A Portrait of Old George Town Part 14

In 1842 the property was bought by James Keith who was a great friend of General Washington, Mr. Keith's daughter married Mr. Forrest, and their son French Forrest was an officer in the United States Navy, but like many others in this part of the world, went into the Southern Navy during the Civil War. At the time of his funeral W. W. Corcoran, who was a very intimate friend, was a pall-bearer. In those days it was the style for the mourners to wear a long streamer of crepe around their hats and hanging down a foot or two. Little Douglas Forrest, the son of the deceased, began to cry, saying he "wanted some funeral on his hat."

Mr. Corcoran took him in hand and insisted that he should have his wish and be arrayed like the other mourners.

In the other houses of that row lived, at number 3335, just before the Civil War, a family named Semmes from New Orleans who had several daughters considered very beautiful. Cora Semmes became the wife of Colonel Joseph Ives, a brilliant young engineer officer of the United States Army, who, although of Northern birth, espoused the Southern cause. He was put on General Lee's staff, and later transferred to be aide-de-camp to Jefferson Davis where, in Richmond he and his wife became prominent and useful in entertaining distinguished foreigners, as she was noted for her charm as well as her beauty.

In number 3333 Judge Robert Ould resided. His father had been one of the founders of the Lancastrian School. Mattie Ould, whose name still is a synonym for grace, beauty and wit, spent her childhood here. After the Oulds went to Richmond this house was for a time the home of Henry Addison, while he was mayor. Later on the Cropleys lived in it.

William Hunter lived for a great many years in number 3331, when he was a.s.sistant Secretary of State. Women of my generation still remember him for his love of little children and his gifts to them of toys and goodies.

Across on the southeast corner of First (N) Street and Frederick (34th) Street at 3340 is the house which Harry Hopkins, the great friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, bought and moved to with his new wife and his daughter Diana, when they left the White House where they had been living for a year or more. This was his home at the time of his death.

On this street used to live the Marburys before they moved to The Heights, and also the Wheatleys of whom there were several households in Georgetown in the latter part of the last century.

A block eastward on the same side of the street is another row of charming old houses, built about 1800 by Colonel James Smith, "lately returned from the Revolutionary War." In the one on the corner of First (N) and Potomac Streets used to live Mrs. Gannt and her daughter Clare and Mrs. Gannt's sister Mrs. Smith. I think they were descendants of the builder of the row. Their old home was for a time occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Blair Thaw, the former a poet, the latter an artist.

Third from the corner at 3259, in the middle of the 19th century lived Dr. Lewis Ritchie who had an extensive practice. I think he was the son of Dr. Joshua Ritchie. This house was the home of Hon. and Mrs. Lewis A.

Douglas when he was the sole representative in Congress from Arizona.

Later he was Director of the Budget and within recent years Amba.s.sador to the Court of St. James. This house is now the home of Mrs. McCook Knox who is very well known in connection with the study of Early American Portraits and has been connected with the Frick Art Reference Library of New York since its inception. In the front room of the attic of 3259 were doors of rough hewn wood with old iron bolts leading into rooms of the two adjoining houses. The story is that in the War of 1812 this row of houses used to be watched. A soldier would be stationed on the corner, but the "questionable person" never emerged, he could escape through the attic rooms and come out at the end of the row.

No. 3257 is now the home of Hon. and Mrs. Richard B. Wigglesworth of Ma.s.sachusetts.

The old home of the Shoemaker family was at 3261. While he was a.s.sistant Secretary of War it was the home of Hon. and Mrs. F. Trubee Davison and is now the home of Hon. and Mrs. James J. Wadsworth of New York.

All of this part of Georgetown west of High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) used to be called Holy Hill, because of the great number of Irish who dwelt in the neighborhood. On Saint Patrick's Day there were parades and fights, and all kinds of excitement.

There were also a good many respectable colored Catholics, and near here, on Potomac Street, dwelt a family of Coakleys. Magdalen Coakley thought she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. She got herself up to look like the Virgin, in sweeping white robes and a sky-blue veil and cloak. She was not a very dark negress and had a fine countenance and striking figure. She used to go about the streets blessing little children and wanting to baptize them, followed, of course, by a string of boys making fun of her. She would go up to Trinity Church and stand by the door; but once she wanted to help the priest give Communion, so they had to forbid her coming. Of course the poor soul thought she was being persecuted, but she took it in a Christian manner and prayed all the harder, on the street and everywhere. She lived to be an old woman still wearing her picturesque costume.

