Georgetown Time Machine: Barns

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring an interesting image that gives a glimpse of an entirely vanished part of Georgetown’s past. In the words of its description:

Barn On Georgetown Heights A View of 2 Barns And Fencing. One Barn At the Left Has a Small Extension Attached To It. Barn At Right Sits Atop Wall Footings, Creating an Open Space Below It.

The drawing comes from the Winfield Scott Clime collection at the DC Historical Society. It is dated to June 29, 1913.

Of course I immediately wondered where exactly this is depicting. Georgetown Heights could mean a couple different places. Firstly, it can refer to the northeastern parts of Georgetown proper, basically north of Q St., east of Wisconsin Ave. But I’m not sure there were barns up in this part of Georgetown that late. Here’s a map of the area a few years later in 1919:

It already had the urban layout that it carries to this day. So it doesn’t seem too likely that the barns were here (of course it’s possible, just not likely).

The other more likely possibility is that this was actually somewhere in what we now call Burleith or Glover Park. Before these neighborhoods were developed as neighborhoods in their own right, they were simply the rural outskirts of Georgetown. And it would be perfectly normal to refer to these hinterlands in 1913 as Georgetown Heights.

Despite this conclusion, this drawing nonetheless offers a fascinating window into Georgetown’s rural past. While the main part of Georgetown was pretty much always developed with an urban form, the areas outside the central part were quite rural at times. There were even small farms west of Georgetown University into the 20th century. This drawing takes us to those days.