Tim Rowland - Strange and Obscure Stories of Washington, DC: Little-Known Tales about Our Nations Capital

Copyright 2018 by Tim Rowland

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover images: iStock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2277-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2279-8

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1
Our Founding Speculators Nearly Ruin
Washingtons Dream

CHAPTER 2
A Storm Saved Washington When Our
Leaders Couldnt

CHAPTER 3
Presidential Ambition Ends in Catastrophe

CHAPTER 4
Washington Wrestles with Slavery

CHAPTER 5
The Best Little Business in Washington

CHAPTER 6
Treasury GirlsThe Original Rosie Riveters

CHAPTER 7
The Most Corrupt Man in a City Full
of Corruption

CHAPTER 8
The First Woman in Congress

CHAPTER 9
The Tree at National Cathedral Has a Thorny Past

Preface

T his collection of historical essays is above all meant to be entertaining. If it is also enlightening, well, that cannot be helped.

It is not meant to mirror more traditional, intimidating histories, in all their heavily parsed, foot-noted glory, although the stories presented herein are accurate within what a jury might call a reasonable amount of doubt.

Nor, however, is it meant as snippets of empty-calorie trivia that are so familiar as social media grist. It is hoped that these histories will land somewhere in the middle, engaging the reader with lively but meaningful looks into our past. It is further hoped that readers will be inspired to go on and read more-scholarly works, and in these pages by way of attribution are embedded a number of hints for further reading.

The inspiration for the Strange and Obscure series comes from an attempt to win over those who believe history is dull. Certainly, more than a few college students have signed up for a history course that sounds promising, only to be buried alive by an avalanche of dates and troop movements and arcane policy discussions. Of course, these dates and policies are important and provide the backbone of historical knowledge.

But to the more casual student, they can be off-putting and can muffle some of the more human drama that, while perhaps not earth moving, is what makes our history so richand entertaining.

The Strange and Obscure stories that follow are sometimes obscure in their own right, but just as often they appear as part of a larger, more familiar event. For example, we know about the Burning of Washington in the War of 1812, but maybe not that President James Madison and his inept army were so unpopular that particular night, that if the British hadnt run them out of town, the residents of Washington themselves might have done it for them.

Also, an attempt has been made to place these stories in context with other related events playing out throughout the nation and the world at large at the same time. The tragedy of the USS Princeton , to pick one, can only make sense against the backdrop of foreign relations with Britain and Mexico.

The research for these essays is gleaned from published sources, books and historical blogs (many Washington institutions such as the Smithsonian and WETA have fascinating blog sites) as well as collections from the National Archives and period newspapers that are accessible as never before through the miracle of digitalization, including the Library of Congresss Chronicling America website.

For a researcher, these sites are almost embarrassingly easy to access, and readers, if they so choose, can do a simple keyword search and scan the letters of George Washington as he becomes ever more irritated with the development of the Federal City, or read the thoughts of Robert Morris as the once-great financier waxed despondent in a Philadelphia debtors prison.

Since the majority of these stories are from the nineteenth century, a word should be said about nineteenth-century journalism which, counterintuitively perhaps, is not always the best place to go in search of the truth. Papers would typically print rumors as they arrived in the newsroom, more or less correcting them in time as the story evolved. So while the gist of the story would generally be correct, the details cannot always be looked upon as solid evidence. It is, at any rate, what people were being told at the time and what they believed, which in some cases would have been just as meaningful as the actual facts on the ground.

Finally, the primary challenge in any collection of offbeat stories in any city is narrowing down the field of candidates. Washington in particular, home of Congress, has enough weird stuff going on to fill a number of volumes. The stories chosen for this book were picked as offshoots of major historical events that formed a rough time line from the citys planning stages in the late 1700s through the early part of the twentieth century. There might also be a faint bias here to have chosen as to the relevancy, or similarity, of modern affairs. Anyone who reads this, it is hoped, will no longer harbor any doubt about the saw that history repeats itself.

CHAPTER 1

Our Founding Speculators Nearly Ruin Washingtons Dream

W hen glancing at a satellite shot of our nations capital, the eye comes to rest somewhat naturally on a couple of points of land at the confluence of the Anacostia River and George Washingtons beloved Potomac. To the left is Hains Point, an artificial finger of land created from late-nineteenth-century dredging operations and named after the Army engineer Peter Conover Hains, who helped lay the groundwork for the Panama Canal, and also, perhaps more impressively, was the one who finally figured out how to get Washington to stop smelling like a heap of rotting fish.

To the right of Hains Point is a second protuberance commonly known as Buzzard Point. Responsibility for the unfortunate sobriquet falls to Augustine Herman, a Bohemian explorer who prowled the mid-Atlantic coastline in the seventeenth century. If the hulking birds were still around in George Washingtons time he did not take it as any sign of bad luck, for on the blunt point of land he envisioned a mighty fortress and bustling commercial waterfront that would amount to a military and economic foundation for a glorious city that would be the envy of the world. It was a grand and plausible plan, but a century later, Buzzard Point was little more than a collection of shacks on spongy ground occupied by poor farmers. Even today, as parks and development have flourished around it, Buzzard Point has remained a somewhat dismal industrial afterthoughtto be revived, its hoped, by a new stadium for the DC United soccer team.