Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly update:
The city is obviously not doing a good job dealing with this snow. For particularly unpassable streets, please call in to 311. I was told informally not to expect any trash pick up until next week, but check DPW’s notices for confirmation.
The ANC will be meeting for our February session next Monday night. During this meeting Councilmember Brooke Pinto will be with us to give her annual update and answer questions from the Commission and public. So please come prepared with questions for her! See you there.
The bridal shop at Volta and Wisconsin appears to be changing hands again. An application with the Old Georgetown Board indicates that Love Couture Bridal is aiming to take over the shop.
Love Couture Bridal is a bridal shop located out in Potomac. This would appear to be their second location.
The Georgetown shop was originally run as Hitched. I always thought that was a great name for a bridal shop and they always had a really nice appearance from the street. In 2018, the shop became Modern Trouseau. Ironically, in 2023 a totally unrelated wedding ring shop also called Hitched moved in up the street.
Part of the nice appearance of the original Hitched shop was the lovely awning. It was replaced by a less attractive blue awning by Modern Trouseau. The new shop appears to want to get rid of the awning altogether.
After an extended period, the C&O Canal will finally be re-flooded this year and the canal boat will return. This is according to an update from Georgetown Heritage, which was responsible for bringing a new boat back to the canal in 2022.
After a year of plying the waters, the boat was put up in dry dock again to allow the canal to receive critical repairs. The work is set to be completed this year and the canal will be filled with water again. (In case you’re wondering, the canal is not flooded with, like, a hose, or something. Up at Lock 5, in Brookmont, MD, there’s an inlet from the river that can be open or closed to fill the canal.) Once the canal is full, the boat will be floated again and the rides returned.
Georgetown Heritage is fund raising to support the boat and the tours, so if you want to help them out, give them some dough!
Parts of east Georgetown will have their water turned off for an extended period tonight as part of the lead pipe replacement project. Here are the details:
This work is scheduled to take place tomorrow, Wednesday, January 21st, beginning at 8:00 pm, takes approximately 8 hours to complete, and there will be scheduled water service outage to customers at the following addresses during the tie-in:
1200-1400 blocks of 27th St NW
1200-1400 blocks of 28th St NW
1200-1400 blocks of 29th St NW
1200-1300 blocks of 30th St NW
1315, 1321 31st St NW
2600-3000 blocks of Dumbarton St NW
2700-2900 blocks of N St NW
2600-2900 blocks of O St NW
2700-2900 blocks of Olive St NW
2600-2900 blocks of P St NW
2700 block of Poplar St NW
All impacted customers at the above listed addresses have been given our standard 48-hour notification prior to this portion of work and scheduled water outage.
So schedule those evening baths on the early side tonight if you live on these blocks!
This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring a fascinating photo that came to my attention from this interesting thread from a vintage photo group on Facebook. The photo itself is the Library of Congress collection. It’s from roughly 1909 and shows the Georgetown waterfront viewed from the south.
There are a lot of interesting elements to this photo. Moving left to right, this is what I notice:
First off you notice the old aqueduct bridge. I discussed this bridge last week. That photo was from 1889 and showed the bridge fairly soon after it had reopened as a second version of the original bridge (which opened as a genuine aqueduct in 1843). There was no “third” version of the bridge, so the version you see in today’s photo is the same from last week. You can see fairly clearly how the bridge was constructed on the old piers, which remained from the original design. They were fairly substantial both in size and number. I suspect that once the bridge stopped carrying water, there wasn’t a need for so many huge piers. But that’s just a guess.
The bridge remained until the 1920s, when the Key Bridge was built. The old bridge was torn down in the 1930s. Most of the piers remained until the 1960s when all but one was dynamited. One pier near the southern shore remains as a relic.
Next over we see the Potomac Boat Club. While the club dates to 1869, this is actually the third club house it occupied. It was built roughly five years before the photo was taken. And it really hasn’t changed much since then. The downstream annex is bigger now and has a couple floors constructed above it, but the main part of the building looks pretty much the same (although it looks possible that the siding may have been unpainted back then).
