The fabled old Northampton Oak gave up its secrets on a sweltering Monday morning in July. Waiting until no one was watching, it pierced the air with a deafening crack and fell across two yards to settle on the opposite side of the street. The first person to look out the window caught green leafy limbs bouncing to a final rest.

With a six-foot trunk and a canopy wide enough to shade six houses on the 2800 block of Northampton Street NW in Chevy Chase DC, the massive white oak was hard to miss. Even before a city arborist in the 1990s declared it the largest tree in the city and probably 400 years old, the tree was revered by neighbors as an elderstatesman. Lore around it grew, as old news stories were unearthed about its being granted clemency during the Civil War from clear-cutting. And more recently, when the street was cut in 1940, road construction crews were directed to curve the street in deference to its root zone.

But the speculation over its age ended after it fell shortly before noon on July 15. City arborists who happened to be a short drive away rushed to the scene and peered into its crumbling core, confirming what they had long suspected but could not prove. “It’s called butt rot in tree parlance,” the specialist noted. And its age – as evidenced by the number of rings – was “200 years, give or take 10 years,” he added.

OK, not pre-Colonial, but still, old.

According to its rings, the sprouting of the Northampton Oak likely occurred between 1814 and 1834, when much of the region was woodland with patches of cleared farmland. Colonists had begun settling this area in the early 1700s after Native peoples had mostly been run off or exterminated by disease, and the crop of choice was tobacco. By the time the tree started growing, most of the English land grants were being carved up into middling farms, and the soil-depleting tobacco fields were giving way to grain crops.

From that time, the tree witnessed profound changes in the landscape and in how Americans lived. The tree exemplified what the National Park Service defines as  “Witness Trees — silent sentinels of storied landscapes that help connect people, history, and places. They experience important events in American history and remain part of our nation’s cultural legacy.”

What we know is that Marylander Samuel Dent Moreland (1777-1815) around 1800 bought a tract of land along what was then called “Rock Creek Ford Road,” a diagonal street that was renamed Utah Avenue by the 1940s. His son, John Notley Moreland (1805-1863), increased the land holdings to a reported 175 acres. Like his father, he was an enslaver and grew tobacco. (Notley’s son, Enoch Moreland, filed for compensation for six enslaved people when DC declared emancipation). On maps, the Moreland homestead appears to be in the center of what is now the intersection of Nebraska and Utah avenues – within eyesight of the Northampton Oak.

When the Civil War broke out, acres of Notley Moreland’s land were taken over for the building of Battery Smeade, and most of the nearby land was clear-cut of anything that could obscure the aim of cannons defending the Washington perimeter. Battery Smeade stood where St. John’s College High School sits today. The ownership of that land, a 23-acre parcel, never reverted to the Morelands.

Instead, in 1900, it was purchased by Evening Star publisher Rudolph Kauffman, who built a summer home at its southern end along Military Road and 27th Street NW that he called “Airlie.” Described as a “big broad house of gray stone and shingle with red roof, green shutters, and white trimmings,” it had a tennis court surrounded by “fine gardens,” vine-covered arbors, and “privet hedges.” Importantly, the parapet and nine embrasures of Fort Smeade remained preserved during those years of Airlie’s existence covered over with honeysuckle. They remained hidden there until the middle of the century when St. John’s College High School cleared the property to build a school.

The remains of Battery Smeade and other defense forts like nearby Fort De Russy were the subject of a Dec. 15, 1912, story in the Evening Star that mentioned Moreland’s property, “a quarter of a mile northwest of the battery.” The story recalled that the commander of Battery Smeade ordered the clearing of Moreland’s land but allowed his old homestead to remain. “Although so close to De Russy and Smeade it was not pulled down, as was the custom then. An old oak in the Moreland garden was also spared, the commanding officer at Smeade saying that he would not order it chopped down until exigencies seemed to warrant it.”

The Northampton Oak would have been less than half a century old at that time, likely dwarfed by the old-growth trees around it. Might it have been part of an oak grove where Notley’s spared oak grew? Given that the Northampton Oak survived until 2024, one can assume it was also spared by the Smeade commander. Notley died in 1863, himself spared from the terror of the July 11-12, 1864, attack on nearby Fort Stevens.

