Georgetown D.C. History

Georgetown was formally established in 1751 when the Maryland Assembly authorized a town on the Potomac River on 60 acres of land belonging to George Beall and George Gordon.

George Town was named in honor of King George II and soon flourished as a shipping center.

Tobacco was the lifeblood of the community, and Georgetown soon prospered as a shipping center with a profitable European and West Indian trade.

Commerce and industry developed along the waterfront, where wharves and flourmills were constructed.

During the Revolution, Georgetown served as a great depot for the collection and shipment of military supplies.

When the town was finally incorporated in 1789, a textile mill, paper factory and more flourmills were established.

Georgetown's character was profoundly affected by the establishment of the nation's capital to the east in 1791.

Although it was included in the new Federal District, it retained its own character.

Georgetown rapidly gained a reputation as the fashionable quarter of the capital and drew eminent visitors from this country and others.

Congress incorporated Georgetown as part of Washington City in 1871.

After the Civil War, large numbers of freed slaves migrated to Georgetown.

The African American community flourished, becoming increasingly self-reliant.

In the 1880s the waterfront prospered.

But in the 1890s the C & O Canal was severely damaged by a Potomac River flood, and the Canal Company was bankrupted.

The area went into an economic decline and in the period after World War I, Georgetown gained a reputation as one of Washington's worst slums; its homes were neglected and the area deteriorated badly.

This trend began to reverse itself in the 1930s with the New Deal and reached a high point when Senator John F. Kennedy resided in the neighborhood in the 1950s.

Although there are some pre-Revolutionary buildings in the district, most of the housing stock dates from the period after 1800.

The Old Stone House at 3051 M Street is the oldest intact house.

It was built in 1765 for Christopher Lehman. It is owned by the National Park Service and is open to the public.

Most of Georgetown is occupied by residential areas whose regular streets and rowhouses set the tone for the entire neighborhood.

A variety of styles illustrate the national trend of architectural development from Georgian mansions and town houses through early Federal and Classical Revival houses to the ornate structures of the ante and post-bellum periods.

The majority of the building stock was constructed after 1870 and is characterized by rowhouse construction popular in the late Victorian era.

The commercial corridors of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street as well as the waterfront areas are characterized by development from every era.

The City Tavern at 3206 M Street was built in 1796.

The Forrest-Marbury House at 3350 M Street is a large Federal townhouse built by Col. Uriah Forrest circa 1788-90.

Here Forrest hosted the dinner closing the deal for the purchase of the land for the Federal City.

The Thomas Sim Lee Corner at 3001-3009 M Street, 1789-1810, consists of early Federal shops with dwellings above.

The Dodge Warehouses at 1000-1008 Wisconsin Avenue and 3205 K Street are Federal-era warehouses on the waterfront and date from 1813-1824.

In the Federal period, brick replaced stone in construction of both residential and commercial buildings.

The mansions of wealthy shipowners, merchants and land speculators were built above the harbor on Prospect and N Streets.

Hotels, taverns, banks and other commercial buildings were constructed along M Street and in the waterfront area.

Speculative housing appeared, including the notable Federal row at 3337-3339 N Street built circa 1815 by John Cox and the row at 3255-3267 N Street built circa 1812 by Walter and Clement Smith.

St. John's Church at 3420 O Street designed by William Thorton was completed in 1809.

On the heights above the town, the squares remained intact and undivided.

Bellevue was renamed Dumbarton House when it was acquired by the Colonial Dames of America.

It was built in 1800 and located at 2715 Q Street.

Evermay,1623 28th Street, was built by Samuel Davidson circa 1801.

William Hammond Dorsey built the house at 3101 R Street now known as Dumbarton Oaks circa 1801.

The house and gardens are open to the public at special hours.

Tudor Place at 1644 31st Street built between 1805-1816, was designed by William Thorton, original architect of the US Capitol.

It is maintained as a house museum and is open to the public by appointment.

In 1848, Oak Hill Cemetery was laid out by George de la Roche in the fashionable picturesque manner.

The Chapel and probably the gates were designed by James Renwick in 1850.

The Van Ness Mausoleum was built in 1833 by George Hadfield and moved to the cemetery in 1872.

The Mount Zion Cemetery (Female Union Band Society) is located at 27th and O Streets.

 The graveyard was established in 1842 by the Female Union Band Society, a benevolent association which provided burial for free blacks.

The Mount Zion United Methodist Church at 1334 29th Street is the home of one of the oldest African American congregations in the city.

The Custom House and Post Office was built in 1857-8 at 1221 31st Street to handle increased shipping from the canal.

It was designed by Ammi B. Young.

Georgetown Market at 3276 M Street is a public market on a site used as a market since 1795.

The present market was built in 1865.

It still serves as a food store and is open to the public.

The Vigilant Fire House is the city's oldest extant firehouse and was built for the Vigilant Fire Company established in 1817 and in operation till 1883.

The present building was built in 1844.