What I find particularly cool is that there used to be a balcony connecting the club to the bridge:
You can still see where the balcony once stood:
Back to today’s photo:
Here you can see the foot of what was 60 some years away from being called the Exorcist Steps. I did a deep dive once into the history of the steps themselves. And in that article I noted that there once was a shed at the bottom of the steps, although I didn’t really know what it looked like.
There was a car service station there for many, many years (and is still there in a zombie fashion). But I don’t think that’s what this was. Perhaps it was a place trolley cars could pull into to get out of the weather without having to go into the Car Barn itself?
Moving right from there you can see a series of buildings that once stood on the south side of M St. across from the Car Barn:
These were a row of buildings that included the famed Key Mansion, which was where Francis Scott Key once lived. They were all leveled in the 1940s to accommodate an off-ramp for the Whitehurst Freeway.
On the western end of these buildings is a building with a fun billboard painted on its back. The sign appears to say “POP IN TO HOPKINS HARDWARE”. This appears to have been a hardware store that dated to the 1870s (although not at this location). It seems to have gone out of business in the 1940s, probably due to the building demolition.
Right at the center is the building that is the subject of the Facebook posting in the first place. Commenters appear to have agreed that it was some sort of a mill-related building. But what’s particularly interesting is that it’s still around, albeit a bit hidden:
The lots down there are a bit of a fee simple nightmare. For many of them it’s hard to know exactly what entity or government body owns it. The zoning map says it’s the federal government, but there could be competing claims from the city or WMATA or who knows.
The last thing that catches my eye is this rather lovely boathouse. I was not aware that there was a boathouse at this location. By this date, on top of the Potomac Boat Club there were boathouses for the Washington Canoe Club (still mostly standing) and Dempsy’s (burned down in the 1960s). But I didn’t know about this one.
Baist’s Real Estate map from 1919 doesn’t really shed light on who owned this one. They simply labeled it “Boat Ho”:
A news article from 1919 about a flood mentions two clubs I was not familiar with the Great Falls Canoe House and Capt. Moore’s Boathouse.
The boathouse in the photo looks more like a canoe boathouse that a rowing one, due to the narrow doorways (plus there’s a canoe in the water by the dock). So perhaps it’s this Great Falls Canoe house.
(After some more digging I believe that it the right answer):
Later references to the club locate it at 3800 K St., which would put it upstream of the Washington Canoe Club. Neither building remains.
This week on Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring yet another interesting shot from the DC Historical Society. According to the photo’s record, it is showing the old Aqueduct Bridge during the great Potomac Flood of 1889.
To orient you, the old aqueduct bridge ran south from just west of where the Key Bridge now stands. So the photographer is standing roughly in front of where the Car Barn now stands. Here is a clearer photo of the bridge before it was demolished:
Interestingly, this steel version of the bridge only opened the year that the photo was taken.
The photo record doesn’t really provide a whole lot of detail. It just says “View south along the Aqueduct Bridge Georgetown bridge during Potomac River flood of 1889”. It’s not even clear what time of year this flood happened. Some Googling tells me that it occurred on June 1st-2nd and was due to spring rain storms:
More to the point, the flooding was a direct result from the much more famous and tragic Johnstown Flood that took place days before. A wonderful article on the Potomac Flood can be found here.
The silly old timey bike that you see in the photo is called a penny farthing. Interestingly enough, it was already out of style by the time the shot was taken. They were being replaced with the “safety bicycle”, which is what they called bikes with two smaller wheels (i.e. the same type we have today). You can even see one of these “safety bikes” just to the left of the penny farthing.
Last week, the DC blog Popville passed on a message it received from some residents near Volta Park who discovered what appeared to be fragments of bone at the field renovation construction site. Like many, I was alarmed to read that and I reached out to DPR for an explanation. I was able to speak with a staff member who gave me a full accounting of the situation, which I will share with you now.