After his death, Notley’s property was divided between his four children – William, Samuel, and Enoch Moreland and their sister, Rachel Moreland Thomas. It was apparently Enoch Moreland’s parcel of 40 acres that contained the Notley Moreland homestead that had the large Civil War oak in the house’s garden. By the time the 1903 Baist map was published, the homestead sits in the dead center of two future avenues – Utah and Nebraska. No record can be found that mentions the Civil War oak.

Enoch’s daughter, Estelle Morehead Whiting (1888-1972), who built a house at 6000 Nebraska, on Moreland land down the street from the family estate house, proudly claimed native Washingtonian status. (Her house remains standing today.)

“I have always lived right here … No one has lived on this property except the Indians, the English, and the Morelands,” she was quoted as saying in her obituary published in the Evening Star-News on Nov. 26, 1972. It seems that the razing of that aged family homestead went unrecorded, but at the time of the 1912 story it was still standing “between two later additions.”

In a Nov. 22, 1953, Evening Star article, Estelle Moreland Whiting not only claimed longtime occupancy of the land but said her then-current housekeeping staff were descendants of Moreland slaves. “My housekeeper is good, though she is nearly 80 years old. She has always been with the family and her people worked for my grandfather. My maid, who never forgets anything, is a great-granddaughter of one of my grandfather’s slaves.”

Estelle and her sister, Maud, were reportedly the last of the Morelands to remain on the land. As early as 1914, land sales began to chisel away at the Moreland estate. The first to go was a 12-acre parcel south of Nebraska Avenue “upon which Enoch (1842-1916) and William (1844-1916) Moreland have resided for the last seventy-five years” (Evening Star, Jan. 17, 1914). It was purportedly the first sale of the Moreland tract in nearly 100 years, since the U.S. government claimed the site for Battery Smeade.

The buyers were brothers Edward E. Murray (1864-1944) and Charles C. Murray (1867-1928), originally from Luray, Va. They were in the wall plastering business, a specialized construction art that they practiced in “Washington’s monumental buildings” (Evening Star, July 2, 1944). They had moved to DC in 1893 and set up shop as “Murray Brothers.” 

In 1914, they announced they would “construct two high-class suburban homes on the property,” which then fronted Rock Creek Ford Road (later renamed Utah Avenue). The two pebble dash four-square houses, both built in 1914, still stand today though subsumed within the modern street grid. They are known as 5827 Utah Ave. (on a large set-back lot across Nevada Avenue from the Episcopal Children’s Home) and 3060 Oliver St., which likewise once faced Utah Avenue until 1958, when a house was built on land in front of it. Although separated by buildings, the presence of an alley preserves a line of sight between the two Murray family houses.

Because the Murray brothers were in the building trades, they might have decided to buy the 12-acre property because of its investment potential spurred by the Chevy Chase Land Company’s rapid conversion of farmland to houses at the turn of the century. But they built only the two houses. It fell to the next generation — after Charles died in 1928 at age 61, and his brother Edward retired from working — to cash in on the increasingly valuable suburban land.

Meanwhile, the Northampton Oak grew amid a rapidly changing landscape. The Episcopal Children’s Home had moved in, elaborate estates like Airlie were being built overlooking Rock Creek Park, and racial covenants became ubiquitous in block after block of suburban homes. The local maps were full of hatchmarks to show future streets through the old Moreland estate.

In 1940, Edward E. Murphy’s son, Irvin C. Murray, created a subdivision of the northern half of the 2800 block of Northampton and sold it to builder Osbert E. Jones and his wife, Alice Sutton Jones, a couple who had immigrated from England. A year later, the Joneses put up 13 houses from one end of the block to the other, and built for themselves the house next door to the Northampton Oak

The new house where the big oak tree grew in the front yard –  2829 Northampton St. – was purchased in 1941 by Griffith W. Garwood, who worked for the Department of Treasury, and his wife Maurine. They had a 1-year-old son at the time. The Garwoods lived there until 1968, when they sold the house to Robert C. and Suzanne Leland. The Lelands raised two kids in the house, and three more children were added when Robert remarried to Laura Anthony. The Leland family hosted the block parties under the tree, memorializing the occasions with T-shirts designed by Laura emblazoned with its likeness.

In 1991, the house and tree acquired a new owner, Wendy Ackerman and Andrew Goodson, who stayed seven years. In 1998, they sold to its current owners, Victoria Williams and her husband, the late Andrew Williams. Victoria Williams was not at home at the time the tree fell. It appeared to do minor damage to the front of the house when one of the limbs landed against it. A badly crumpled red car sitting in the driveway took the brunt of the tree’s heft. Two other cars in the neighborhood were also damaged by the falling tree.