There are approximately 58 houses listed in the DC Inventory as individual Georgetown landmarks that are of Federal City/Pre-Civil War importance.

Listed below are the names of those that are also listed in the National Register:

The Walker House at 2806 N St.

The Haw House at 2808 N St.

The Beall House at 3017 N St.

Halcyon House at 3400 Prospect St

Quality Hill at 3425 Prospect St

Prospect House at 3508 Prospect St.

After the Civil War, the brick rowhouse made its appearance in Georgetown.

The brick rowhouses of the 1870s and 1880s exhibited elaborate bracketed cornices and then corbelled cornices in the 1880s and 1890s.

It is the Queen Anne rowhouse that found the greatest favor with Washington builders and was also used frequently in commercial architecture.

Residential architecture of the 1890s took the form of a rowhouse in a minimalist late Victorian, late Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival styles and various combinations.

Overall, Georgetown's population continued to climb, as reflected in its construction of public schools.

The Phillips School built in 1890 at 27th and N Streets was one of several schools constructed to serve the African American community.

The Volta Laboratory and Bureau (Alexander Bell Laboratory) at 3414 Volta Place was a brick carriage house adapted by Alexander Graham Bell in 1885 and used until 1922 as his laboratory.

The Volta Bureau, built in 1893 by Peabody and Sterns, is at 3417 Volta Place.

Several examples of Renaissance Revival and Colonial Revival can be found from the early decades of the 20th century in Georgetown commercial architecture.

Rowhouse development continued to flourish with the Colonial Revival a popular form.

Although the waterfront remained primarily commercial, the Potomac Boat Club at 3530 K Street and built in 1870 and is a charming example of the Shingle Style.

The Washington Canoe Club built in 1890 also afforded recreational uses.

There were neither blacks nor whites in Georgetown -- then known as Tahoga -- before British settlers came ashore around 1696.

It was a peaceful village inhabited by the Nacotchanke Indians.

Straightforward facts and precise dates of Georgetown history are difficult to establish; much of the subject is undocumented, and accounts differ.

But the basic story is indisputable.

The Indians were soon expunged by the settlers.

Then, in the 18th century, white entrepreneurs realized that huge sums of money could be made from the insatiable demand -- in both Europe and the United States -- for the tobacco cultivated in Virginia and Maryland (of which Georgetown was then a part).

Because of its position on the Potomac, Georgetown provided an ideal port from which ships laden with tobacco could sail to Europe; by the end of the 18th century, it was just about the largest tobacco port in the United States, an economic powerhouse to which slaves were brought to provide labor and to service the households of the tobacco merchants.

Slavery, of course, is as old as humanity. European powers -- first Portugal, followed by Spain, France and Britain -- began abducting men and women from Africa to work as slaves in the New World.

To its everlasting shame, Britain, my own country, was responsible for the transport of probably more than a million slaves, many of them to work in the sugar fields of the Caribbean.

But at the point when English abolitionists were finally forcing an end to my country's slave trade, America's exploitation of slaves on its soil had not even reached its zenith.

The year of Britain's Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, 1807 is the very year a white man named John Beattie conducted a highly successful slave-trade business on what is now O Street, just east of Wisconsin Avenue, that flourished well into the second half of the 19th century.

Blacks thus became essential economic tools for the development of Georgetown, but were simultaneously feared and rejected socially.

The first Georgetown law to oppress them came as early as 1795, forbidding them to congregate in groups of seven or more.

1800 Census showed that, in a population of 5,120 in Georgetown, there were already 1,449 slaves and 277 "free blacks."

There was a lone exception to the congregating law: Blacks could go to church on the Sabbath.

But they were still kept rigidly separate from whites.

St. John's Episcopal Church, established in 1816 at 33rd and O streets NW, had an outdoor staircase built especially for blacks; it's still there today.

That same year, hardly surprisingly, a handful of free black men managed to start their own tiny church -- which was to become Mount Zion United Methodist Church, one of the churches that remain a potent black force in Georgetown today.

It was another half-century, though, before Mount Zion was allowed to have its own black minister.

Its burial crypt, still visible at the church's cemetery at 27th and Q streets NW, was reputed to be a hiding place for escaped slaves fleeing to the North via the Underground Railroad.

I imagine that at least the girls who formed part of the property of my house in 1807 were still alive when the 1848 "Black Code; Ordinances of the Corporation of Georgetown" was introduced.

It is hard to convey the viciousness of the laws, so I will confine myself to just three examples:

The code decreed that any black person swimming in the Potomac or Rock Creek at night "shall be publicly whipped"; that any black person who watched a cockfight could be punished with as many as 39 lashes; and that even flying a kite was punishable by whipping.

That same year, 77 slaves tried to escape this kind of oppression on a ship called the Pearl; furious owners sent a posse on a steamer called the Salem to recapture them, and it caught up with the Pearl 140 miles downriver.

The black flight from Georgetown was already beginning.

But blacks were still being bought and sold here as late as November 1861.