Her sister, Frances, was nurse for three generations for the Hein family whose home was at number 3249 N Street, now entirely changed by its modernized roof and steps.

Samuel Hein had emigrated from Konigsberg, Germany, as a young man, and had become an American citizen. He was fifty-six years in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, retiring as its disbursing officer. He was an ardent Union man, and during the four years of the Civil War kept the Stars and Stripes flying from one of his windows. All through the two terrible days after the Battle of Bull Run, when the Northern troops were streaming through Georgetown, Mr. Hein maintained a soup kitchen for the soldiers in his back yard. His wife was the daughter of John Simpson who lived on the corner of High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) and West (P) Streets. Her brother, James Alexander Simpson, was a rather well-known portrait painter. They were quite a musical and artistic family.

One son Charles Hein was an artist and had his studio in a little frame house still standing on 31st (Congress) behind another house, opposite the post office. There he took pupils. He was very picturesque in appearance, tall and dark, wore a drooping mustache, low collar with flowing black cravat and wide-brimmed black hat and cape.

Another son Col. O. L. Hein in an interesting book called _Memories of Long Ago_ tells this story:

One day in the spring of 1861, as I was pa.s.sing the residence of the pastor of St. John's Church, The Rev. Mr. Tillinghast, quite near our house, I was attracted by the sight of a dashing young Cavalry officer, who was showing off the paces of his handsome black charger to the Minister. I lingered nearby, greatly enjoying the equestrian performance, and upon its conclusion I was informed by the clergyman, that the name of the young officer was William Orton Williams, and that he was the military secretary of Lt. General Winfield Scott.

In the following year I was shocked to read in a local newspaper the account of the trial and conviction of Williams and his cousin, Lt.

W. G. Peter (resident of Georgetown) as spies under the a.s.sumed names of General W. C. Auton and Major Dunlop, of the Union Army, by a drumhead Court Martial, and their conviction and execution by hanging. In recent years I was informed by my wife's mother, Mrs.

Ross, that she remembered Williams quite well, and that he was engaged to Miss Anne Lee, the daughter of General R. E. Lee; but that she died, on the outbreak of the Civil War. Mrs. Ross was a cousin of General Lee, and a freqeunt visitor at Arlington before the secession of Virginia.

Williams was of distinguished ancestry, the son of Capt. William G.

Williams, a graduate of West Point of the cla.s.s of 1822, who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Monterey, Mexico, while serving on the staff of General Zachary Taylor, and his mother, America Peter was the daughter of Thomas Peter, a prominent citizen of Georgetown, whose wife Martha Parke Custis was the granddaughter of Mrs. George Washington and an aunt of Mary Custis the wife of General R. E. Lee.

Just next door to this house is the site where, even before 1780, stood the Columbian Academy of which Mr. Rogers was the princ.i.p.al and of which Dr. Balch became the head in 1781. It was a large, two-story frame building, having a high entrance porch, where hung the bell. It stood on a hill which commanded a fine view of the river from the study rooms upstairs. Adjacent to the schoolroom was a large garden in the middle of which was a jessamine arbor. Two of General Washington's nephews were students of the school and lived with the princ.i.p.al.

Here was housed the Columbian Library which was opened in 1803. In later years the present building was erected but having a very different appearance. Here lived Hugh Caperton a well known lawyer.

I myself lived here as a very small child when I was two or three years old and one of my very first memories is being dared by my brothers and sisters to jump off the stone wall fronting the street, about four feet high. I felt as if I had to jump from the Washington Monument, but I did it, with no ill effects.

It was after that the home, for many years, of the Barbers. Old Mrs.

Barber moved there with her grandchildren when she sold her home where the United States Naval Observatory now stands. She was the daughter of Major Adlum whose home was The Vineyard where the Bureau of Standards is now. His place was well named for he was a great horticulturist, the first to domesticate the Catawba grape. It grew wild in North Carolina.

Chapter X

_Gay (N) Street--East to Rock Creek_

Across High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) along Gay (N) Street on the northwest corner of Congress (31st) is the Baptist Church which has just celebrated its 75th anniversary. It was originally a small frame building, up on a bank. The present building was erected in 1890.

On the southwest corner of Gay (N) and Congress (31st) Streets stood, not so very many years ago, an attractive old white house with long porches, tiers of them, across the back overlooking a garden. I think the present building is what it was converted into in the period that did the best to rob Georgetown of all its charm.