On the July evening the tree fell, a procession of neighbors, admirers, and curiosity seekers wended their way to the spectacle, bringing bottles of wine to toast its honorable life, reciting poetry about noble trees, and reminiscing about all the life the tree had witnessed. A man whose boyhood was spent in the house that belonged to the tree happened upon the scene by coincidence. Soon, his father and sister were called to pay their respects too, standing in shock to see the giant down.

Since the days when Northampton Street became part of the urban grid, the tree served as the backdrop for growing toddlers and graduating seniors. It shaded more than 20 years of neighborhood block parties. At least one Northampton resident – the late Felix Lapinski – was so devoted to its nurturing – deep feeding it at his own expense and harvesting acorns to grow into seedlings –  that the beloved tree rated mention in the 2021 obituary of his storied life. It is said that the State Department once took Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to visit it.

City arborists noted in 1998 that its health was in decline as evidenced by the condition of limbs it had lost by then. But in more recent years, when the previous arborist who long covered this part of DC handed over his inventory, he noted that the city “probably won’t be pruning this again. We’ll probably be taking it down.”

Within a day or two of its falling, only a ground-up stump remained.

The post The Northampton White Oak: Old Enough appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

The yellow-brick house at the southeast corner of Chevy Chase Parkway and McKinley Street NW has long been a curiosity. More California Coast than Cape Cod, it is singled out in walking tours and guides for its unfamiliar genre: Hollywood Moderne.

“I get a lot of comments,” said Marsha Gentner, working in her tranquil backyard recently. “Some people stop me and say, I love your house. Others ask, is it a dentist office?”

They don’t know the half of it.

The house at 5535 Chevy Chase Parkway NW was built in 1948, designed for the most part by the lady of the house, Nettie Madigan. “She was a chorus girl, not the Radio City Rockettes, but something like that. She used to mow her lawn in her negligee and high heels,” laughed Marti Goldstone, who has lived across the street from the Hollywood house since 1970. “She was a character.”

What the neighbors knew that is largely forgotten beyond the block is that the Hollywood house produced a true Hollywood star: Nettie’s daughter, Betty Madigan — a torch-singing vocalist from the 1950s and ‘60s who became an overnight sensation when she recorded the hit song “Joey” (reaching #12 on Billboard in May 1954). Trained in classical music from youth by a determined mother, Betty Madigan graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and flew into pop stardom.

She recorded for M-G-M and Coral Records, landed nightly gigs on sophisticated nightclub stages, and was a sought-after guest by Ed Sullivan, The Dick Clark Show, The Red Skelton Hour and many others. She was also an actress who won rave reviews for her versatile talent and glamorous Elizabeth Taylor looks. She was best known for a spirited 1958 recording of “Dance Everyone Dance,” a takeoff of the Israeli song “Hava Naglia.” Listen to it now and you’ll be hooked. Here’s also a sampling of 70 of her greatest hits.

In tracing what became of starlet Betty Madigan, I found … Betty Madigan Brandt, age 92, picking up the phone in her highrise overlooking the ocean in Bal Harbour, FL. She cued to the unexpected call like a performer, warming to the subject and reaching back into her prodigious memory to talk about her mother, her home in Chevy Chase DC, her life before and since her stardom, which she voluntarily dropped for marriage in 1961 at age 32.

“I wanted a house, I wanted to get married. I was kind of tired of my mother and I always traveling together, of being (chaperoned). It was overkill. It was very, very confining to be in my 20s like that,” she said. “But here’s what really happened. My husband gave me an ultimatum: ‘If you don’t marry me now, I’ve bought fixed tickets for a cruise to Europe and back, then that’s the end.’ ”

“Singing Star, Showman are Married,” the Sept. 16, 1961 Washington Evening Star headlines shouted in reporting her marriage to Louis Brandt, a theater-hotel entrepreneur. True to his plan, the story reported that after a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, the couple “embarked on the French liner Liberte for a month and a half honeymoon in Paris.”

“I have never regretted it,” she said of her marriage and the show business left behind — nor of the young man to whom she was engaged at the time Brandt claimed her. She has had a life filled with music, culture, and world travel interrupted only by Covid. “I have gone to every opera that was available, in all the fabulous opera houses in the world. Each is more beautiful than the one before.”

