five years after Herbert’s death, Martha sold the house to Dupont neighbor Mabel Boardman for $125,000 who converted it into the headquarters for the new Sulgrave Club for women. Boardman, who lived on P Street across from the Wadsworth house, brought together a group of friends and neighbors to both found the club and to prevent the property from falling into “undesirable” hands—had Mabel and the club’s Organizing Committee not acted when they did, the house would have become a Masonic Lodge.

While some of the eclectic interior of the house has been somewhat modified, much of its original detailing still remains. The carriage entrance is now the ground floor entrance hall.

Charles Van Wyck was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He completed preparatory studies and graduated from Rutgers College in 1843. He then studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1847, eventually moving to Bloomingburg, New York, where he became the district attorney of Sullivan County, New York in 1850.

Van Wyck had inherited a sizable amount of money and was quite eccentric. Never concerned about his personal appearance, Van Wyck would never have been mistaken for a wealthy man. His appearance was often disheveled, with baggy clothes, collars gone awry, and black string neckties caught up around his ears. His enemies called him “Crazy Horse” on account of his jerky speech and gestures.

Van Wyck first came to Washington when he was elected to Congress as a Republican from New York, serving two terms from 1859 to 1863. In 1869, during his second term in Congress, he married Kate Ross Brodhead and they had four daughters.

During his first term in Congress, Van Wyck delivered a harsh and widely reported antislavery speech on the House floor in which he denounced the Southern states for slavery. A year after his anti-slavery speech in Congress, and on the same night as an attempt was made to assassinate president-elect Lincoln in Baltimore, Maryland, Van Wyck was attacked near the U.S. Capitol building by three men in an assassination attempt, reportedly in response to the speech. Van Wyck fought off the attack, surviving only because a copy of congressional records that he kept in the breast pocket of his coat had blocked the blade of a Bowie knife from going into his heart. The three men fled and were never identified.

After his second term in Congress, Van Wyck entered the Union army as colonel of the Fifty-sixth Regiment, New York. He was the idol of his men. His purse was always open to his soldiers, and he would write letters home for those in his regiment who could not write themselves, as well as pay for the postage. Van Wyck went on to serve in the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign and was wounded at the Battle of Fair Oaks in Virginia. He left the army as a brevetted brigadier general. After the war, Van Wyck returned to Congress and served two more terms until 1871.

Van Wyck then moved to Nebraska and took up farming, but he did not stay away from politics for very long. After serving as a delegate to the Nebraska constitutional convention in 1875, he was elected to the state senate.

In 1881, Van Wyck returned to Washington as a Republican senator from Nebraska. In the Senate, Van Wyck specialized in attacks on local businesses and corporations and the wrongs suffered by the population at the hands of public franchises. He fought hard against street railways and gas companies, attempting to cap gas prices. After an unsuccessful run as a Populist candidate for governor of Nebraska in 1892, Van Wyck retired from politics and returned to Washington to live out his years.

The Holy Cross Episcopal Church that once sat on a triangular lot on Dupont Circle directly across from Van Wyck’s house had been in financial trouble for a long time. The wealthy around Dupont Circle tended to be Presbyterian, and the Church of the Covenant was just one block south of the circle. No longer able to stay afloat, the parish put the church up for auction; Van Wyck bought it and presented it to his wife, Kate, as a “little after-dinner favor.”

One day, Van Wyck astonished the fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood by suddenly moving his family into the deserted church while repairs were being done on his Massachusetts Avenue house. Due to increasing illness, Van Wyck had developed a fear of climbing stairs and thought it would be better to live on a single floor. He initially divided the auditorium by imaginary lines into parlor, bedrooms, dining room and a picture gallery that later became real walls and rooms. Van Wyck would often be seen sitting on the lawn in front of the church in his shirt sleeves, smoking a cob pipe, and nodding to those passing by and staring.

Van Wyck died of a stroke in 1895, and a year later, his widow Kate sold the church and its lot on Dupont Circle to Herbert and Martha Wadsworth of New York City.

Fortunately, for the neighborhood’s Episcopalian population, Calvary Parish had formed and built its own parish hall on Church Street just three years before and would complete the construction of its new St. Thomas’ Parish on Eighteenth Street in 1899.

On December 24, 1793, the real estate syndicate of James Greenleaf and Robert Morris purchased 6,000 lots from the city commissioners in order to help finance the new government and began marketing the lots for sale and development.  Robert Morris was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. He helped George Washington acquire the funds for the Yorktown campaign during the Revolutionary War and was given the moniker “Financier of the American Revolution.” The Greenleaf-Morris real estate syndicate went bankrupt in 1797 and Morris died in 1806 after spending several years in debtor’s prison.

In November 1794, General Walter Stewart purchased the seven lots on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue at 1901 to 1913 Pennsylvania Avenue from Greenleaf and Morris, and in 1796 constructed seven brick three-story townhouses.  When complete, the Seven Houses were some of the earliest residential structures built in the city, and for many years thereafter, some of the most fashionable.  Each was exquisitely detailed, with an ornamental lintel with a sculpted woman's head was placed above each front door.

Perhaps the most famous of the Seven Buildings was the corner house at 1901 Penn Ave.  President James Madison and his wife, Dolley, lived there from October 1815 to March 1817 while the White House was being rebuilt after it was burned by the British in 1814.  It became known as the “House of 1,000 Candles” after an evening reception given by Dolley Madison in honor of Andrew Jackson in 1815.  It later became the residence of Martin Van Buren shortly before his inauguration as President in 1836. 

Other well-known residents of the Seven Buildings included Elbridge Gerry, who lived in one of the Buildings from 1813 to 1814 while he was Vice President.   Naval hero Stephen Decatur purchased 1903 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1817 and possibly lived there until his house on Lafayette Square was completed in 1818.  During the Civil War, General George B.  McClellan and General Martin Davis Hardin established their headquarters in the Seven Buildings. 

By the 1890s, the Seven Buildings were being used for commercial purposes rather than homes.  The end house at 1913 Pennsylvania Avenue NW was razed in 1898, and a new four-story building was erected in its place.

By 1910, the former home of the James Madison at 1901 Pennsylvania Avenue had become home to Nichols Pharmacy.  In 1917 and 1918, the owner of the pharmacy, Eugene R. Nichols, was charged with adulterating regulated solutions and selling them. This must not have been a serious offense, as both times, he failed to appear in court, only forfeiting a $20 bond that he had posted himself. Nichols Pharmacy would later become home to a People’s Drug Store.

Numbers 1901-1905 Pennsylvania Avenue NW were razed in 1959 to make way for an office building constructed on the site.  From the 1950’s until 1983, 1911 Penn was home to the Italian restaurant, Marrocco’s Sorento Room.  By 1979, only 1909 and 1911 Pennsylvania Avenue NW remained.

In 1986, 1909 and 1911 Pennsylvania Avenue became the latest victim of “facadism” or architectural billboarding with their street-facing walls incorporated into the new $4.5 million, nine-story Embassy of Mexico.  The architect of the project, Peter Vercelli, persuaded the developer the save the old facades, not because he knew their history, but because they seemed to match to represent the original cornice line along Penn. Ave.  As a result, the 1898 office building at 1913 was demolished, 1911 Pennsylvania was restored, and a mid-19th-century floor addition on 1903 Pennsylvania was removed and returned to its original 1796 appearance. 

The return to Washington was a practical move for Julia Grant. Along with many of her lifelong friends, she also had a considerable amount of family in town: a son, a daughter, and two sisters.

Julia’s divorced daughter, Ellen “Nellie,” who married Englishman Algernon Sartoris in an elaborate White House ceremony in 1874 that was billed as one of the greatest American social events of the 19th century, had returned to Washington the year before her mother and was living in the Dupont Circle neighborhood.

Julia’s son, Colonel Frederick Dent Grant, who had married Ida Marie Honoré, the daughter of Chicago real estate magnate Henry Hamilton Honoré, was already well-established in Washington when Julia arrived.

Upon her arrival in Washington, Julia Grant moved in with her daughter Nellie in a leased house at 2018 R Street, NW. The two then bought a marble-faced mansion at 2111 Massachusetts Avenue that had belonged to Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont (a hotel now stands on the site).

Once they were settled into their new home at 2111 Massachusetts Avenue, Julia was able to indulge her love of entertaining, hosting an open reception every Tuesday afternoon during the winter social season months. Although suffering from severe rheumatism, she would force herself to remain standing to greet guests, refusing to ever be seen using her wheelchair.

During her years in Washington, Julia would become so feeble that it was impossible for her to continue to socialize in society. She spent her final summers in Ontario, Canada in the town of Cobourg, where Nellie had rented a house with a lake view.

Julia died from heart and kidney complications in her Massachusetts Avenue home on December 14, 1902 at the age of 74. Her daughter Nellie was by her side.

President Theodore Roosevelt attended Julia’s Washington, D.C. funeral services at the Metropolitan Methodist Church. Roosevelt’s appearance at the funeral made national headlines, as it was as much a tribute to the memory of the venerated General Grant as it was to Julia herself. Julia was interred in a matching sarcophagus beside her husband inside the Grant mausoleum on Riverside Drive in New York City.

Julia Grant was the first First Lady to ever write a memoir, but she was never able to find a publisher in her lifetime. She had been dead almost 75 years before The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant) was finally published in 1975 by Southern Illinois University Press.

Levi Ziegler Leiter was born in Leitersburg, Maryland (just north of Hagerstown) in the town founded by and named after his grandfather, Abraham Leiter.  While some of his ancestors were Mennonites, Levi Leiter was raised as a Lutheran.

Leiter began working as a clerk in the village store in Leitersburg, but in 1855 at the age of 21 he moved to Chicago to work as a clerk in a dry goods store there.  With a fellow employee, Marshall Field, Leiter bought an interest in the store and in 1865 sold it to go into business with Potter Palmer as Field, Palmer, Leiter & Co.  In 1867, Palmer left the business and the company was renamed Field, Leiter & Co.   Deciding to retire from the dry goods business, Leiter sold his interest in the company to Field in 1881, and the company name was changed to Marshall Field and Company.  Marshall Field and Company survived until 2005, when it was acquired by Macy’s Inc.

Leiter developed an interest in real estate and invested heavily in the city, helping it to recover from the fire of 1871 and building his already immense fortune.  While still in Chicago, he became associated with the Chicago School of architecture and was the builder of the first true steel skeleton building—the William LeBaron Jenney’s Leiter Building (1889).  He also served as the second president of the Chicago Art Institute, provided a new building for the Chicago Historical Society, and donated generously to the Chicago Public Library.

Leiter married Mary Theresa Carver in 1866. Mary was the daughter of Benjamin Carver, a wealthy banker from Utica, New York and a descendant of John Carver, the first president of the Plymouth Colony.  The couple had four children: Joseph, Nancy, Marguerite (Daisy) and Mary Victoria.

Like so many of the nouveau riche of that period, or parvenus as Mark Twain referred to them, the Leiters decided to establish themselves in Washington, DC.  While not exactly born poor, Levi Leiter was considered a self-made man and Mrs. Leiter, was a former school teacher.  Even in light of significant contributions to the city of Chicago, they would never fully be accepted by Chicago’s high society.  

In 1883, the Leiters rented the Blaine mansion at 2000 Massachusetts Avenue for a whopping sum of $11,500 a year, the amount they were more than happy to quote to any who asked, or even didn't ask.  People either gasped that they would pay that much, or more probably that they were so easily relieved of their money by Blaine.  Either way, the rent allowed Blaine to comfortably relocate to Seward house on Lafayette Square and the Leiters to establish a foothold in Dupont Circle.

