Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

“ Chief among the manufactories are several large flour mills—Georgetown flour was long noted for its excellence. There is a very large fish-market here. Georgetown was settled late in the 17th century, was laid out as a town in 1751, chartered as a city in 1789, merged in the District of Columbia in 1871, and annexed to the city of Washington in 1878. In the early days of Washington it was a social centre of some importance, where many members of Congress as well as some cabinet officers and representatives of foreign countries lived and the President gave state dinners ”

“ Beyond spreads the city, every ugly outline hidden and lost in a waving sea of greenery rippling and tossing above it. The great avenues run and radiate in all directions. Pennsylvania Avenue stretches straight on between its border of shade trees to its acropolis one mile distant, the great Treasury gleaming in the sun, and the white chimneys of the Executive Mansion peering above the trees; and still on, till it joins the primitive streets of Georgetown. Massachusetts Avenue, broad, straight, 108magnificent, spans the city from end to end unbroken. ”

“ I had a long ride through the camps, and saw some improvement in the look of the men. Coming home by Georgetown, met the Prince driving with M. Mercier, to pay a visit to the President. I am sure that the politicians are not quite well pleased with this arrival, because they do not understand it, and cannot imagine a man would come so far without a purpose. The drunken soldiers now resort to quiet lanes and courts in the suburbs. Georgetown was full of them. It is a much more respectable and old-world looking place than its vulgar, empty, overgrown, mushroom neighbour, Washington. ”

“ Could the Virginians or the Marylanders who had opposed Assumption pay him in votes for a capital at Georgetown, or even Baltimore? Could Robert Morris whip the stubborn Pennsylvanians into line for a capital in Philadelphia or on the Susquehanna? True, Washington favored Georgetown, but that meant nothing to Hamilton if Georgetown could not bring Assumption. It is a myth of history that he was tenderly considerate of the wishes of his chief: the facts to sustain it do not appear. Far more important to him was the fact that Madison and Carroll favored Georgetown. ”

“ Many amusing stories are told of Georgetown’s early days, when the Scotch element were so strong in its population that a man could not be appointed to the office of flour inspector without subscribing to a test oath declaring his disbelief in the doctrine of “transsubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper”; when the city fathers sought to save the expense of employing a surveyor to calculate the width of the Potomac at a point where a bridge was to be built, by ordering out all good citizens to pull at the opposite ends of a measuring-rope ”

“ Georgetown, built partly on the heights of the Potomac River, west of Rock Creek, was a municipality before the site of the Federal City was selected, and is sometimes designated as West Washington. Anacostia, Brightwood, and other names given to the settlements in the District away from the main centre of population are still in use, but have no civil significance. The steam railroads enter the city from three different points and centre in two depots, one north and the other west of the Capitol building. ”

“ Not all the historic associations of Georgetown and its neighborhood have been so peaceful. For a few miles out of town the river’s edge is dotted with sequestered nooks to which hot-brained gentlemen could retire on occasion, to wipe out their grievances in one another’s blood. The Little Falls bridge afforded such a retreat to Henry Clay and John Randolph after Randolph’s speech declaring that the “alphabet that writes the name of Thersites, of blackguard, of squalidity, refuses her letters for” Clay. ”

“ The wharves of Washington and Georgetown are empty compared with those of New York, or even of Baltimore. For generations there was neither commerce nor manufacture to induce men of capital to remove from large cities of active business to the new city in the wilderness, whose very life depended on the will of a majority of Congress. Washington’s idea of the National Capital far outleaped his century. ”

“ Should the seat of the national government be removed farther west, Alexandria would not suffer much by that change. The Potomac, broad, deep and navigable, would still roll its tide from Georgetown to the sea. The industry, enterprise, economy, morals, religion and patriotism of the people would remain, and render prosperous, useful, good189 and happy, a thriving people. An increasing city will forever remain here an ornament of the nation. This is a nucleus, around which men of good principles may rally, and from this point spread far and wide, sound morals and sound principles of all sorts. ”

“ Those who summered away were fast leaving and the streets were not so full of people as earlier. Old Georgetown retained its usual quiet, broken at intervals by a passing trolley-car or an automobile climbing up the steep streets.
“There is one thing I like about Washington,” remarked Nan as the carriage turned to cross the Aqueduct bridge, “we need only to pass over the Potomac and we are in Virginia, and we can, moreover, see the shores of our native state any time we choose. How lovely the green banks look, Aunt Helen.” ”

“ His house, built according to reduced plans of the temple of Theseus, stands upon one of the most beautiful situations imaginable; from the portico the eye takes in, at one view, the majestic course of the Potomac, the commercial movements of Georgetown, the rising city of Washington, and far beyond the vast horizon, beneath which lie the fertile plains of Maryland. ”

“ Most of the members of Congress, it is true, keep to their lodgings, but still there are a sufficient number of them who are sociable, or whose families come to the city for a season, and there is no want of handsome ladies for the balls, especially at Georgetown ”

“ This sight of Canaan from Pisgah-height was no luxury to the taxi-driver, and he hustled his coffee-grinder till he reached Rosslyn once more, crossed the Potomac’s many-tinted stream, and rattled through Georgetown and the shabby, sleeping little shops of M Street into the tree-tunnels of Washington. ”

“ A soft midsummer night, we stood upon the roof of the United States Observatory. Beneath us was Braddock’s Hill, where, generations gone, the young surveyor dreamed; and stretching far on to its guardian Capitol, the city which he foresaw—a verity now—its myriad lights twinkling through the misty distance. To our right was Georgetown; beyond Arlington Heights, and House; before us the Potomac, winding on to Alexandria; above us the fathomless heavens, the waxing moon 511and silent stars. Professor Harkness moved an axle; the great revolving dome turned round and parted ”