Here, in 1795, Dr. James Heighe Blake built his home. He was a very eminent citizen, a member of the first vestry of Saint John's Church, one of the very first to advocate schools of the Lancastrian system and a reformatory, and the very first person to suggest a health officer for the City of Washington. He moved over to the city and became its third mayor from 1813 to 1817. His daughter, Glorvina, married William A.

Gordon, senior, of whom I have already spoken.

Here, at one time, lived Judge Walter c.o.x, grandson of Colonel John c.o.x.

His wife was a daughter of Judge Dunlop. Still later, the school of Miss Jennie and Miss Lucy Stephenson was here, which was well attended in the seventies and eighties. In the spring of 1875, a romantic elopement took place. A young girl of sixteen, an orphan, who was said to be "an heiress," went off to Baltimore very early one morning with the son of a minister who taught Latin in the school.

When the pupils came that morning, they sensed the excitement and gathered in groups in the gallery. Eventually, the news leaked out and the chief topic was that the young lady took no baggage, not even a nightgown, in her flight.

Just below here, on Congress (31st) Street, in the latter part of the last century lived a lady much beloved by rich and poor. She was the first person to conceive the idea of a diet kitchen for the needy. She had not much of this world's goods, so she went daily to the different butchers who gave her sc.r.a.ps of meat which she cooked, and had continually on hand jars of "beef tea." All the doctors knew where to apply when they had patients who were in need of it. She was the widow of Captain Charles Carroll Simms, an officer of the old navy who went with the Confederacy, and at the famous battle in Hampton Roads, was second in command of the _Merrimac_, and in command after the chief officer was killed. She was Elizabeth Nourse, daughter of Major Charles Joseph Nourse, of The Highlands.

Next door, below Mrs. Simms' house, stands the Methodist Protestant Church which not long ago celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. The lot for it was purchased in April, 1829, but the founders for a year or two previous to that had been worshipping in the Presbyterian Church building, Saint John's or the Lancastrian schoolroom. It is now a Christian Science Church.

Across the street from the church, next door to the Post Office, the tall brick house is where a family lived which in the nineties was a mystery to Georgetown--the Oueston family--father, mother, and daughter.

No one knew what was the father's business, and no one ever saw the mother out, but it was rumored that she came from South America, was of royal blood, and had a throne on which she sat, dressed accordingly. The daughter was known then, and for many years afterwards, as "the girl of a thousand curls." She was tall and slender, and her magnificent suit of dark hair was a ma.s.s of curls, making her head look like "a bushel basket." She wore ankle-length dresses of a style totally different from what every other girl wore: white stockings, when all of us wore black, and black slippers, laced up with narrow black ribbons.

And then up to the northeast corner of Gay (N) and Congress (31st) Streets, to the tall yellow house, now an apartment house. For many years it was at the home of the Snyders. Dr. John M. Snyder died at the age of 36, in the enjoyment of a fine reputation in his profession, of an unusual accident.

The story is told by Dr. Samuel Busey, in his _Personal Reminiscences_:

Dr. Snyder had bought a farm called "Greenwood" a little way out of town toward Tenallytown, and one afternoon at Dr. Busey's home, "Belvoir," now the Beauvoir School, was telling Dr. Busey how he was enjoying pruning the old oak trees on his place of dead wood. Dr.

Busey warned him that he was engaging in a dangerous amus.e.m.e.nt and related the story of how a hired man of his, doing such a job, had had a bad fall, but, fortunately, without injury.

Two or three days later, Dr. Busey was summoned to "Greenwood,"

where he found Dr. Snyder dying from just such an accident. The branch of the tree he had been sawing off was hanging by a splintered sliver, too weak to support its weight and, in swinging to the ground, had knocked away the ladder on which Dr. Snyder was standing.

His wife was Sophy Tayloe, a member of the well-known family of the Octagon House in Washington, and beautiful old Mount Airy in Virginia.

As a widow in her old age, she had a steady admirer, a general, who came every afternoon at the same time in his Victoria, and took her to drive.

I can see her now, a small, slight figure in her cape, and little black bonnet tied under her chin, and holding one of those quaint little ruffled sunshades to keep the sun out of her eyes.

She had one daughter, Miss Annie, who had the loveliest rosy cheeks (no rouge in those days), who never married. One son, Bladen, was an artist, and he used to be a familiar sight with his camp-stool and easel on the streets, painting.

Georgetown was not so "arty" in Bladen Snyder's day, unfortunately, so he was considered very "odd."

The other son, Dr. Arthur Snyder, was a fine surgeon, and an ardent horseman.