In 1891, the Leiters decided to move to Washington permanently and purchased a lot at 1500 New Hampshire Avenue, NW for $83,276.53 (again an astronomical price to pay for any real estate at that time).  Undoubtedly, when folks saw Leiter coming, prices would likely skyrocket knowing that Leiter would never balk at any price asked.

Shunning the architects of Chicago and Washington, DC, Leiter chose Philadelphia architect Theophilus P. Chandler to design his own palatial mansion in DC.  The original house was three stories plus basement, 55 rooms, 96’ across the front, 75’ deep, and 62’ in height and cost $125,000 to construct.  

In the spirit of Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers, all three daughters married high-ranking Englishmen, using the Leiter fortune to ensure their husband’s economic standing while at the same time boosting their own social standing in both Europe and the U.S.  Mary Victoria married George, Lord Curzon, who became Viceroy of India.  She would die in India in 1906, shortly after her arrival there.  Daisy married the Earl of Suffolk, and Nancy married Colin Campbell, a colonel in the British army. The Leiters were well-traveled and took many trips abroad to visit their daughters.  

Mary Leiter’s early attempt to enter Washington society was awkward at best. She quickly developed a reputation for comical malapropisms and social missteps. Upon returning from a trip to Europe, she was reported as saying that she “was relieved to set my feet on American terra cotta.” She was particularly proud of one acquisition and proudly showed guests “the bust of my daughter’s hand, done by Rodin.” At one of their dinners, Marguerite Cassini tried to refuse the terrapin soup. Mrs. Leiter screamed, “You can’t refuse my terrapin! It costs a hundred dollars!” But ultimately, Mary prevailed and became the leader of the smart set and their new grand mansion its center.

Upon his graduation from Harvard, Levi offered his son Joseph one million dollars to see what he could do with it.  He soon had thirty million dollars’ worth of properties.  But, he did make one large financial miscalculation. In 1897, he tried to corner the wheat market, but with concerted efforts by his competitors, the wheat market collapsed the following year.  He lost at least ten million dollars and was bailed out of the debt by his father.  By the time of his death, he was reportedly earning about one million dollars annually.

In 1904, Levi Leiter died of heart disease while vacationing at the Vanderbilt cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine, which the Leiters had taken for the summer season.  He was interred in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, DC. 

Leiter requested a very particular way to be buried.  Out of fear that his remains would be dug up by grave robbers and held for ransom, a 12-foot deep hole was dug with two feet of concrete poured in, then covered over with a grid of steel beams onto which the casket was lowered. More steel beams were bolted across the top of the casket before the entire chamber was then filled with concrete.  Essentially, Leiter was completely encased in a steel-reinforced concrete block.

In 1909, Mary Leiter added a two-story brick addition to the rear (19th Street side) of the house and continued to live in the house and throw lavish parties there until her death in 1913.  The house then passed to their son Joseph and his wife who occupied it until Joseph’s death in 1932.  It was then left to Joseph’s son Thomas, with the provision that his mother be allowed to live there until her death.  After she passed in 1942, the house was then leased to the U.S. Government for use as an office building.  It was then sold in 1944 to Dupont Plaza, Inc. for $190,000, who razed it in 1947 to construct the current building on the lot, then an apartment building, and now a hotel.

While Emory hailed from the old Washington “Cave Dwellers”— wealthy southern Democrat families that were in Washington from its founding—he was also part of a new wave of socialites who would transform the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood in the 1880s—those with money, and a lot of it.

In 1879, the thirty-three-year-old Emory, then a navy lieutenant, contracted the architectural firm of Smithmeyer and Peltz (which later would design the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building) to design a house for him, his wife and their daughters across the street from the British Legation at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and Nineteenth Street at 1301 Connecticut Avenue NW. But due to the demands of his naval career, he and his family lived there for only short periods of time between assignments until Emory finally retired as a rear admiral in 1909.

One of Emory’s more noteworthy assignments during his naval career was commanding the USS Bear, one of three rescue ships sent in search of the survivors of the Greely Expedition. The Greely Expedition had set out to the Arctic in 1881 to collect scientific information in the Lady Franklin Bay region and became stranded, cut off from food and supplies. On June 22, 1884, less than two months after his departure, Emory sighted the survivors of the expedition, who for months had been existing on moss, leather sledding equipment and whatever small game they could find. By the time they were discovered, most had died or gone mad from deprivation. The six that survived resembled skeletons. The surgeon accompanying the expedition had committed suicide. Greely died before he could be returned to the States.

During most of his active career, Emory was stationed away from Washington and leased out the house on Connecticut Avenue. At one point, he rented it to Representative John Glover of Missouri, who would later marry Augusta Patten, one of the Patten sisters who dominated society from their home on Massachusetts Avenue. He then rented the house to naval colleague and friend Lieutenant Richardson Clover, who would later build his own house on New Hampshire Avenue.

In 1908, after several years of absence, Mrs. Emory returned to Washington while her husband was in command of the USS California. The following year, William Emory retired with the rank of Rear Admiral and joined his family at his home on Connecticut Avenue. They spent the summer seasons at their home in Roslyn on Long Island that adjoined the Whitney estate.

One of Emory’s daughters, Blanche, did not look too far nor too long for a husband. Within a year of the family’s return to Washington, she met and married Esmond Ovey, a third secretary at the British Legation just across the street. Ovey had only arrived in Washington from Paris the year before they married.

The ceremony was held in the house and attended by only a small company of family relatives, the British ambassador and his wife and members of the British Embassy staff and their families. The reception and breakfast that followed included Washington’s diplomatic core, as well as many Dupont Circle neighbors. The month they were married, Ovey was promoted to second secretary and later went on to become one of Britain’s outstanding diplomats, serving as ambassador to Mexico, Brazil, the Soviet Union, Belgium and Argentina.

After the marriage of Blanche to Esmond Ovey, the Emorys left the Connecticut Avenue house, leasing it to Mrs. John Jackson, who was also hosting the Swedish Legation there. Proximity again proved key in a marriage to the diplomatic core in Washington. Mrs. Jackson’s daughter, Laura Wolcott Jackson, married August Ekengren, the Swedish secretary and counsellor who would later become the Swedish minister, who was living in the house at the time.

The southern part of Connecticut Avenue at this time was quickly becoming known as the “foreign quarter,” with the Swedish Legation taking possession of the Emory house, the British Embassy just across the street and the Austro-Hungarian Legation at 1305 Connecticut Avenue in the former home of Senator David Levy Yulee.

Hoping to capitalize on the commercial expansion making its way slowly north along Connecticut Avenue, Emory attempted to sell his house in 1912 to a developer who planned to remodel it into stores and offices, but the deal fell through. Mrs. Jackson remained in the house until 1916, when it was demolished in order to erect the seven-story flatiron building that stands on the site today. Part of the new building became home to the D.C. Chapter of the American Red Cross where many Dupont Circle women volunteered for the war effort.

Hamilton Stuyvesant Fish III was from a long line of distinguished politicians. His grandfather, Hamilton Fish, served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York, lieutenant governor and governor of New York, a senator, and the 26th Secretary of State under Ulysses S. Grant.  His father served as Speaker of the New York State Assembly and a also as a member of the United States House of Representatives.

Fish attended Harvard where he graduated in 1909 with a cum laude degree in history and government.  He turned down an offer to teach history there after his graduation, instead opting to sell insurance in New York City.

At the outset of the U.S. involvement in World War I, Fish was made a captain in the 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment, a unit composed of African American enlisted men that came to be famously known as the "Harlem Hellfighters." The 369th spent 191 days on the front lines, which was the longest of any American regiment, and was also the first Allied regiment to reach the Rhine River. Fish—as well as his sister Janet, who served as a nurse near the front lines—was later inducted into the French Legion of Honor for his wartime service.

Fish served as a Republican member of Congress from New York between 1920 and 1945.  The Fishes moved to their home at 2319 Ashmead PlaceAshmead Place in Washington in 1920, just after the twin row houses had been built.

As a congressman, Fish was a strong anti-communist and an outspoken opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fish’s political career ended when he lost the Republican general election in 1944.  Fish's son, Hamilton Fish IV, was a thirteen-term U.S. representative from New York from 1969 to 1995.  Fish's grandson, Hamilton Fish V also ran for Congress, but was defeated.

Fish made his acting debut in the 1977 documentary Men of Bronze, the story of the famous 369th combat regiment.  In 1981, Fish returned to the silver screen in the movie Reds about the life of John ("Jack") Reed, playing himself.  (Fish was a Harvard classmate of Reed's.)  In the film, Fish reflects almost amusingly on his strong anticommunist stance while in Congress.

Hamilton Fish celebrated his 102nd birthday in 1990 and died a month later in January 1991. That same year, his autobiography, Hamilton Fish: Memoir of an American Patriot, was published.

Throughout his life, Fish kept track of the men of the 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment. During his funeral at West Point, a group of veterans from the 369th arrived by bus from New York City. Upon being greeted by a family member and thanking them for being there for their service, one of the veterans said, “He [Fish] was always there when we needed him. We want to be here for him today.”1

John Field, a successful Philadelphia banker and businessman, and his wife Eliza were well established in Philadelphia before they decided to retire to Washington in the early 1880s. They were great patrons of the arts and noted benefactors of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Mrs. Field’s father was one of its founders. The couple’s portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent in Paris in 1882, and Mrs. Field donated it to the academy after John Field’s death. Artist Gilbert Stuart had painted her mother’s (Abigail Willing) portrait, and Rembrandt Peale had painted her father’s. 

After retiring and spending years in Europe, in 1883 the Fields decided to make Washington their home for their final years. They engaged local architect Robert Fleming to design a spacious square house at 1400 New Hampshire Avenue that is believed to have been the first Colonial Revival–style house in Washington.

John Field had a special gift for friendship and became friends with many noted authors, poets and artists in England and the United States. He maintained an ongoing correspondence with poet Robert Browning and was an intimate friend of James Russell Lowell, who was once a guest at the Field’s house in Washington. 

John Field died in 1887. According his wishes, Eliza was to remain in Washington. But that same year, she sold the house to Charles Fairchild, who had just been appointed as Secretary of the Treasury, and she moved to New York. In 1889, George Hearst purchased the house from Fairchild. 

When the Hearsts bought the Field's house, they were not happy with either its size or its architectural style. While Robert Fleming had pioneered the introduction of the Colonial Revival style to Washington with this house, the Hearsts brought a taste for the much heavier and old-fashioned Richardsonian Romanesque Revival style that had been slow making its way west, so was new and popular in California at they time they left.

The original Field house was completely torn apart, inside and out, expanded and refaced. The finished house boasted thirty-two bedrooms and twenty-two baths and was, in the Hearsts’ minds, a home worthy of their wealth and stature.

When she first arrived in Washington and began entertaining, Phoebe Hearst preferred to host intimate gatherings in her home, sponsoring talks by various well-known men rather than the larger, traditional social fêtes. These talks were held in the afternoons, each featuring a unique topic. Initially, these gatherings were considered an undesirable and uncomfortable innovation, but they then became quite the thing for others to host as well, although Mrs. Hearst was recognized as the leader in what became a very fashionable movement. 

According to Marguerite Cassini, Phoebe Hearst also set the bar for society musicales; they were simply the "best shows in town." Phoebe's gatherings never consisted of more than fifty guests and featured the biggest opera stars, musicians and theatrical names of the time. Counted among them were Madame Schumann-Heink and violinists Jan Kubelik and Fritz Kreisler. Phoebe was also very devoted to her charities, one of which was a free kindergarten modeled after those she had seen in San Francisco at the time, and also enjoyed helping out neighbors with their charities. 