Background History
Before I get into the more recent story, it’s important to give you a summary of the more distant past of this particular property (I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia page on the property, which is surprising extensive). The old Presbyterian Burial Ground was established here in 1802. For about half a century, this was the primary cemetery for Georgetowners, rich and poor alike. The establishment of Oak Hill Cemetery in northeast Georgetown challenged this status. Between the competition from Oak Hill and the fall in revenues that came from hosting fewer burials, the Presbyterian Burial Ground began a gradual decline in the second half of the 19th century.
By the late 1880s, internments ceased at the property and the cemetery was soon closed. But by that point, approximately 2,700 graves had been established, each of which could host multiple remains. A call went out to the family members of the interred to come and remove the remains. While many did so, the grim fact is that the vast majority of the graves were left. The cemetery continued to degrade and fall apart until finally in 1909 the city purchased the property to be converted to a playground. (Again, I recommend reading the Wikipedia article linked above, which has a fairly detailed blow-by-blow of this decline with some fairly shocking and gothic details.)
In the hundred plus years since then, many projects have been done in the park, with varying levels of sensitivity towards the hundreds (if not thousands) of remains that continue to, well, remain. These projects often disturbed the graves and caused bone fragments to be mixed up in the soil.
So this background story leads to two conditions that are relevant to the current situation: There are bone fragments found in the soil throughout the park and there are still undisturbed graves scattered around as well.
Present Day
So that takes us to last fall. As part of the field renovations, a series of French drains are being installed. These are long trenches, approximately 3-4 feet deep. They are critical to addressing the surface flooding that can impact the park after heavy rains. The crews successfully installed trenches along the western and southern edges of the park. Then the workers began digging a trench westward across the outfield from the pool area.
As they got about 20-30 feet across the field, the workers encountered what appears to be a fully intact grave. This was surprising because as the expression goes, most graves are “six feet under”, i.e. six feet deep. As mentioned above, the workers were digging only 3-4 feet down for the trenches.
Once the workers encountered the grave, the work stopped immediately. Throughout the project an archeologist has been on site at all times that digging is being done. When bones are found–which has happened multiple times on this project–the work stops and the archeologist takes over. They recover the bones and hold them until they can be re-buried on-site at a sufficiently deep spot.
This is the preferred method for dealing with these remains. The identity of the body is basically impossible to determine, so there’s no way they can be transferred to some distant descendant. And keeping them in the general spot that they were buried seems to be the most respectful outcome.
So while the crews were not surprised to find bones, they were surprised to find a full grave, and one so shallow at that. There are a couple possible explanations for the grave being so shallow. I was told that the most likely explanation is that it was an unauthorized burial. Perhaps the family simply wanted to avoid paying the fee and did it themselves (and thus not as deeply as an authorized burial would be). Another possibility is that the grave used to be deeper, but erosion or field leveling brought the surface closer. In either event, the decision was made to leave the grave as is. A wire mesh will be installed above it to prevent future unintended incursions.
The trench will be redirected around the grave. Also, since there’s a chance that other shallow graves are around, the trench will now be dug much less deep. Instead of 3-4 feet deep it will be about 15 inches deep. But this requires a specialized style of French drain that can work at shallower depths. (When we were being told that the delay was about waiting for a specialized pipe, this is what they were talking about).
But how does this explain the bones just being left out in the open that were photographed?
The bone fragments were in piles of dirt that had been excavated for the trenches. As I mentioned, as the soil has been dug up throughout this project, bone fragments have appeared. But why were they left in the pile out in the open? The explanation I was told was that they weren’t visible at the time the work stopped. But with weeks and months of rain since then, the dirt washed away and the fragments emerged.
In either event, the piles have been covered with a tarp since last week. I was told that the fragments would be collected by the archeologist as well, but I don’t know if that has happened as of Sunday night. They will be re-buried on site at some point.
Plan Going Forward
The discovery of the grave has added significant delays to the project. On top of the change in plans for the trench, a whole new set of approvals and permits needed to be issued. That simply takes time. But they anticipate finishing the work by April to May. Once it’s warm enough to install the new sod, that will go down. The field will be off-limits 1-2 months more after that point in order to give the grass time to grow.
Then the park will fully reopen. At least that’s the plan….
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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