Georgetown Time Machine: Muddy Streets

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’ve got a bit of an unsolved mystery. The photo (from the DC Historical Society) is labeled as an unidentified unpaved street in Georgetown. The date is given as a range of 1895 to 1905.

But beyond that, it’s a mystery. I thought perhaps it was somewhere in the east village. The wood frame houses were common for the Herring Hill area, mostly occupied by Black families. While that may be true, the blocks I checked it against don’t match.

There are blocks with wood frame houses on the west side as well. But I can’t match it up to any of those either.

(Another possibility is that this is a photo from another primarily black neighborhood nearby Georgetown that has since been erased for highways. This was a neighborhood on the western edge of Foggy Bottom that bordered the east side of Rock Creek.)

It’s a fascinating photo in either event. It shows what life was like on our streets 125 years ago. There were muddy streets that surely got awfully messy after a rainy day. You can understand why there used to be so many boot scrapes around!