George Hearst died of stomach cancer at his home in Washington in 1891 at the age of 70, having spent less than two years in his newly remodeled house. Like Eliza Field, Phoebe did not remain in Washington long after her husband's death. 

Returning to California, Phoebe engaged architect Albert Cicero (A. C.) Schweinfurth to build her a new home there in 1893, the Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, in Pleasanton.  The hacienda had substantial later additions designed by architect Julia Morgan, best known for her work on Phoebe's son's Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California. Phoebe died at her hacienda in 1919 of the Spanish flu at age 76.

Until 1850, only three judicial executions had taken place in DC. Although homicide was a common aspect of life in early Washington, the idea of hanging a man for a violent altercation with another, even if it resulted in a death, was alien to the minds of early Washingtonians. As a result, juries were more willing to convict a man of manslaughter, an act with no malice of aforethought, than wade into the murkier waters of motives or passion to determine degrees of murder.

Had McGurk not been an Irishman in Washington in 1802, and/or been tried only a year later, he might have been convicted of manslaughter and lived. But a conviction of first-degree murder and an execution provided the perfect opportunity to release increasing tensions between the locals and Irish immigrants in a small town.  

James McGurk

James McGurk (sometimes spelled McGirk) was among the many Irish immigrants who were part of the earliest labor forces helping to build the new capital city. Many came as indentured servants as early as 1784 to work on the Potowmack Company, and later on the construction of the government’s public buildings. They also bought many of the house lots that the government had been unsuccessful in auctioning off to support its building campaign. They built homes on them, and quickly became an integral part of the population of the emerging city. Although they provided much of the city’s needed manual labor, these Irishmen lacked the necessary skills to enter into the artisan hierarchy and ended up working alongside slaves and freemen.

At the time, the criminal status of the Irish was suspect. Many of the indentured servants were, in fact, newly released convicts. Two cargo loads of Irish convicts were sent to work in Georgetown and Alexandria in 1785 and 1786. James Hoban, the construction superintendent of the White House and native of County Kilkenny himself, was accused of bringing with him a “company of thieves” when he arrived in Washington from Charleston 1792. Known locally as the “Mechanics,” the Irish would continue to be despised in Washington for the next sixty years.

McGurk had come to Washington from Philadelphia and found work as a bricklayer. Along with his wife, he settled amongst his compatriots on F Street between 12th and 13th Streets, NW. He was known for his drunken rages, often returning home drunk, quarreling with and beating his young wife. After a series of beatings in August 1801, she gave birth prematurely to twin boys. The babies had bruises on their bodies, and were either stillborn or died shortly after the delivery. Mrs. McGurk died several days later. Her death may have been the result of childbirth, the beatings, or a combination of both. 

McGurk was arrested and jailed on charges of murdering his wife. The city’s jail at the time was nothing more than a small brick building consisting of three rooms that adjoined a bath house on the north side of C Street between 4th and 6th Streets, NW. In its day, it was the only bath house in the city, offering first-class accommodations. With no competition, its business flourished. By 1802, the lower floor served as a saloon and the rear was used for lock-ups where McGurk was thrown in with debtors, petty criminals, and runaway slaves. Over the years, this building would become known as “McGurk’s Jail.”

A Fledgling Circuit Court

The court that was to try McGurk had only recently been established and was at odds politically with the new Jefferson administration,  When Jefferson, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party and rival to the Federalists, took office on March 4, 1801, he inherited two pieces of legislation that Adams had hoped would leave a permanent Federalist legacy on the country's legal system: the Judiciary Act of 1801, and the Organic Act of 1801. Also known as the "Midnight Judges Act," the Judiciary Act reorganized the federal circuit courts and increased the size of the judiciary, which was then filled by Adams's eleventh-hour appointments of Federalist judges, all with lifetime terms. 

The Organic Act of 1801, also known as an “Act concerning the District of Columbia,” was an emergency measure taken when Congress realized that the land on which the nation’s capital sat had been overlooked and was without a uniform set laws or governance of its own. It combined five separate territories--Washington City, Georgetown, Washington County in Maryland, Alexandria, and the County of Alexandria into just two counties: the County of Washington, and the County of Alexandria. 

The Organic Act also established a federal circuit court with a local jurisdiction to convene four times a year, twice in each of the two newly established counties. This court held the same status as the other circuit courts and consisted of three judges—a chief justice, and two assistant justices— who were also appointed for life. It also established the position of Attorney General of the United States to prosecute cases before the court. This new court covered not only federal crimes, but also any issue that would normally come before a court.

At first, Jefferson was powerless to do anything about Adams’s appointments of federal judges for the circuit courts. While he could not remove them directly, he simply changed the law that had created their positions.  In 1802, the new Congress passed the Repeal Act of 1802 that abolished Adams's newly created circuit courts, putting the midnight judges out of their jobs.

Jefferson did not purge all of the Adams-appointed judges though. Being a practical man, he realized that Washington needed some form of a local legal system and governance and did not repeal the Organic Act. He also knew he would be able to exercise influence over its new Circuit Court with his own choices for its Chief Justice and Attorney General.

For the DC Circuit Court’s Chief Justice, Adams originally had hoped to appoint the highly esteemed Thomas Johnson of Maryland. Among Johnson’s many accolades were a revolutionary war hero, close friend of George Washington, the first governor of Maryland, District of Columbia commissioner, and former Supreme Court judge. But Johnson had been suffering from poor health for years, resigning his Supreme Court seat in 1793 and declined Washington's nomination for Secretary of State. Not unexpectedly, the 69 year-old Johnson declined the appointment to the Circuit Court as well, leaving the Chief Justice seat unfilled when Jefferson took office. Jefferson chose a Marylander and fellow Republican, William Kilty, for the seat in a hasty recess appointment.

For one of the court's two assistant justices, Adams appointed James Marshall, the younger brother of his appointment to the Supreme Court and Jefferson’s arch rival, John Marshall. For the second assistant justice, he appointed his wife Abigail’s favorite nephew and Federalist, William Cranch, who had been working as a land agent for the real estate firm of Morris, Greanleaf & Nicholson, which had gone bankrupt buying and trying to develop the city’s unwanted house lots.  

Although connected to President Adams both politically and through marriage, Cranch quickly earned Jefferson’s respect. He had a reputation of being highly honest and moral, never wore the standard judge’s robe or wig, and yet was able to fully command his authority in the courtroom.

For Washington’s first District Attorney, Jefferson appointed prominent lawyer, John Thomson Mason. Originally from Virginia and a supporter of Jefferson in the elections of 1796 and 1800, Mason was so impressive a lawyer that Jefferson would later twice offer the position of Attorney General of the United States, which he declined both times. 

The law governing all federal circuit courts was the Federal Crimes Act of 1790. It recognized two types of murder: first-degree (premeditated, or willful) and manslaughter (unpremeditated, or an act of passion), and established a separate set of penalties for each. For the penalty for first-degree murder, it specified death by hanging. For manslaughter, it specified imprisonment not to exceed three years, and a fine of no more than one thousand dollars. 

The Prosecution and the Defense

McGurk certainly did not have the means to be able to afford a lawyer for himself. His court-appointed lawyer, Augustus Brevoort Woodward, was inexperienced and relatively unknown in Washington’s legal spheres.  

Woodward was born in 1774 in Virginia. He may have received his college education from William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia. Woodward had gotten to know Jefferson at Monticello when Woodward was teaching school while studying law in Rockbridge County, Virginia. Jefferson was not initially impressed by Woodward, but with their shared interests in the law and education, a friendship, if only a limited one, started to develop.

An ambitious individual and sensing opportunity, Woodward arrived in Washington and was sworn in to the bar in 1802. With Washington’s small bar of only eleven lawyers in 1802 and with a friend in the White House, the city provided a perfect venue for Woodward to launch his legal career. He was the first attorney to establish a private law practice in the new capital, yet his practice was so small that he could barely eke out a living. But opportunity did eventually come his way, not due to his reputation in the courtroom, but because he was the only private lawyer available at the time to defend McGurk. With Woodward’s friendship with Jefferson, McGurk’s hopes for a presidential pardon were undoubtedly heightened.

The Trial

The trial took place on April 10, 1802 and was over almost as soon as it began. Woodward was certainly no match for Mason in the courtroom, giving a poor showing against Mason’s well-prepared prosecution, possibly because he himself may have been convinced of his client’s guilt. 

Mason was certain to make sure that McGurk would be convicted of first-degree murder and sent to the gallows. For his argument, he drew upon old English common law brought to the colonies in the 17th century, arguing that in order to reduce the charge to manslaughter, there had to be evidence of both passion and provocation, neither of which to him seemed to be present in this situation, nor was there any evidence of any motive produced. But, there were no witnesses to the murder or who could speak to McGurk's mental state or potential motives, so Mason’s assumption was ultimately not supportable. The only evidence admitted against McGurk were his dying wife’s declarations of his brutality, which with the lack of any witnesses, was allowable as evidence. This practice was carried over from the medieval English courts dating back as far as 1202, with the presumption that "no-one on the point of death should be presumed to be lying."

After the closing arguments, the jury deliberated only for a few minutes before finding McGurk guilty of first-degree murder. Although Mason had unsuccessfully convinced the jury that McGurk committed premeditated murder, or least that there was not any evidence that he had not, Judges Kilty and Marshall were divided on whether hanging was the most appropriate punishment—Kilty was in favor of death and Marshall was not, but for a jury’s conviction of first degree murder, the law required death. 

The Sentencing

McGurk was brought before Judge Cranch to receive his sentence. Cranch was visibly pained in fulfilling this part of his duty for the first time. After he asked McGurk if he had anything to say, he proceeded to state that he had been found guilty by an impartial trial. He added that the offense was aggravated by the fact that the victim had been McGurk’s wife, who ought to have been protected by her husband than receive such barbarous treatment as to cause her death. 

Cranch would later admit to Jefferson that no “adequate punishment, short of death” was available to the court. He could have meant that no other punishment was available as Washington had no prison at the time to incarcerate a prisoner for a manslaughter sentence. Washington’s first prison, where McGurk might have been sentenced if convicted of manslaughter was not to be completed until 1803, so Cranch probably did not want to risk embarrassment of handing down a sentence that could not be enforced.

When Cranch recited the words no one ever wants to hear, "... that you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead...," McGurk appeared unmoved and asked only for some time to prepare himself, which due to the delays that were to follow, he got more of than he could have imagined.

In reporting the verdict, the Washington Federalist newspaper took the opportunity to expound on the evils of foreigners in the city, namely the Irish:

"The prisoner was neither born nor educated in America. It is a matter of astonishment to those who are accustomed to attend our Courts of Justice to observe how few native Americans are found charged with the different crimes, which stain our records. How long can we expect our native youth to remain uncontaminated, from the examples were are constantly inviting to our shores? 

Legal Confusion and Political Backlash

This first death sentence in Washington exposed yet another flaw in the city’s young legal system that led to extended anguish and suffering for McGurk and political embarrassment for Jefferson.  

McGurk’s crime was committed and tried in the County of Washington, which was still governed by Maryland’s common law. Traditionally, the Governor of Maryland signed writs of execution against persons sentenced to death by any court in the state, but he no longer held jurisdiction over the County of Washington, and therefore could not sign a writ of execution for a man convicted in Washington. 

A 1789 statute had given the federal courts power to issue writs of execution as needed “for the exercise of their respective jurisdictions.” But this language somehow had been overlooked in a 1792 rewrite of the statute and was not included. This omission was not realized until McGurk’s conviction. 