Widowed when her only son was a teenager, she eventually settled in southern Florida when the culture scene was nearly nonexistent. “We had to set up folding chairs to hear a concert,” she recalled. She has devoted herself through the decades as an art patron and philanthropist, frequently celebrated at society galas. A product of the restricted mores of her era, Betty Madigan Brandt also spent a lifetime concealing her true age. “I didn’t go beyond 29,” she laughed. “But I’ve been outed. My friends gave me a 90th birthday — that’s when I stopped lying about my age. Now I’m kind of proud of it.”

She credits her mother with much of her young success. There were years of early classical piano training and voice lessons starting at 14. She studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and went into drama and voice at Catholic University. Nettie Madigan had pushed both Betty and her younger brother to perform in children’s amateaur shows and theaters. She then became the adult-Betty’s manager, relentlessly booking auditions at hotels, clubs, Army bases, anywhere to get exposure for her daughter’s honey-smooth voice.

One night after performing at Lounge Riviera at Hotel 2400 (the old Meridian Mansions on 16th Street, now gone), she had crawled into bed at her parents’ home with her hair in pin curls, when the phone rang. “Joe,” her mother was quoted as saying to the slumbering husband at her side. “I think we’d better get our lawyer. That was an agent who’d been in to see Betty’s show. He wants her to come to New York.”

Thus was her proverbial Big Break. Hotels from shore to shore opened to her. At age 21 she recorded “Joey,” a jukebox favorite. Road tours ensued and then the popular television hosts started calling. She was described as versatile, both sultry and wholesome, and could do Jerome Kern like no other. And although her singing career was relatively short lived, her fan base has kept up with her. In 2018, Jasmine Records released a two-CD compilation of 58 of her singles recorded between 1953 and 1961.

But back to Betty Madigan’s memories of her home: They were conjured like it was yesterday although she hasn’t seen it in decades. Her fond memories included the “wonderful porch on the first floor, the second floor aluminum railing, the lower level completely walled in knotty pine, exterior round corners of glass brick.”

“They were all my mother’s ideas. She had a great imagination into the future. I know the interior was a big problem (with the builders) … my mother did not want 90-degree angles in some corners, she wanted rounded corners. She caused such a commotion! I remember the ruckus.”

While Nettie Madigan took obvious pride in her daughter’s meteoric success, the shrine she nurtured — until death finally forced her out — was the house. Nothing about it was ordinary. The closets were curved inside. The open kitchen was completely paved in white subway tiles — from walls to ceilings. The roof was mid-century flat, unusual in snow-prone climates. A laundry chute cascaded down two floors. Rounded metal nook shelves were everywhere in the kitchen. The entrance featured a dramatic brushed-aluminum staircase that floated toward the door reminiscent of Gone with the Wind.

Nettie Madigan had plans, lots of them. The blueprints for them were ceremoniously dumped in the middle of the table at closing when Donna and Stephen Bower bought the house in 1992 after Nettie died at age 84. Stephen Bower describes it as a “dramatic farewell” from Nettie’s son, who appeared both reluctant to sell and eager to offload. “He threw a huge bag of plans, clippings, all house-related, onto the table with a shouted, ‘I never want to hear anything about this place again!’ We complied.”

They were fascinated by the house, a time capsule suffering from delayed maintenance. “The fact it was an oddity in terms of architectural design was a non issue,” Stephen Bower responded to an email about the house. “We were actually drawn to it as something a bit different. We knew it was going to take a lot of work to minimally bring it back to a more finished state. That was fine, we liked that.”

For the next 12 years they did just that, preserving its quirkiest features while modernizing and making upgrades. They scoured antique shops to replace missing handles for the vintage Geneva metal kitchen cabinets. They built a fence to echo the roofline. While other kitchens were going the way of granite, they put in Formica to be true to the era. Although still functional, the original air conditioner — one of the first in the neighborhood (“it made you feel like you were at the airport, it used to rattle and shake”) earned awed admiration from repairmen.

“We simply loved the place, even the casement crank-out windows in aluminum — one glorious house put together by a character. We secretly hoped she was happy in heaven as we did our best to preserve and cherish,” he said.

