Anyone have 275 Candles?

Happy Birthday to Georgetown! Well, happy slightly belated birthday to Georgetown: On Friday the neighborhood/former city officially turned 275 years old!

It was on May 15, 1751 that the Maryland colonial legislature passed the following bill:

An Act for laying out and erecting a Town on Potowmack River, above the Mouth of Rock Creek in Frederick County. Whereas several Inhabitants of Frederick County, by their hum- ble Petition to this General Assembly, have set forth, that there is a convenient Place for a Town on Potowmack River, above the Mouth of Rock Creek, adjacent to the Inspection-House in the County aforesaid; and prayed that sixty Acres of Land may be there laid out, and erected into a Town. Be it therefore Enacted by the Right Honourable the Lord Pro- prietary, by and with the Advice and Consent of his Lordship’s Governor, and the Upper and Lower Houses of Assembly, and the Authority of the same, That Capt. Henry Wright Crabb, Master John Needham, Master John Clagett, Master James Perry, Master Samuel Magruder the third, Master Josias Bealle, and Master David Lynn, shall be and are hereby appointed Commissioners for Freder- ick County aforesaid; and are hereby authorized and impowered, as well to buy and purchase sixty Acres, Part of the Tracts of Land belonging to Messieurs George Gordon and George Bell, at the Place aforesaid, where it shall appear to them, or the major Part of them, to be most convenient, as to survey and lay out, or cause the same to be surveyed and laid out, in the best and most convenient Manner, into eighty Lots, to be erected into a Town.

And thus the town of Georgetown, MD was established. The town was not established as its own municipality until 1789, at which point Maryland was a state in the newly created United States of America. Georgetown continued as an independent municipality–first in Maryland and then in the new District of Columbia–until it was merged with the city and county of Washington in 1871.

Georgetown was founded by a group of tabacco merchants who set up shop along the Potomac River. With Little Falls just a little ways up the river, this was about as far as ocean going vessels could reach. The merchants petitioned the colonial legislature to establish the town.

But who was Georgetown named after? A definitive answer to that has been lost to time. It was, of course, not named after George Washington, as some mistakenly believe. (George Washington was a teenager living in Virginia when Georgetown was formed.) The most likely candidates are either King George II or one or both of George Gordon and George Beall, from whom the town’s land came.

Perhaps it’s all of the above. By naming it Georgetown (or rather, George Town, as it was more often written originally) they could honor the king and both the primary landowners. Those two primary landowners, it should be mentioned, we’re actually nonplussed about the establishment of the town. They initially refused to sell their land and then sued when the town commission condemned the land to force the transfer. They were ultimately awarded £280 (that’s only about $75,000 in today’s money). So maybe the town name was an olive branch to them. No one wrote down the reason, as far as we know, so we’ll probably never know the actual reason.

But whoever it was named after, they should be proud. The town has existed for 275 years, seeing everything from the negotiations over the purchase of the land that became DC, seances attended by Abraham Lincoln, the founding of IBM, the writing of Country Roads Take Me Home, St. Elmo’s Fire, and more. No too shabby for a scruffy 18th century riverside tabacco port.