Kilty and Cranch both assumed that authority in the District of Columbia lay with the President and did not consider it part of their duty to set a date and time for the execution. Still, not completely certain of their position, they asked the opinion of John Thomson Mason who agreed with them that that responsibility belonged with the President. But, while authorized to grant reprieves, pardons, and to commute sentences, the President did not have the Constitutional authority to punish, which included signing writs of execution. With the first death sentence, there was seemingly no one to sign the warrant for execution. Jefferson, one of the framers of the Constitution, immediately realized he had a predicament on his hands.

The day after the conviction, Jefferson wrote to both U.S. Attorney General Levi Lincoln and John Thomson Mason concerning the question of who was to sign the writ for McGurk’s execution.  The following day, he received hastily written responses from both men, one contradicting the other. Lincoln wrote that he thought that for convictions in federal courts, the Constitution gave the authority to the President. Mason, who had originally agreed with Kilty and Cranch, had rethought his position, and had now determined that Congress had given the DC Circuit Court all the powers it granted to all other circuit courts whose duty it was to hand down sentences and issue writs of execution. Therefore, the signature of the President was not necessary.

McGurk began writing personal letters to Jefferson pleading for him to spare his life. The letters were written in another, barely literate hand, and signed by McGurk. But whoever actually authored the letters was clearly aware of the legal quagmire uncovered by the conviction. In the first letter, McGurk's ghost writer acknowledged the confusion as to who held the authority to sign the writ of execution, and whether the President thought the responsibility might ultimately fall upon himself, he might therefore consider granting a pardon. But Woodward initially thought his client’s letters were too intrusive to be delivered to the President. It may be the fact that Woodward had written them himself and was concerned that Jefferson might have detected this.

Jefferson ultimately took Mason’s advice and decided that the Circuit Court should set the date and time of McGurk’s execution in its upcoming July session. But due to the amount of time it took Jefferson to decide not to take action on the sentencing, McGurk would end up sitting in jail for three months before he would learn of the final date and time of his end. 

When the Circuit Court finally convened that July, it set the date for McGurk's execution a month later on 28 August, now leaving McGurk sitting in jail for more than four months after his conviction. The accepted practice at the time was that an execution should be done within a reasonable amount of time--Virginia law granted a convict only up to thirty days to live after a sentence was passed.

By mid-August, time was running out for McGurk. Woodward realized that Jefferson was not inclined to intervene on his behalf to commute the sentence. Woodward may have been the first lawyer to have lost a capital case in Washington, but he would make up for it as an advocate on behalf of his convicted client. 

He decided to make the long trip from Washington to Monticello to plead for McGurk’s life. Along with McGurk’s previously undelivered letters to Jefferson that Woodward held withheld earlier, he brought a petition with more than 150 signatures. The petition’s signers were some of the city’s leading Irish citizens including the architect of the White House ,James Hoban, Hoban’s real estate partner Pierce Purcell, architect John Kearney, and a number of other signers who had Irish surnames as well. The list of the petitions signers revealed how close-knit the Irish community was at the time and that it was undoubtedly concerned that one of its own was to be the first Washington resident to be sent to the gallows. This would not help their status in the city.

The petition argued that the extended amount of time that McGurk had already spent in “severe and rigid confinement,” due to Jefferson’s and the judiciary’s indecision should have been punishment enough for a crime that was not premeditated and intentional, and that the punishment was disproportionate to the offense, were it the result solely of his unfortunate temper and habits.

By now, Jefferson began weighing the possibility of a pardon for McGurk. But because Kilty and Marshall had been divided as to recommending him to mercy, Jefferson had also solicited Cranch’s opinion. While awaiting word from Cranch, and one week before McGurk was scheduled to be hanged, on August 21, Jefferson signed another week's reprieve for McGurk until August 28. 

When the news of the reprieve reached Washington, it first came as a rumor that Jefferson had actually granted McGurk a pardon. After the news was corrected, the Washington Federalist newspaper—not a friend of the Irish or immigrants in general—rallied against the stay of execution: “the prisoner was neither born nor educated in America,” and that native-born Americans rarely committed such violent crimes. It also condemned immigration laws (namely those pertaining to the Irish) “that for the sake of gaining a few bawling patriots, would thus hasten the strides of vice, disturb the peace, and security of our country.”  

Open wounds from the recent presidential election still festered and came to the surface. Some Federalists used the delays to argue that Jefferson was too lenient on McGurk, suggesting that he may have been an agent of Jefferson acting as one of a gang who lurked about Washington intimidating Aaron Burr’s supporters early in 1801, before the resolution of the presidential election in favor of Jefferson by the House of Representatives. Such rumors may have had an effect on Jefferson’s interest in pardoning McGurk. Were he to grant a pardon, he may have appeared complicit in McGurk's alleged actions. Others felt that McGurk was being scapegoated by Federalists as an agent of Jefferson and therefore unfairly tried by a court where two of its three judges were Federalists condemning him to an unjust sentence. 

In September of 1802, William Cranch finally responded to the numerous letters he had received from Woodward and McGurk. They had hoped that Cranch had changed his mind and now sided with Jefferson in being opposed to McGurk's death sentence and in favor of a pardon, but Cranch remained steadfast to his original verdict. He wrote, “whatever I might be disposed to do as a private citizen, I can not, as a judge, recommend the criminal to the mercy of the President. The interests of society, which it is my duty to protect, demand that crimes like these should be severely punished.” 

Three weeks after Woodward received Cranch’s letter, a copy of that letter reached Jefferson at Montecello. Cranch's response was the final and strongest opinion that Jefferson would hear from the three judges. Knowing that McGurk was now apprised of Cranch’s opinion, Jefferson became concerned that McGurk would try to escape and wrote to Washington’s mayor, Robert Brent, who was a fellow Catholic and parishioner with McGurk of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, recommending that he spare no vigilance to prevent his escape. The mayor responded quickly to Jefferson’s concerns and confined McGurk in a seven feet square room and shackled with nearly 60 pounds of irons. McGurk found no peace, with his ears assailed every hour of the day with the cursing and obscene expressions of the other prisoners. His small cell got very little air, and was covered with excrement from an adjoining apartment.

Five days before McGurk's scheduled hanging, Woodward made one final and desperate attempt to try to sway Jefferson. Jefferson received an anonymous letter, signed only as “Friend.” Although the letter was not in Woodward’s handwriting, Jefferson must have known that it was from him. Some of the phrasing used by its author was very similar to wording in documents and letters that Woodward had sent to Jefferson earlier and in letters he wrote to the Washington Federalist arguing against capital punishment for McGurk, going so far as to blame his wife for not having a strong enough constitution to endure his physical abuse. 

Jefferson remained unmoved. McGurk sent two more direct appeals to Jefferson begging for clemency, the last arriving on the day of the execution. Jefferson did not respond to either of the pleas, and McGurk was to be hanged on October 28th. 

McGurk's Execution and Burial

This was the first hanging in Washington, so a scaffold had to be constructed for the event. It was erected on the western grounds of Capitol Park in a grove of oak trees which stood a little north of the Pennsylvania Avenue approach to the Capitol Building. The scaffold could be seen from Pennsylvania Avenue, which was then little more than a country road. There were other few buildings along the way except the new jail, still under construction, and Blodget’s Hotel.

In the morning of an overcast October day in 1802, McGurk, attended by Father Young of St. Patrick's Parish who had been attending to McGurk’s soul, was taken from the jail in a cart to the gallows, surrounded by a strong guard, and followed by a mob of screaming, hooting men, women, and children all the way to the gallows.

After McGurk had climbed the thirteen steps to the top of the makeshift platform, he was asked if he had anything to say—the final courtesy given a condemned man. McGurk took a long look at the sea of eager, angry faces and exclaimed: “When a man’s character is gone, his life is gone.” 

After the noose was placed around McGurk’s neck and before the sack was placed over his head, and as if looking to heaven, he cast his eyes upward to where the rope was fastened to the crossbeam. Suddenly, he jumped off the platform before the henchman could pull the canvas cap over his head. Father Young shouted out to him “McGurk, don’t hang yourself!" The hangman immediately ran up the steps and tried to pull McGurk back onto the platform. Swinging wildly at the end of the rope, the hangman only succeeded in getting McGurk’s feet back on the platform. McGurk then pushed off again. While dangling the air, someone hastily cut the rope that held the trap door on the platform to keep him from regaining his footing. After three or four convulsive shrugs, was dead. Following an old Medieval custom, immediately after the body was cut down, crowds rushed the scene and started cutting the rope hoping to secure a small piece thought to have curative powers.

Even though this was the first execution in the nation’s capital, it received scant notice in a local paper. The National Intelligencer simply stated: “Yesterday was executed James McGurk, sentenced to death for the murder of his wife.” 

McGurk’s body was buried Holmead’s Cemetery, then a privately-owned family cemetery at the edge of the city (present day Florida Avenue and 19th Streets NW). He was placed next to a young woman who had been buried there the week before. Her brothers found out and when they informed their mother, she told them she would not regard them as men if they allowed the murderer to rest there. A group headed by a Mr. Sniverly, armed with shovels and torches, moved McGurk to another part of the cemetery. On a Sunday night, a large band of McGurk’s fellow Irishmen moved it back to the plot where it was intended and kept guard over it at night. Supplied with enough whiskey to pass the night, they awoke the next morning and discovered that the body had once again been removed by Sniverly’s band of men. This time, they buried the body close to the banks of Slash Run and damned the stream to change its course so that its water would run perpetually over the site.

Some 40 years later, the owner of some land south of the cemetery was digging a post hole and struck a human skull and some fragments of wood. One of Sniverly’s resurrecting party members admitted that it was the location where they had laid McGurk for his final rest.

Postscript

William Kilty resigned as Chief Justice of the DC Circuit Court in 1806 to become Chancellor of Maryland. He held that office until his death in Annapolis in 1821.

William Cranch was appointed by Thomas Jefferson in 1806 to become the Circuit Court's Chief Justice, filling the seat vacated by William Kilty. Cranch would go on to serve on the court for the next fifty-four years until his death in 1855 in Washington, D.C. He is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington.

Soon after McGurk's trial, Woodward left Washington for the Michigan territory, where Jefferson had appointed him as judge of the Territorial Court, where he served from 1805 to 1824. He would remain in Michigan for twenty years and would also be instrumental in the founding of the University of Michigan.  In 1824, President James Monroe appointed him to a judgeship in the new Territory of Florida. Woodward served in that capacity until his death in Tallahassee in 1827 at the age of 52. 

John Thompson Mason twice declined the office of United States Attorney General when it was offered by Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He later ran for one of Maryland's seats in the United States Senate, but lost. Mason died on 10 December 1824 at the age of 59 and was interred at his Montpelier estate in Clear Spring, Maryland.

Holmead's cemetery became the burial site of many notable Washingtonians, including McGurk's compatriot and supporter James Hoban, itinerant preacher in the Second Great Awakening Lorenzo Dow, and William and Rhoda O'Neale, the owners of Franklin House. In addition to McGurk, another of the more notorious later burials there was also Lewis Payne, one of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, who was also to face the noose. 

The city took ownership of Holmead's cemetery in 1820 and expanded it to become the Western Burial Grounds.  The cemetery started going into steep decline around 1850, and in1870 it was condemned as a health menace. Cemetery record books accounted for over nine thousand burials within its small area, not including a large number of unofficial burials as well, of which McGurk may have been one. Removal of remains, most of which were reinterred at Graceland Cemetery or Rock Creek Cemetery, continued until 1885. James McGurk's remains were not among them.

