Georgetown Time Machine: In the Jailhouse Now

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m back in the archives of the DC Historical Society (did I ever leave it?) This photo is a fascinating one. It purports to show the “ruins of the old Georgetown Jail” on the west side of Wisconsin Ave. just south of the canal. But is it?

The photo is identified as being from between 1923 and 1927. There definitely appears to have been some old ruins that were identified as the old jail, as you can see in this article (whose headline could have been written today):

In it, a resident cites some of the derilict properties that could be razed in order to allow for more housing:

This description is somewhat hard to square with the old maps. Here is that stretch of Wisconsin in 1888:

There is no building identified as a jail. The Sumac Mill mentioned in the article is there though. And the police station is also there. Several of the remaining buildings are identified as warehouses. That leaves just a few possibilities. But they’re all either brick (the pink structures) or woodframe (the yellow structures). No stone structure stood here. But maybe it was already in ruins by the 1880s and simply not included in the map.

More evidence for the existence of the jail comes from Portrait of Old George Town, a memoir from Grace Ecker in the 1950s:

South of the canal on High Street stood the Debtors’ Prison. This was the only prison in the lower part of Montgomery County, although the county court was held at Rockville, and there the cases were tried. At one time the town clerk of George Town got tangled up in his money matters and was placed in this prison where he languished until his friends made good his debts. A report was made to the Town Council that he could not perform his duties because he was in jail! Nothing now remains but a part of the old stone wall.

But around the same time, Georgetowners were convinced that the Old Stone House was George Washington’s headquarters or perhaps the famous Suter’s Tavern. It was neither. It was just a really old stone house. And there’s something about the story of this old jail that feels similar to me. As early as 1875, a structure near the corner of Grace and Wisconsin (then High Street) was referred to as the old jail:

A 1903 article appears to speak with some authority about the provenance of the jail:

While these residents would have lived in a time much closer to when this structure was supposedly used as a jail, the problem is that I see no references to a Georgetown jail in older newspapers. (An 1810 ordinance by the city of Georgetown did authorize the creation of a jail or penitentiary. So some sort of a jail almost certainly existed at some point.)

So maybe this old stone wall really was a jail. Or maybe it was just an old stone wall that started to get called an old jail. In either event, it’s long gone…