“ It is said that flour shipped in colonial times from Georgetown to Europe was so good that consignees did not think it necessary to open the barrels for inspection. Tobacco and corn were the two other chief exports. Georgetown University was established in 1789, the year George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the Republic. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 182 miles long, commenced in 1828, had its beginning in Georgetown. It cost $13,000,000. Georgetown’s exports in 1792 amounted to $348,539. Much coal was also shipped to Alexandria for towns on the Atlantic coast. ”

“ GEORGE TOWN produced three eminent philanthropists: one whose benefactions were solely to Georgetown; a second, who became the greatest benefactor the City of Washington has ever had, and inaugurated the tremendous gifts to schools and colleges that have since become the fashion among men of great wealth; the third started his gifts at home, then crossed the ocean and made enormous contributions to the largest city in the world. ”

“ These circumstances added much to my satisfaction on my first day’s visit to the seat of Government. I met and shook hands with many old friends, residing either here or in Georgetown. Washington no longer presents the outside of vice, and that circumstance speaks highly of those, who have so zealously laboured to improve the morals, and mend the hearts, of the great mass of the citizens. Their labors must have been great, otherwise such success would not have followed their works. ”

“ Georgetown, which is now a part of Washington, was then a pretty, well-to-do, little Maryland town about a hundred years old, and Alexandria, Virginia, included in the southern end of the District as then bounded, was a shipping port of some consequence. All the rest of the tract was forest and farm land. The President felt a lively personal interest in the whole neighborhood. His estate, Mount Vernon, lay only a short boat-ride down the Potomac ”

“ Georgetown, in the southern part of Seattle, but not a part of it as yet, has a population of about 5,000, and is an important manufacturing center. Here are the car shops of Seattle Electric Company, gas works, foundries, breweries, machine shops, brick and tile works and many other industries. ”

“ Her school was always large, it being patronized in Georgetown as well as afterward by the best Colored families of Washington, many of whom sent their children to her from Capitol Hill and the vicinity of the Navy Yard. Most of the better-educated Colored men and women now living, who were school children in her time, received the best portion of their education from her, and they all speak of her with a deep and tender sense of obligation. ”

“ Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown has a considerable colored population, though it is the only part of Washington where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty years ago. ”

“ The first and best of citizens must leave us; our aged must lose their ornament; our youth their model; our agriculture its improver; our commerce its friend; our infant academy its protector; our poor their benefactor; and the interior navigation of the Potomac (an event replete with the most extensive utility, already, by your unremitted exertions, brought into partial use) its institutor and promoter."
Washington left Alexandria on the afternoon of the same day and attended by his neighbors proceeded to Georgetown, where he was received by a number of citizens of Maryland. ”

“ My sister, Mrs. Eames, lived in a house on G Street near Twenty-first Street in what was then known as the First Ward. This general section, together with a part of Indiana Avenue, some portions of Capitol Hill, Sixth and Seventh Streets, and all of that part of the city bounded on the north by K Street, on the south by Pennsylvania Avenue, and westward of Fourteenth Street to Georgetown, was at this time the fashionable section of the city. Like many other places in its formative period, Washington then presented the picture of fine dwelling houses and shanties standing side by side. ”

“ A few weeks later L'Enfant was doing the honors of the spot to a brother artist, the painter Trumbull, just back from Yorktown, where he had been sketching in view of his big picture of the surrendering of Cornwallis, and who wrote in his autobiography: "Then to Georgetown, where I found Major L'Enfant drawing his plan of the city of Washington; rode with him over the ground on which the city has since been built. ”

“ Sometimes I go up to Georgetown, about two and a half miles up the Potomac, an old town—just opposite it in the river is an island, where the niggers have their first Washington reg’t encamped. They make a good show, are often seen in the streets of Washington in squads. Since they have begun to carry arms, the Secesh here and in Georgetown (about three fifths) are not insulting to them as formerly.
One of the things here always on the go is long trains of army wagons—sometimes they will stream along all day; it almost seems as if there was nothing else but army wagons and ambulances. ”

“ The canal, drained and filled up, no longer breeds pestilence. Pennsylvania avenue has outlived its mud and its poplars, to be all and more than Jefferson dreamed it would be,—the most magnificent street on the continent. Its lining palaces are not yet built, but 74more than one superb building like that of the Daily National Republican soars high above the lowly shops of the past, a forerunner of the architectural splendor of the buildings of the future. Cars running every five minutes have taken the place of the solitary stage, plodding its slow way between Georgetown and the Capital. ”

“ They were assigned the room in the basement of the Capitol now occupied by the Supreme Court library.
Even when the first acute discomforts incident to removal had passed away, the general depression was little relieved. Most of the earlier citizens of Washington had entertained hopes of its becoming a commercial as well as a political center of importance. They reasoned that since Alexandria and Georgetown had already built up some trade with the outside world, Washington, much more eligibly situated than either, ought to attract a correspondingly larger measure of profitable business. ”

“ One letter from Washington merits quotation:
ELLANOR (NELLY) CUSTIS
“Let me touch a little now on your Georgetown ball, and happy, thrice happy, for the fair who assembled on the occasion, that there was a man to spare; for had there been 79 ladies and only 78 gentlemen, there might, in the course of the evening have been some disorder among the caps; notwithstanding the apathy which one of the company entertains for the ‘youth’ of the present day, and her determination ‘Never to give herself a moment’s uneasiness on account of any of them.’ A hint here ”