Watch the full episode here. If You Lived Here airs on Mondays at 9 p.m. on WETA PBS, 8 p.m. on WETA Metro; and streams on the PBS App and at weta.org.

Be sure to visit the Cleveland Park Historical Society's website to learn more about what is happening in the neighborhood!

John Mason was one of the most prominent businessmen in Georgetown at the turn of the 19th century.  He served as a brigadier general of the District of Columbia militia, was a founder of the first bank in Washington, the Bank of Columbia in 1793 and later served as its president.  He became president of the "Potowmack" (Potomac) Company, the predecessor to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company (George Washington was its first president). And in 1815, he purchased the Columbia Foundry, the largest business in Washington at the time. Upon his father's death in in 1792, he inherited Analostan, an island in the Potomac River, just across from Georgetown now known as Theodore Roosevelt Island.

During the 1790s, John Mason began constructing his summer home on Analostan.  In the winter months, the Masons would return to their house near Georgetown.

Prominent visitors to Analostan in the summers included Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Louis Phillipe, Duc d'Orleans –  later the King of France.  One of Mason's sons born on the island, James Murray Mason, served both as a United States Senator and Representative from Virginia.  He was later appointed commissioner of the Confederacy to the United Kingdom and France between 1861 and 1865 during the Civil War.

The island was famous for its gardens, which were designed and installed by English gardener David Hepburn.  It became Mason's summer plantation, where he gardened, grew fruit trees, and raised livestock. 

To date, it has generally been assumed that Analostan was never finished, with only the center block (hyphen) and west wing ever completed.  But a letter from Thomas Jefferson and archaeological evidence from a 1930s excavation suggest otherwise.  In 1806, the east wing was destroyed by a fire while the Masons were at their Georgetown home.  Never one to miss a fire or inspect the damage afterwards, in a letter to his eldest granddaughter, Anne Cary Randolph, Jefferson described the damage and its aftermath: 

"one wing was burnt down and the middle nearly so. They saved their furniture.  Suspicions arising that it was done by one of his house servants who wished the family to go back to Georgetown, he was arrested and on his way to prison with the constable, he jumped out of the boat and drowned himself.  I understand the family will continue through the summer in the remaining wing."  

The west wing that Jefferson referred to did in fact exist.   Jefferson was an architect himself, and would never have made such a mistake if the west wing did not initially exist, especially concerning the home of a close friend that he most certainly had visited prior to the fire.

Due to financial problems, Mason was forced to sell his Washington house and Analostan in 1833 when he moved to his Clermont (Claremont) plantation in Fairfax, Virginia.  He had already vacated the island in 1831 when a causeway stagnated the water in the Potomac River. 

Mason's Island was bought by former Washington mayor William A. Bradley and the house was used as a public resort and then as an army camp during the Civil War.  The interior of the house was destroyed by fire in 1866. After Bradley died in in 1867, the island became home to the Columbian Athletic Club and the Analostan Boat Club.  The remaining roof and several walls collapsed in a second fire in 1906. In 1913, the house was bought by Washington Gas Light Company.  In 1931, the island was acquired by the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association, which donated it to the federal government for a park. 

In 1935, plans were made to pull down the the remaining walls of the house.  Before this occurred, an excavation of the site was undertaken that revealed valuable information about this history of the house. 

During the excavation, only a small part of the area of the former west wing was sampled that led to the conclusion that a dependency had been constructed on the spot, yet what was uncovered mirros the basement of the east wing of the house.  

This article originally appeared in the InTowner Newspaper, January 2013. Copyright (c) The Intowner Newspaper and Stephen A. Hansen.  All Rights Reserved.

Cliffbourne was first documented in 1815 when Dr. William Thornton acquired land for a horse farm in Kalorama Triangle from John Holmead and Thomas Peter that would later be acquired by John Little.  The deeds from both Holmead and Peter referenced an existing adjacent property owned by John Holmead and Thomas Pairo on Anthony Holmead's Widow's Mite tract of land.  

When Anthony Holmead died in 1802, Widow’s Mite was divided among his wife, Susanna, his sons John and Anthony, and daughters Sarah Speak and Loveday Buchannon.  Although Loveday inherited part of Widow's Mite, it would never be in her own name; it would have remained in one of her brother's names until she married, in this case her brother John's name.  

In 1805, Loveday married German-born real estate broker Thomas Pairo.  Instead of transferring the title to Loveday's inheritance completely to her husband, John Holmead's name remained on the title as well.   It is probable that Pairo built the Cliffbourne house sometime around 1805 as a home for himself and his bride.  The Pairos ultimately returned to live at Holmead family's Rock Hill house in the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood.

Sometime before 1826,  Col George Bomford acquired Cliffbourne from the Holmeads.  In 1822, he had acquired the title to Joel Barlow's Kalorama estate.  Like many proprietors at that time, Bomford became heavily involved in real estate speculation, eventually expanding the Kalorama estate to ninety acres.

Bomford's real estate speculation kept him constantly borrowing against one property to secure another.  In 1826, he placed the Cliffbourne property in trust to Richard Smith as collateral in order to secure a loan from the Bank of the United States.  By 1837, a financially strapped Bomford had failed to repay the loan, entitling Smith to sell the property to cover Bomford's debts.  But Smith did not immediately sell Cliffbourne.  The property briefly returned to the Holmead family in 1845 when Smith finally sold it to Charles Hedges James, who had married Mary Ellen Holmead.  George Bomford never recovered from his losses, and died of in a modest house on I Street, N.W. in 1848.

In 1846, Charles James sold Cliffbourne to Selah Reeve Hobbie, a former Jacksonian Democrat congressman from New York who also served as First Assistant Postmaster General, most of this time serving under Post Master General Amos Kendall.  It may have not been a coincidence that Cliffbourne was only a stone's throw away from Holt House where Amos Kendall was residing.  But Hobbie never lived at Cliffbourne himself.  Immediately after he purchased the property, he leased it back to Richard Smith who in turn sought high-end tenants for the house.   

Another Jacksonian Democrat, Jefferson Davis, briefly lived at Cliffbourne at some point between 1853 and 1857 while serving as the Secretary of War during the Pierce administration.  An 1896 Washington Post article ("Homes of Jeff Davis," June 21, 1896) described "Cliffburn" as "a pretty little country place... just out in the suburbs on the line of the the electric road to Chevy Chase.  Here is was that the Secretary spent the summer for one season."

Cliffbourne next appears on an 1861 map of Washington, D.C., created by Albert Boschke and surveyed in the 1850s, that shows a large estate immediately to the north of the Little farm belonging to Mrs. S. R. Hobbie.  The map shows that the house was approached by a long drive from Columbia Road, running along what would become Biltmore Street, and terminating in a circle at the front of the house.   

During the Civil War, Ciffbourne was commandeered for use as a United States Army cavalry barracks, when it became known as Cliffburne.  The site provided an ideal location for cavalry horses, as it was flat and already clear cut and used as farm and grazing land.

Following the Fifth U.S. Regiment’s departure for the battlefield in 1862, the Cliffburne barracks were converted into the headquarters of the Invalid Corps under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel John Shaw Billings, a surgeon from Cincinnati.  When Billings took charge of Cliffburne, he found the buildings and grounds “in an extremely filthy and dilapidated condition,” with no drainage and no water within half a mile.  In order to be used as a hospital, additional buildings had to be added, along with 105 hospital tents, to accommodate up to one thousand patients.  Either Mrs. Hobbie or perhaps neighbor John Little had been raising and slaughtering cattle on the land at the time, and it was said that “15 hundred loads of offal had to be cleared from the grounds and vicinity of the buildings.” 

The Cliffburne hospital was one of the largest and one of the most comfortable in the District.  Two wards of the hospital were devoted to Confederate soldiers who were brought in from Williamsburg. Caring for both Union and Confederate soldiers put the hospital in a delicate situation.  The older residents of Georgetown and Washington who were sympathetic to the South brought food and drink to the hospital intended for the Confederate soldiers only.  Family members of Congress and government officials also brought food, specifying that theirs should go only to the Union soldiers.  Billings had to explain that the hospital could not accept gifts under such terms, and they were ultimately left for those who needed them most.

While touring Cliffburne, William A. Bayley, a congressman from New York City, turned to Billings and asked, “You have got a lot of my boys here; I would like to do something for them, something that the papers will notice, you know.  What do you think I had better give them?” Billings replied, “They have all got more or less scurvy, and I think fresh strawberries would do them good.  You might have a strawberry festival, and have a band here.”  Bayley agreed, and the wounded were treated to strawberries and cream. The event was a great success.

Poet Walt Whitman was a frequent visitor to the Cliffburne Hospital, spending many hours and entire nights sitting at the bedsides of soldiers.  Whitman himself has often been described as a Civil War nurse, although his actual role was that of a very attentive visitor.  In his poem “The Wound Dresser,” Whitman wrote of his experiences in the Washington hospitals:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet and sad.

After the army relinquished Cliffbourne, Julianne Hobbie took up residence there.  In 1870, in need of more land she purchased thirty-nine acres belonging to Columbia Mills from Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, as an addition to the farmland she already owned.  The small parcel ran along the northern boundary of the land and adjoined the Quaker cemetery.  This additional tract of land is now the site of an apartment building at 1836 Adams Mill Road.  Julianne Hobbie died in 1898 at the age of ninety-one.

In 1880, Julianne Hobbie sold Cliffbourne to John Bassett Alley, a Massachusetts Republican who had served in Congress from 1859 to 1867.  Alley may have also had some prior connection with the Hobbies, as he had served as chairman of the Congressional Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads.  

Alley did not hold Cliffbourne for very long.  The same year he bought it, in what was basically a property swap, he sold it to Brigadier General Noah L. Jeffries for $20,000.  In turn, Alley bought Jeffries's sizeable house on McPherson Square at the corner of Fifteenth and K Streets for $30,000.  The transaction may have been pure real estate speculation on Jeffries's part.

In the 1880s, as Washington grew beyond its original planned limits and city streets were being extended, large estates in Washington County were eyed for development.  Land owners, trustees, and speculators submitted maps (plats) of proposed subdivisions to the city for approval. [1]  Old estate owners would  cash in on a higher value for their properties resulting from being broken into smaller, more easily sellable house lots with improvements (water and gas lines) in a new development.  Many of the existing large houses were razed as they did not conform to the new subdivision plats.  Throughout the development pressures of the 1880s and 90s, the old Cliffbourne house managed to survive.

In 1888, the Cliffbourne estate was purchased by Mrs. Effie Hinckley Ober Kline, who possibly bought the property sight unseen on speculation.  Kline was an American opera manager and booking agent who had founded the Boston Ideal Opera Company (later known as "The Bostonians") in 1879.  Her husband,  Virgil P.  Kline, was a personal attorney of John D. Rockefeller and worked for Standard Oil Company for many years before he died in 1917.

Kline entered into a contract to sell Cliffbourne to the real estate firm of Presbrey & Green for $110,000.  Presbrey & Green then developed a plat for the subdivision of the land and submitted it to the City Commissioners for approval.  The plat left the old Cliffbourne house in place, providing it with its own lots (yellow structure on lots #8 and #9 on the map below).  In 1899, the firm confidently placed the new development on the market, assuming that the subdivision would be approved and the sale would go through. The subdivision was denied as Kline, described as "non-resident and absent," never signed off on it.

The same year that Effie Kline contracted to sell Cliffbourne to Presbrey & Green, real estate developer and future Nevada senator from Nevada Francis Griffith Newlands chartered the Rock Creek Railway Company.  The charter was for a single track, running from the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and Florida Avenue (then Boundary Street), up Columbia Road, passing through Cliffbourne to Woodley Lane, and then connect on to Woodley Park.