The stack of plans was her “wish bag,” he said. She had clipped pictures of things she wanted, making lists. Some of them were checked off as accomplished, such as the metal kitchen cabinets (“like Hillwood,” was scrawled beside this, referring to the Marjorie Merriweather Post mansion), and a dramatic marble fireplace surround (“like this”). 

There was the jewel safe. Two all-tiled monocolor bathrooms (one pink, one baby blue, tiled floors, walls, ceilings) with a mystery window opening between them. Art deco sinks. A giant glass mirror etched with exotic maidens. An entire basement of knotty pine. Outside, English boxwoods “were trimmed to Marine-haircut length that took 10-plus years” to recover, he said, adding that there was also “a huge garden that was supposed to be the site of another house, all planned, never executed.”

It would be nice to know more about Nettie Madigan, but there is little to go on. I could find no record of her as a dancer. She was born in 1906 in Baltimore as Anntonietta Merando to Sicilian immigrant parents. She had six sisters and one brother. She was married twice, and her second husband, who spent 40 years as owner and operator of the Acme Locksmith Company, was referred to as Betty’s father. But Betty’s biological father was actually Nettie’s first husband, Terzo Lugaresi, an accomplished musician who played clarinet in the U.S. Marine Band. He later played for the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York. Given what we know of Nettie, no one would think it out of character for her to dramatically kidnap her then-8-year-old daughter from the father who had been granted custody four years earlier.

While it ended in Nettie’s favor, the whole sordid tale can be read in the June 24, 1936 Evening Star. Although there is no explanation for why he was granted custody of the child at age four, it could have been because he quickly remarried and provided a more traditional custodial home than could a single mother. As soon as she remarried, she petitioned for, and was granted, full custody of Betty. The problem occurred when she whisked her away before the court papers arrived, leading to her arrest.

After her locksmith husband Joseph F. Madigan died in 1969, Nettie had a longtime boyfriend who the neighbors referred to as “the Colonel.” Her youthful, free-spirited manner became neighborhood legend. “A friend of mine whose family owned a Cadillac dealership told us as a teen he delivered a car to her house, and described a ‘Mrs. Robinson’ moment where he was not sure he could escape back to the dealership fully clothed,” Stephen Bower said with a chuckle and good-hearted devotion.

When the Bowers retired, they decided the house’s increasing maintenance was too much. They put Nettie’s house on the market, hoping for buyers who would preserve it. They, too, handed off Nettie’s wish bag at closing. The current owner, Marsha Gentner, remembers being flummoxed by the papers. When they handed them to their architect, he was baffled, too. “There are 20 separate plans and none of them are this house,” he told them.

When Gentner, an intellectual property lawyer, and her late husband Joseph M. Berman, a Realtor, bought the Hollywood house in 2004 they were living nearby on Livingston Street. They often passed the house, admiring its unusual exterior architecture. But it was the double lot that clinched it for her — she wanted a large yard.

She disclosed right away that the house of Nettie Madigan’s creation is gone. They gutted it after taking stock and deciding that her style was not theirs and brought in renowned architect Robert Gurney to obliterate the eccentric and create crisp, open, flowing spaces with floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Some of it was art deco, but most of it wasn’t very true to art deco,” she said, noting that the interior and exterior were a mix of styles and eras — likely because of Nettie Madigan’s impulsive constant redesigns. There were arched doorways, glass-block corners, curved front stairs, a colonial bay window teetering off the front. Other than the mostly-preserved exterior, the living room/dining room footprint is about all that is the same, she said.

That, at first, was hard for the Bowers to swallow. The house had attracted hundreds of curiosity seekers when it hit the market in 2004 and a bidding war ensued. He recalls thinking Marsha and her husband loved the house for what it was.

“However, within months it was a radical re-do. For maybe two years we were really angry,” he said. “One day I bumped into the owner and he asked if we wanted to see what they had done. I talked with Donna, and we buttoned our lips. When we went over we were WOWED! Such a transformation — beyond our ability to envision. It was like a weight taken off us….5535 had undergone yet another transformation. We were happy for them, we felt our 12 years were not wiped out/wasted, and we hope the ghost of Mrs. M. feels the same way.”

The post Hollywood Moderne: A House that Lived Up to Its Name appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

By Cate Toups Atkinson

In 1919, commercial roofer Bruce Stringfellow Branson jumped aboard the residential building boom in Chevy Chase DC to put up four houses in the 5600 block of Chevy Chase Parkway. The eight-room arts and crafts bungalows, priced at $16,500 each, were built side by side, alternating direction to give the block variability.