The next year, President Abraham Lincoln signed a local law that freed slaves eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Furious white merchants demanded compensation, and an "expert examiner of slaves" was brought in.

After examining their teeth and general health, he assessed the overall value of the slaves of Georgetown, D.C., at $300,000.

Georgetown's whites then voted against a Negro Suffrage Bill by 712 to 1, passing a motion describing it as "wholly uncalled for, and an act of grievous oppression."

Blacks from the South, anticipating freedom, nonetheless poured into Georgetown.

Between 1865 and 1870, its black population increased from 1,935 to 3,271.

Over the next two or three decades, a skilled black working class started to emerge alongside a handful of black professionals.

But countless laws and regulations that continued well into the 20th century prevented true economic and social emancipation:

Only white passengers were allowed to ride on Georgetown's new electric streetcars, for example, enabling them to commute to Washington for well-paying jobs that were effectively denied to blacks.

Then came a series of economic blows that began to seal the fate of Georgetown's blacks.

The Potomac silted up, virtually ending the industrial effectiveness of Georgetown's harbor.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which flowed through Georgetown and was crucial to many businesses such as flour and paper mills, flooded disastrously in 1889.

Blacks were the first to lose their jobs when countless firms went bust.

By 1910, the black population of Georgetown had peaked, and when the Great Depression struck 19 years later, more and more blacks found themselves displaced by whites taking menial jobs.

Perversely, FDR's New Deal then began to work against blacks in Georgetown.

Thousands of well-paid white government workers poured into Washington, creating further demand for housing and pushing property prices ever higher in Georgetown.

"The dispossession of the Negro resident [of Georgetown]," the Conference on Better Housing Among Negroes reported, "is jointly managed by the city's leading realtors and their allied banks and trust companies."

Two pieces of legislation passed in the 20th century by none other than Congress itself, though, were the final straws for Georgetown's blacks.

The ostensible purpose of the District of Columbia Alley Dwelling Act of 1934 was to get rid of slums; but I suspect that to a House with only one black member and a Senate with none at all, slums and blacks were synonymous.

Then, in 1950, Congress passed the Old Georgetown Act "to preserve and protect places of historic interest," but it had the effect of making Georgetown's gentrification legally enforceable.

It was pushed through despite fears from "Negro groups," The Washington Post reported at the time, that it "might drive them from the area."

 Less than a decade later, Georgetown's black population had dwindled to fewer than 3 percent, and in 1972 The Post noted that fewer than 250 remained, "so few that some Georgetown residents are unaware they are there."

Blacks were thus becoming invisible by the time the likes of Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman started creating Georgetown's all-white "social salons" of such ludicrous legend.

Indeed, racism was so entrenched in the nation's capital that even the glamorous young Sen. John F. Kennedy voluntarily signed a deed containing a "restrictive covenant" when he bought his house on N Street NW in 1957, agreeing that the home should not "ever be used or occupied or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to Negroes or any person or persons of the Negro race or blood."

"When we didn't have anything, the church was our everything. . . . When there was nothing and no place to go, [it] was the one place to go." 

This explains why the emotional bonds to the black churches in Georgetown remain so strong.

An architectural feast awaits as you stroll brick sidewalks in this 18th century port town.

Today, Georgetown is known mostly for its shopping, dining, and lively night scene.

Yet, this remarkably intact example of a complete historic town boasts historic house museums and gardens and a rich variety of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings.

Founded in 1751, the city of Georgetown substantially predated the establishment of the city of Washington and the District of Columbia.

By 1776, Georgetown was one of the largest cities in Maryland, and retained its separate municipal status until 1871 when it was annexed by the City of Washington.

The area reached the height of fashionability when Georgetown resident John F. Kennedy was elected president.

Parties hosted by his wife, Jackie, and many other Georgetown hostesses drew political elites away from downtown clubs and hotels or the upper 16th Street corridor.

In the first half of the 20th century, Georgetown which is situated on bluffs above the Potomac River, left the river to a lumber yard, a cement works, the Washington Flour mill and a meat rendering plant, and its skyline was dominated by the smokestacks of a garbage incinerator.

More recently, as Georgetown continued to acquire a reputation as a center of wealth and style in the Capital, the incinerator smoke stacks become the most pronounced feature of a new Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

The Ritz, and other upscale development along the Potomac waterfront highlight

Georgetown’s growth as a center of power and beauty in the Nation’s Capital.

When Congress created the District of Columbia for the nation's capital in 1791, its 10-mile square boundaries were drawn to include this port town, as well as the very similar Virginia tobacco port of Alexandria just across the river.

Alexandria was given back to Virginia in 1846, but Georgetown remains as one of Washington's most fascinating and lively urban neighborhoods.

Georgetown offers many attractions that can involve you in its rich history, from canalboat rides on mule-drawn barges to a world-class garden and three exceptional historic house museums.

On the way, you can savor the exquisite variety of architectural styles that distinguish Georgetown's charming homes, including Georgian mansions, Federal and Classical Revival houses, and late Victorian Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque rowhouses.