In 1889, Presbrey & Green sued Kline for failing to deliver on the contract to sell Cliffbourne to them for which she had already received $5,000 in advance.  She had refused to sign the off on the subdivision plat, the deed, or refund the money she had already received.  Kline knew that she could now get a better price for Cliffbourne from Newlands and that the financial gain of holding out for a better price was well worth the costs of any lawsuit.  The case was ultimately dismissed.

In 1894, Effie Kline sold Cliffbourne to Newlands for $185,000 — $75,000 more than she was offered by Presbrey & Green only six years before.  The next year, Newlands began laying Cincinnati Street (now Calvert Street) running along his Rock Creek Railway tracks. 

Throughout both Kline's and Newlands's ownership of the old Cliffbourne house, it continued to serve as a high-end rental property.   In 1890, it was occupied by Senator Lyman Rufus Casey of North Dakota, but his duties as Senator made it necessary for him to move closer to the Capitol.  The following year, it became home to its last resident, Marvin Chester Stone—the inventor of the paper bendy drinking straw, or “artificial straw.”[2] 

In 1898, Newlands submitted a subdivision plat for Cliffbourne.  The plat only subdivided the land to the east of the old house, leaving the land the house and land occupied by Marvin Stone in place for the time being on a single, large lot (Lot #3 below).  The same year, Newlands put the Cliffbourne subdivision on the market with Cliffbourne still standing. 

Marvin Stone died in the Cliffbourne house on May 17, 1899 following a lengthy illness.  Immediately following Stones' death, Cliffbourne was razed and and its large lot subdivided.  The year it was razed, the site was replaced with two Craftsman-style houses at 2504 and 2506 Cliffbourne Place NW designed by architects Marshall and Hornblower, and a three-story rowhouse at 2508 Cliffbourne Place.  The rest of the land was quickly developed in the following years.

End Notes:

1.  See "A Catalogue of Suburban Subdivisions of the District of Columbia, 1854-1902."  Matthew B. Gilmore and Michael R. Harrison. Washington History, Vol. 14, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2002.

2.  For a more in depth look into Marvin Chester Stone's “artificial straw,” see Matthew B. Gilmore's July 15, 2015 article "What Once Was: Washington DC, Center of Manufacturing" on his Washington DC History Resources blog.

This article was adapted from the author's book Kalorama Triangle: The History of a Capital Neighborhood.

The Kalorama mansion in Washington, DC once stood on the south side of the 2300 block of S Street, NW on the site of Jeff Bezos's two houses.  The original part of Kalorama dated from about 1750 and was built by Scottish immigrant and early Washington proprietor Anthony Holmead.  It was a long, two-and-a-half story house made from brick imported from England.

In 1795, Holmead built a new house for himself that he named "Rock Hill" on top a craggy plateau just a stone's throw away from his first house that he sold to City Commissioner Gustavus Scott.  Scott added gardens and landscaping to the Holmead house and named it "Belair."

With his purchase and upgrades to Belair,  Gustavus Scott found himself in financial difficulties and sold off two parcels of the estate on the edge of Rock Creek to Edgar Patterson and Evan Lyons.  Patterson built a paper mill and Lyons, a grist mill.  Learning that Scott was near bankruptcy, Thomas Jefferson wrote to poet, statesman, and close friend, Joel Barlow, trying to interest him in purchasing Belair: "There is a most lovely seat joining the City on a high hill commanding the Potomac River, with superb house and gardens," but at the time Barlow seemed not to be interested.

Upon Scott's death in 1800, his widow sold Belair to William Augustine Washington (President Washington's nephew) for $16,000.  Washington added a dining and drawing room onto the rear (north side) of the house.  In 1807, Washington sold the estate at a loss to Joel Barlow.  Washington then moved to Charleston, S.C. where he died a short time later.

Barlow changed the name of the estate from Belair to Kalorama, Greek for “fine view,” as he felt the name Belair had been already given to many places in Maryland and Virginia.  When Barlow acquired Kalorama, it consisted of 30 acres.  He then bought an additional acre to allow access to the estate from Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue and R Streets) and twenty acres to the north for a barn and orchard.  

Around 1810, Barlow engaged the services of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and added the large east wing to house, a gatehouse in the style of a Greek temple at Boundary Street, a family mausoleum at Massachusetts and 22nd Streets, and stables at Massachusetts and Decatur Place.  Kalorama was covered entirely in a mustard yellow-colored stucco to give the various additions an overall uniform appearance.

Thomas Jefferson often visited Kalorama to consult with Barlow on foreign policy matters as well as gardening and agriculture.  Barlow was also an intimate friend and supporter of inventor Robert Fulton who was experimenting with designs for a new steamboat.  Having no children of their own, the Barlows invited the Fulton family to live with them, which they did throughout the course of ten years.  When Fulton finished his experimental model of his steamboat, the Clermont, Barlow had Rock Creek below Lyons millpond dammed up for Fulton to try out his model.  

Upon the resignation of the American minister to France, President Madison persuaded Barlow to travel to France to arrange a commercial treaty with the Napoleonic government.  Tragically, Barlow died of exposure on Christmas Eve 1812 while following Napoleon over the frozen fields of Poland.  His body was buried in Poland.  His widow Ruth returned to Kalorama where she was joined by her sister Clara and her husband Col. George Bomford.  Ruth Barlow died at Kalorama in 1818 at the age of 62.

During Ruth Barlow's time at Kalorama as a widow, it became something of a boarding house for local and foreign dignitaries. About 1818, Mrs. Wilson who was the widow of the young Irish patriot and hero of the Irish insurrection of 1798 Theobald Wolfe Tone, whom the Barlows had met in Paris was invited to come live at Kalorama.  The west wing of the house, disproportionately small compared to the grand east wing, was added for her occupancy and consisted of two large apartments with stairways in both the front and in the rear.  

In 1820, Susan Decatur, the grief-stricken widow of Commodore Stephen Decatur and close friend of Clara Bomford, along with two of the Decatur's nieces, moved to Kalorama and secluded themselves in the west wing.  At Susan Decatur's pleading the remains of Stephen Decatur were temporarily placed in the Barlow family mausoleum before they could be transported to Pennsylvania for burial. 

In 1822, George Bomford acquired the title to Kalorama.  Bomford added the conservatory onto the front of Holmead's original house and amassed the size of the estate to 91 acres, a large part of which later became the Kalorama and Belair Heights subdivisions.  Due to financial problems, Bomford was forced to sell Kalorama in 1846 to Thomas Lovett from Philadelphia who acted as trustee for his parents, Thomas and Louisa Fletcher, for $25,000.

Due to its relatively isolated location, the mansion was commandeered during the Civil War by a regiment from Illinois for use as a smallpox hospital.  The Lovetts temporarily returned to Philadelphia.  Hospital tents were struck and out buildings were demolished when the army was disbanded in the fall of 1865.  But during a farewell ball for the remaining hospital staff on Christmas Eve of 1865 in the mansion, a defective stove pipe caught fire and completely gutted the east wing.  Years would pass before the government settled on the rent and damages to Kalorama to be paid to the Lovetts during its occupancy.

After the Civil War, Louisa Fletcher, by now a widow, returned to Kalorama and died there in 1868.  Kalorama stood empty until 1875 when her other son George Sidney Lovett decided to return to the family mansion with his second wife Emeline Dore Boggs Lovett and their two daughters, Charlotte and Anna.  In need of funds to restore the mansion to its former glory, he sold a forty acre parcel of the western part of the estate to the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company for $15,000.  This was the first of a series of events that would ultimately lead to the complete break up of the estate.

One year after George's death in 1882, District Commissioners confiscated an east-west, fifteen-feet wide strip for a subterranean tunnel for an aqueduct through the upper part of the estate.  That same year, a real estate operator purchased the western parcel for $30,000, twice what the Freedman's Bank had paid.  In 1885, wealthy Bostonian, developer, and father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, bought this same parcel of land for $60,000.  He had it surveyed and platted, calling it Belair Heights after the name given the estate by Gustavus Scott, and then sold it to a New York syndicate for $300,000.  

Emeline Lovett continued to occupy Kalorama while the extension of the city above Florida Avenue and westward with Massachusetts Avenue began to encroach upon what remained of the estate.  In 1886,  District Commissioners began proceedings to extend Massachusetts Avenue through the southern part of the estate, passing directly through the old Barlow cemetery.  The only objections to the proposed extension were Commander Brown of the Naval Observatory and Evan Lyons, a descendant of the Evan Lyons who had purchased the land from Augustus Scott for a grist mill.  Brown removed his objection when he learned the extension would not cross Rock Creek.

With development happening all around, four of the five Lovett heirs to Kalorama—George's brother Thomas, and three sisters—smelled a financial windfall and wanted to sell it, but the fifth heir, George's widow Emeline who held the land in trust for her two daughters, refused to sell.  As a result, in 1886 the four Lovett siblings petitioned to divide the property into fifths.  Emeline got the southern portion of the estate, from S Street NW south to Q Street NW that included the mansion.  The siblings quickly sold their portions the next year to a Philadelphia syndicate that paid $5,900 an acre for sixty acres of the estate.  The Evening Star reported that "this transaction was the highest ever made in this area for land beyond the Boundary.  The contrast is striking between the unimproved Kalorama property enclosed by its rough stone wall, and the handsome houses along the end of Massachusetts Avenue near Rock Creek."

 Emeline Lovett would continue to try to hold onto her portion of the estate, along with the old Kalorama mansion, but this would not last for long.  In 1887, the  Kalorama mansion was condemned and razed for the extension and grading of S Street that would have run directly through the house.  

The next year, Emeline's share of Kalorama was subdivided as Kalorama Heights.  With her house gone, she needed a new home and she finally subdivided the remaining land that was not condemned by the city.  Emeline and her daughter Charlotte moved to 2203 Massachusetts Avenue, a single row house that was built as her residence in 1890 on her subdivision on her part of the Kalorama estate directly across from the Barlow mausoleum.  Emeline's other daughter, Anna (now Mrs. Beaman), would move just across the street to 2208 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.

Emeline Lovett was not the only hold out in the neighborhood at that time.  Immediately to the east remained Anthony Holmead's Rock Hill home that he built and moved to in 1795.  It remained in his descendants hands, and in the 1880s it was occupied by Sophia Speake Kall, a great-granddaughter of Anthony Holmead,   The original 56 acre that Holmead kept for himself when he divided up his Kalorama estate were still in tact, running from what is now Wyoming Avenue on the north to Florida Avenue to the south.  While developers were subdividing the land around around the house and the city was laying sewers and water, it had to stop when it reached the Holmead property line.  Finally, in 1887 Sophia Kall directed a lawyer to divide the northern part of her land, but the rest of Holmead property remained in tact until 1894 when Kall died at the age of 62.

Barlow's lodge and gatehouse was removed in 1890 for the extension of R Street NW and the construction of the building at 2119 R Street.  It had been assumed that the one acre plot of land where the Barlow mausoleum stood was part of the Lovett's Kalorama estate, but in fact it was only held in trust by the Lovetts for the Bomford family.  With the condemnation of land along the route of Massachusetts Avenue, it ultimately became city property and in February 1892 District engineers removed fourteen bodies from the mausoleum to Rock Creek Cemetery for burial in a lot which George Bomford had purchased years before.  Among them were the bodies of Ruth Barlow, Abraham Baldwin (her brother and Senator from Georgia), Clara and George Bomford, and several other Bomford descendants.  With the demolition of the mausoleum, the last physical traces of the Barlows at Kalorama were gone.

