The Newlands Chevy Chase Fountain Debate, 2014-2015
Carl Lankowski, October 2015: On 30 November 2014, a draft resolution was posted to the Chevy Chase listserv to change the name of the fountain in Chevy Chase Circle by Gary Thompson, an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner (ANC Commissioner) for ANC 3/G encompassing the “DC side” of Chevy Chase Circle, the round-about that originally defined the new street-car suburb from 1892. The recitations in the draft resolution were clearly about distancing the community from honoring Francis Griffith Newlands—lawyer, Nevada Congressman, then senator, and heir to great wealth through his wife—because of the outspoken racially segregationist positions he advocated during the same period (ca. 1890 to Newlands’ death in 1917) that he founded Chevy Chase (on both sides of Western Avenue, the DC/MD boundary).


