James Blaine's Dupont Circle Mansion: A Short Tenure
The grand red brick at 2000 Massachusetts Avenue was designed by architect John Fraser and built in 1881 for James Gillespie Blaine, one of the most prominent and powerful politicians of the nineteenth century. While the house still bears his name to this day, Blaine occupied it for less than two years.
James Gillespie Blaine was born in West Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in 1830 and graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1847 at the age of seventeen. After a brief teaching career in Kentucky and Philadelphia, Blaine moved to Augusta, Maine, in 1854.