On Oct 13, 1902,  Emeline Lovett met with a fatal accident while visiting a sanitarium in Cobourge,  Canada with her daughter Charlotte, who was then in delicate health.  After leaving her room to take a bath, she mistakenly opened a door that led to a stairway to the floor below.  Not looking, she stepped through the door and fell to her death.  Her remains were returned to Washington and she was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery along side her husband.  Two years later, Charlotte sold the house on Massachusetts Avenue for $25,000.

___________________________
Sources (Selected):

Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon. The Domestic Architecture of William Henry Latrobe. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2006.

Corra Bacon-Foster. The Story of Kalorama. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. , Vol. 13, (1910), pp. 98-118.  Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

Matthew B. Gilmore and Michael R. Harrison. "A Catalogue of Suburban Subdivisions of the District of Columbia, 1854-1902."  Washington History, Vol. 14, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2002.

Stephen A. Hansen. Kalorama Triangle: The History of a Capital Neighborhood. Charleston: History Press. 2011.

Michael R. Harrison. Above the Boundary: The Development of Kalorama and Washington Heights, 1872-1900. Washington History , Vol. 14, No. 2.  Published by the Historical Society of Washington, DC. , pp. 56-69.

Christian Hines. Early Recollections of Washington. Junior League of Washington, Washington, DC. 1981.

Mary Mitchell. Kalorama: Country Estate to Washington Mayfair. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. Vol. 71/72, The 48th separately bound book (1971/1972), pp. 164-189

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Copyright © 2012 Stephen A. Hansen.  All Rights Reserved.

This article explores only a limited number of individuals who occupied a part of a single block in the 17th Street corridor and therefore offers only a glimpse of the many, many stories of the African-Americans that helped shape our city.   

By the end of the Civil War, as many as 40,000 former slaves had made their way to Washington from Maryland and Virginia.  Some built settlements which were to become the foundations of later African-American neighborhoods.  One of these settlements, Barry Farm, was located across the Anacostia River in southern Anacostia.   Unlike Barry Farm where freedmen purchased lots from the federal government and constructed their own homes, other settlements in town were made up of renters who may have preferred to avoid long commutes to their jobs in the city.

The newly-formed communities of freed slaves tended to be well-defined, providing formal and informal support and services not generally available to them elsewhere.  Households were likely to expand beyond the immediate family to include extended family members, boarders, and friends also newly arrived from Maryland and Virginia.  Boarding provided an important means for new arrivals to become acclimated to life in the city.  Through their hosts, boarders were introduced to employment opportunities, social groups, churches, and friends.  This network helped enhanced their mobility and also provided financial assistance for the unemployed, sick, and elderly.

In the 1870s, eight houses on the northwest corner of 17th and R Streets, NW (Square 154) formed one such community, where modest wood-frame, white-owned houses constructed around the time of the Civil War provided relatively affordable rentals for a small community of freed slaves to start new lives in the city. 

These eight houses were an isolated location, with nothing else yet to be built in the immediate vicinity. Many of the streets north of Massachusetts Avenue specified in  L'Enfant Plan for the City if Washington were yet to be laid out and a large amount of the area was still mostly pasture and farmland.  It was also a somewhat of an  unappealing area of land as an eastern tributary to Slash Run ran through the center of the Square 154 creating a boggy terrain.  In the 1870s by the Board of Public Works, headed by Alexander "Boss" Shepherd, buried Slash Run and its tributaries in underground sewer lines, helping to drain the area and make it more habitable, which helped lead to a building boom in the general Dupont Circle area in the 1880s.

Often, freed slave households resulted in what were considered as unconventional living arrangements for the times, with groups of single men or women sharing a house, or a single man or a group of men sharing a house with a widow.  The settlement on R Street was no exception.  In 1877, Fannie Minns, working as a messenger, Lizzie Olvis, and Elizabeth Smith occupied the house at 1715 R Street (#7 on map above).  Fannie later married Jerry Evans, a manual laborer, who lived next door at 1717 R Street (#5).  At 1721 R Street (#4, Joseph Burke, a blacksmith shared quarters with Mary E. Newman, a domestic maid.  At 1723 R Street (#3), Sarah Beverly, a widow, shared the house with Willis Herndon, a manual laborer.   At 1725 R Street (#2), Anna Gaskins, also a widow, shared the house with laborers Nathaniel Gilmore, Jesse Harris, Frank Wilson, and John Robinson, a driver.  At 1727 R Street (#1) lived Joseph Holmes, a waiter, Mack Jenkins, a hostler, and Samuel and Emma Taylor, all laborers who eventually  bought the house together.

By 1877, two additional houses had also been built on the southeast corner of the block.  Caleb L. Saers (“Sayers”), a white house builder, owned and occupied a house at 1711 R Street (#7).  Immediately to the west of Saers (#8) was a house owned by James H. Saville, a white lawyer and Chief Clerk of the Treasury Department that was occupied by a widow, Margaret Wells.  He later rented the house to two African-American men: Thomas Carter, a porter and Otho Martin, a barber. 

In 1877 the large vacant lot on the southeast corner of 17th and R Streets was subdivided into six new lots with addresses 1700-1710 17th Street, NW (lots 1 and 15-19).  That same year, six two-story brick houses were built on speculation were built on the lots, each with frontage of 16 feet on 17th Street, with basements, and with "modern improvements" (i.e. gas, water, and indoor plumbing) were constructed on those lots.  The corner building at 1700 17th Street was the deepest of the six buildings, double the depth of the others and running 82 deep along R Street.  The extra depth was probably so that the building could serve as a store, with enough floor area to accommodate merchandise and living accommodations above.

By 1881, all the six houses from 1700 to 1710 17th Street were owned and occupied by African-Americans.  Like their neighbors on R Street, they too were born into slavery, but were mulatos, of mixed white and black ancestry,  and therefore had somewhat more of an advantage in bettering their socio-economic status.  These new residents of 1700-1710 17th R Street were independent businessmen, leaders in African-American education, both locally and nationally, government clerks, politicians, and noted clergymen.  

In 1881, Christopher Columbus “C.C.” McKinney, who was born in South Carolina in 1832, purchased the corner house at 1700 17th Street and (#1) and set up a grocery under the name of C.C. McKinney & Son.  McKinney had one son, Christopher Jr, and three daughters.  Christopher Jr., known as “Professor” C.C. McKinney, it seemed had little interest in the grocery business.  Also born in South Carolina in 1856, Christopher Jr. was an active organist and choir director in the prominent African-American churches around the city, including Shiloh Baptist Church and the Second Baptist Church (then on 3rd Street between H and I Streets).  After his father sold the grocery business to German immigrant Ernest H. Schmidt, Christopher Jr. found work as a copy clerk in the Department of the Navy to supplement his income as a musician. 

Attrell Alexander Richardson purchased the house at 1702 17th Street (#2) where he would later live with his wife, Flossie.  Richardson was born in North Carolina in about 1848 and worked as a packer and folder at Coast and Geodetic Survey for 30 years.  Richardson initially rented the house to Henry Piper, a messenger for the Treasury Department where he lived with his wife Emma and his 13 children.  

Henry Piper was born around 1837 in Fairfax County, Virginia.  His family arrived in Washington in 1843, but his mother died in 1846 leaving Henry and several siblings to fend for themselves.  While not formerly schooled, Henry mastered the basics of a rudimentary education under the tutelage of Alexander Hays, an emancipated slave from  Maryland and one of the early pioneers in African-American education in Washington.  During the “Great Rival” of 1858, Piper joined the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. With a prominent and active African-American congregation, the church played a prominent role in the struggle for freedom, civil rights, as well as the founding of educational institutions.  Piper eventually became a church trustee and superintendent of the mis-sion Sunday school.  From 1853 to1857, Piper served in the U.S. Navy in various capacities and won the confidence and esteem of his associates and superiors.  

It was not an easy task for African-American Washingtonians to obtain jobs in the federal government. Access to even the lowliest positions—laundresses and laborers—required connections to prominent whites or blacks with ties to the government.  In early 1861, Piper informed Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that he was “a poor, uneducated colored man” seeking “a situation in your Department.”  To bolster his application, Piper told Chase that he was “very well acquainted” with William Slade, the head servant in the Lincoln White House.  Slade was a member of Piper’s church, and who, like Chase, was also from Ohio. After three years and multiple letters of reference, in the spring 1864 Piper was finally hired as a messenger at the Treasury Department, where he continued to work until 1906.

Piper became one of the city’s earliest African-American political activists and elected officials.  Shortly after the Civil War, he joined the Union League of America, becoming its president in 1867.  Two years later, he was elected an alderman to the city government’s common council.  At that time, the local government consisted of a mayor and an eight-member board of aldermen, a 12-member common council, and a mayor elected by both the aldermen and the common council. 

When the local government was reorganized by Congress in 1872, it established a legislative assembly with an upper-house composed of eleven council members appointed by the President, and a 22-member house of delegates who were popularly elected.  Piper ran as a Republican delegate and was up against two formidable white opponents— Republican banker and real estate speculator Hallett Kilbourn, a Republican as well, and John M.  Binkly, a Democrat— but won by a margin of 23 over both candidates.   Piper became one of the council’s most outspoken advocates of racial equal-ity in the schools and public accommodations. 

Piper’s wife Emma died in 1880 after a short but painful illness at the age of 42 and the funeral was held in the house at 1702 17th Street.  Piper Died 1906 and his funeral was held at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.  Attrell Richardson died in 1918 and his funeral was also held at his home at 1702 17th Street.

Due to its proximity to Howard University, the 17th Street area began to attract middle-class African-Americans, many of whom were Howard alumni themselves.  Howard University, founded in 1866, would see the education of 150,000 freed slaves by 1872. 

Two of the new houses on 17th Street were purchased by some of the earliest graduates of Howard University, who taught in and served as administrators of the city’s black schools.  Although teaching positions were high status jobs for African-Americans at that time, they were not the first choice for teachers in their own schools.  In 1880, at a meeting on African-American teachers in public schools held at the Madison Street Colored Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, J.D. Kennedy, ex-member of the Louisiana state legislature stated:

"We do not come, hat in hand, begging for colored teachers as a favor; we demand it as taxpayers and wealth producers.  If we are good enough to pay our mites into the coffers of the nation and State; is we are good enough to serve in the armies of the country in times of danger like that of 1862, we are good enough to be teachers in the public schools."

By 1881, Richard T. Moss had purchased the house at 1704 17th Street (#3) and moved from his home at 433 6 1/2 Street, SW.  After attending Howard University Preparatory School, Moss entered Howard University and graduated in 1876 at the age of 20 with B.A. and was the class salutatorian.  He began teaching, and by 1879 was teaching the fifth grade at the Mott School, named for Lucretia Coffin Mott, an American Quaker, abolitionist, a women's rights activist, and a social reformer.  Moss eventually became the school’s principal.

Moss was a staunch advocate for education reform.  As the speaker for Howard University’s 1883 graduation ceremony, he read an exhaustive paper attacking the present curriculum of the public schools, claiming that it left young men unprepared for life, and declared it foolish that a person should spend 15 years of his life ostensibly preparing for duties of public life, and yet be less fit for such duties than those who had not had any such preparation.  He thought that too little time was devoted to the demands of the present and that the past absorbed too much of a student’s studies and lamented the lack of European-style technical schools that combined an academic education with trade skills. 

Moss returned to Howard University and received an M.A. in 1886.  By 1889, he was teaching at the Stevens School and became principal there in 1891. Built in 1868, the Stevens School, located at at 1050 21st Street, N.W., is the oldest surviving public elementary school building in the District.  Named after Pennsylvania Congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, it was built for African-American students as part of the city’s racially segregated public school system.  Still, the school was considered to have comparable facilities to those provided for white students.

Even though Moss was a great educator, he seemed to have had trouble as a school administrator at Stevens School.  In 1891, the prominent African-American newspaper the Washington Bee reported: “Moss, the principal of the Stevens School has not the control of his pupils.  When a school con-trols the principal, he should step down and out.”  Moss’s inability to maintain order in the school may have been related to the fact that he was burning the candle at both ends; he had once again re-turned to Howard University and was working on medical degree that he completed in 1892.  Unfortunately, Moss died the following year, probably from exhaustion.

Robert Lynwood Mitchell purchased the house at 1710 17th Street (#6) around 1881.  Like Richard Moss, Mitchell was also a teacher and principal at the Mott School.  Mitchell was born in Virginia in 1856 and was a graduate of Howard University’s class of 1872.  While at Howard, he met and mar-ried fellow classmate, Mary Orick, who was described by the Washington Bee as “a lady of remark-able refinement, as well as industrious.”  Together, they had four children, three girls and a boy.  Two of the children also became teachers.

Mitchell left Mott School and returned to Virginia to become secretary and treasurer of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, now Virginia State University.  Mitchell eventually resigned this position to assume charge of his father-in-law’s livery business. 

The Mitchells settled in a commodious brick house on South Braddock Street in Winchester, Virginia.  Mitchell proved to be a successful businessman and at one point had up to forty employees.  In addition to the livery business, he also had a large farm a few miles outside of Winchester where he raised enough food to feed his family and supply the local markets.   In what was probably a racially-motivated act, an arsonist set fire to the stable and Mitchell lost thirty or forty carriages and many fine horses.  Robert Mitchell died in Winchester in 1917.  

Possibly the most prominent figure on the block was Anna Julia Haywood Cooper who bought the house at 1706 17th Street (#4) in 1889.  Cooper was an author, educator, public speaker and one of the most important African-American scholars in United States history.  But unlike her other neighbors who were also educators, she never had any formal connection with Howard University.

Anna Cooper was born in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina to an enslaved mother, Hannah Stanley, and her white slaveholder, George Washington Haywood.  At the age of nine, Anna enrolled in St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, where she successfully petitioned to be able to take classes traditionally offered only to boys.  In 1869, at the age of 11, she became a student teacher at the institution.  

At age 19, Anna met Reverend George A. Christopher Cooper from Nassau, British West Indies and they were married a short time later on June 21, 1877.  He was the second African-American ordained clergyman in the Episcopal Church in North Carolina.  Only two years later, George Cooper died and left Anna a widow at the young age of 21.

In 1881, Cooper enrolled at Oberlin College, where she again refused to take the inferior “ladies course” in favor of the “gentlemen’s course.” Cooper received her B.A. in 1884, and then returned to Oberlin and earned a M.A. in mathematics in 1887. 

After attaining her master’s degree, Cooper moved to Washington, DC in 1888 and began teaching at the Washington Colored High School.  The school was founded in 1870 as the Preparatory High School for Negro Youth as an educational mission run out of the basement of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.    It would later become the M Street School, and then Dunbar High School after the death of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1906.  At the time, it was the only all-black high school in DC.  The building is now the Perry School. 

The academic reputation of the M Street School was well-known and many African-American families moved to Washington D.C. simply to send their children to the school.  Within a few years of its establishment, many of the faculty members were African-American, and were well paid for the time. The goal of the school’s leaders was to prepare the students for higher education at colleges and universities.  Over the years, the school produced a large number of college graduates and its alumni included many prominent educators and public figures.

During her first year teaching at the M Street School, Cooper bought a house in Ivy City.  Ivy City at the time was a small neighborhood in Northeast Washington, D.C. laid out in 1873 as a suburban development specifically for African-Americans.   But after only a year there, she purchased the house at 1706 17th Street.

During her time as a teacher at the M Street School, Cooper also founded the Colored Women’s League of Washington in 1892.  That same year, she also published her landmark book, A Voice From the South, that argued that womanhood was a vital element in the regeneration and progress of African-Americans.  In response to their unwillingness to allow women of color into the YWCA, she was instrumental in opening the first YWCA chapter for black women. 

Cooper became principal at the M Street School in 1902.  But her outspokenness both in and out-side of the school garnered contempt from white colleagues and supervisors.  She was dismissed from the school in 1906 after a controversy erupted surrounding her character and behavior.  But when a new superintendent was appointed in 1910, Cooper was re-hired at the school as a teacher. 

Cooper decided to return to school again and enrolled at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924.  Upon receiving her Ph.D. in history, she became the fourth African-American woman ever to earn a doctoral degree.   While continuing to teach at the M Street School and working on her doctorate, she was also raising five children whom she had adopted in 1915 after her brother had passed away.

Next door to Anna Cooper at 1708 17th Street lived James L. Jasper.  Jasper was born in 1851 in Fairfax, Virginia. In 1875, Jasper found employment with the U.S. Post Office Department, where he was promoted numerous times.  In 1878, he married Annie Parker, also a native of Virginia, and together they had nine children.

Influenced by his devoutly religious parents, Jasper was called to the ministry at an early age and became actively involved with the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, once located at the corner of 19th and I Streets, NW and is now on 16th Street, NW.  Founded in 1838, the Nineteenth Street Bap-tist Church was the first, and today the oldest, African-American Baptist congregation in Washing-ton, D.C.  Since its founding, the church has figured prominently within the historical and social fabric of Washington, D.C.'s African-American community.

Through taking evening classes at Howard University, Jasper received a certificate from its theology department in 1905.  The following year, he was ordained at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church by a counsel composed of the church’s pastor and two delegates from each of the city’s black Baptist churches.  In 1906, Jasper established the First Baptist Church of North Brentwood, Maryland that started with only 19 members.  Services were first held in a private home until the church moved into a one story building in 1907. 

With only a small, if any, income as a minister and with a large family to support, Jasper continued to work as a mail clerk at the Post Office Department.  Yet by 1910, Jasper had acquired numerous properties, including his 17th Street home, N.W., and a summer residence in West Lanham Hills, Maryland.  He became a pioneer in the construction of houses in North Brentwood, acting as a small-scale developer at a time when housing discrimination based on race was common.  This ex-ample of self-help is still a common theme in the tight-knit community of North Brentwood—the first incorporated African-American community in Prince George’s County.

Jasper continued to live at the house on 17th Street until his retirement from the U.S. Postal Service when he moved to North Brentwood to reside with his daughter, Addie, and her family.  He remained pastor of the First Baptist Church until 1935 and continued to own the 17th Street house into the 1940s.

In 1889, Mary McKinney, the daughter of grocer C.C. McKinney at 1700 17th Street, married Wyatt Archer at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.  Mary at the time was a principal in one of the city public schools. Uncommon for a black wedding at the time, the description of the wedding appeared in the society page of the predominantly white newspaper the Evening Star, and closely followed the description of a party given by Dupont Circle’s high society socialite, Mary Leiter.  The article noted that the bride was given away by her father who was wearing a neat-fitting traveling suit.  

Wyatt Archer was born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1859 where he attended public school.  He attended Howard University Commercial Department between 1870 and 1871 and then its Pharmaceutical College, graduating with a degree in pharmacology in 1888.  He then took a job with the U.S. Treasury Department and was promoted from one rank to another until he reached the esteemed position of a clerk.

The year he was married, Archer contracted to build a new, two-story, brick, detached house for himself and his new bride immediately behind, and on the same lot, as his father-in-law’s at 1703 R Street.  The house was designed by the prominent architectural firm of A.B. Mullet & Co.  The firm’s founder, Alfred Bult Mullet, is perhaps best known as the architect of the Old Executive Office building, but Archer’s modest house was probably designed by one of his two sons who were in business with their father.

Mary Archer died in 1890.  Funeral services were held at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church where the couple had been married only the year before.  In spite of his wife’s untimely death, Archer became socially prominent and quite wealthy dealing in real estate in predominantly African-American Ivy City neighborhood.

Archer would again fall on hard times in the next decade.  He had become a director of the Capital Savings Bank, the first black-operated bank in the District of Columbia   that began operations in 1888.  But by 1902, it was in financial difficulty and had stopped paying on checks and was forced to suspend operations and finally failed in 1904.   Depositors sued each of the bank’s officers individually.  In 1905, Archer found himself in bankruptcy court for debts totaling $100,892.82 in depositor claims and was declared bankrupt.  

With advent and popularity of large apartment buildings after the turn of the century, the 17th Street corridor began to change from residential to mixed residential and commercial.  As was the trend along Connecticut Avenue at the same time, commerce was slowly moving north, replacing what were once single-family residences with stores to service apartment residents.  By the 1920s, this commercial wave had reached the 1700 block of 17th Street.

Many of the homeowners in the 1700 block of 17th Street took advantage of the opportunity provided by the commercialization of the neighborhood, keeping ownership of their houses while leasing them to businesses and renting the remaining rooms to borders, with a preference for black borders, perhaps to help give them a leg up.  The result was a succession of mom and pop businesses as well as several grocery stores catering to the needs of the many residents of the new apartment buildings.

The building with the most consistent use throughout its lifespan was the corner grocery store at 1700 17th Street.   C. C. McKinney sold his grocery business to Ernest Schmidt, a German immigrant. The store changed hands several more times until it was bought in 1928 by Lebanese immigrant, Frederick Neam.  Neam promptly renamed it the Chastleton Market, undoubtedly to attract the attention and business of the residents of the Chastleton Apartments only a block away on 16th Street.  

In 1903, Archer moved to 1714 P Street and rented out the house on at 1703 R Street, advertising for black tenants.  He sold the house in 1918 to Harry W. Kenner, a white man who lived and worked at his pharmacy cross the street at 1711 17th Street.  Archer died of a stroke at Bellevue Hospital in New York City in 1929 while visiting a niece.  Kenner converted Archer’s house  into a store with second-floor four-room apartment in 1925.  In a classified ad he ran in the the Evening Star to lease the property, Kenner included the line: “Will consider colored.”  This was ironic in a neighborhood historically occupied by African-Americans and particularly for a house built by a prominent African-American, who when he himself leased the house, specifically sought African-American tenants.

Caleb Saer’s house was razed by 1913 and the rest of the wooden houses along R Street were ultimately razed for the construction of the Rocksboro Apartment building at 1717 R Street in 1923 and the Art Deco-style Pierre at 1727 R Street in 1939.

Developed on land purchased room Howard University in 1873, Le Droit Park was planned and developed as a residential subdivision of large freestanding houses and duplexes of related architectural design and was an early attempt at racial integration.  Its homes  have been occupied over the years by prominent District and national figures, including many noted black educators, poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and District mayor Walter Washington.

In 1926, Anna Cooper sold her house on 17th Street and moved 201 T Street, NW in Le Droit Park.  Her former house on 17th Street was immediately converted into a business property. 

Although Cooper’s retired from the M Street School in 1930, it was by no means the end of her career in education.  The same year she retired, she accepted the position of president of Frelinghuysen University, a school founded to provide classes for DC residents lacking access to higher education.  Cooper worked for Frelinghuysen for twenty years, first as its president and then as registrar, and left the school only a decade before she passed away in 1964 at the age of 105. 

Around 1926, Richard Moss’s former house at 1704 17th Street was leased to the new Memphis-based Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain.  About a year after Piggly Wiggly opened, A&P (the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) opened only three doors up the street at 1710 17th Street in Robert Mitchell’s former home, adding yet a third grocery store to the block.  

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