But each held an unlikely jewel that strung them together — identically carved Italian marble fireplaces of Victorian vintage, each a different hue of exquisitely veined stone. Already half a century old when installed in these new bungalows, their austere presence belied what they might have already experienced in their previous life. Warming the private bedrooms of a grand mansion? Drawing wealthy travelers around them in an elegant DC hotel?

Today, 101 years later, three of the four houses at 5605, 5607, 5609, and 5611 Chevy Chase Parkway still retain these mysterious marble fireplaces. But one has apparently gone missing, said to have been liked so much by a previous homeowner of 5607 that they took it with them when they moved out. Another of the four — a gray marble fireplace in 5609 — was so prized by its one-time owner that she kept the fireplace and discarded the house then built a new one on the lot.

Retired lawyer Matt Simchak and his wife Jane bought 5611 Chevy Chase Parkway in the mid-1970s. The shade of their marble fireplace is pink etched in black. He remembers being “very charmed by that fireplace” when they bought the house and recalls an architect friend coming over one day and exclaiming, “Wow, this is obviously from some place else.” He told him the fireplace appeared to be carved of Italian marble and dated to the 1870s.

“He knew about some mansions near Washington Circle, around Pennsylvania and 23rd, that had dated to the 1870s but had been demolished around 1914 to accommodate commercial buildings,” Simchak recalled. “He said he thought they’d probably been removed from one of  those.”

The architect who told him this was Frederick Lear Fryer (1918-1983) who worked with the renowned DC architect firm Faulkner, Stenhouse, Fryer & Faulker, designers of the New Zealand Embassy at 37 Observatory Circle NW, among other impressive buildings.

A careful perusal of classified ads in the local newspapers from those years turned up no announcements of the availability of salvaged marble fireplaces. But this was the Jazz Age, a time before e-bay or Restore, and salvaged materials were frequently scooped up by people in the building trades. Nor did the building permits on file in the Washingtoniana Collection at the DC Library reveal that any of the four Chevy Chase Parkway houses included salvaged parts in the newly constructed bungalows. Although not required, details like this are sometimes noted on the permits. 

One might assume that since these fireplaces were so unusual and elaborate, they would be mentioned as selling points for these brand new homes. But I could find no advertisements of these four houses when they were offered on the market that mentioned anything about marble fireplaces. Perhaps that was because by the 1920s Victorian architecture, while beautifully incorporated in the Chevy Chase houses, was considered a bit outdated and  fussy, so perhaps it wasn’t the feature Branson wanted to brag about. That went to the closets (see the ad at right).

The architect for the four houses was Speiden & Speiden, a company consisting of  brothers William and Albert Speiden who designed more than 2,000 structures in the early 20th century, including more than 270 buildings in Washington, DC. By the time these houses were built, elder brother William had died and Albert was commuting from Manassas. Branson used the contractor W.A. Kimmel to construct the four houses.

Branson doesn’t appear to have dabbled in residential construction again, or if so, he used a different name. His primary business was managing, then owning, the “Ironclad Roofing Co.” He was 36 at the time he built the Chevy Chase Parkway houses. It was a spec investment, as he did not have buyers until the houses were complete. Nor was it likely he intended to live in them. The Washington City Directories do not record him in residence in any of them. In fact, in January 1920, he bought 3807 Ingomar St. NW, where he was listed as residing with his wife, Ethel Lillian Branson, and their children Eleanor, Anna, and Bruce Jr. The Bransons were still living there in 1924, as evidence by a newspaper ad they took out on May 25 about a “lost stone marten neckpiece” that was dropped “between Hylers and the Woodward & Lothrop elevators.”

Meanwhile, the buyers of the four bungalows on Chevy Chase Parkway settled into their new homes. Most of them stayed for decades. They were all white, as required by the racial covenants attached to these four houses like most of the homes platted by Fulton R. Gordon during those years. The post-World War I period was a time of rapid growth for Chevy Chase DC when President Warren G. Harding from Ohio promised normalcy (the Teapot Dome scandal didn’t alight until after his death) followed by Calvin Coolidge who took the country into prosperity until the 1929 stock market crash.

5605 Chevy Chase Parkway: Black Marble

The house at 5605, which features a black marble fireplace, has been through only four families. The original 1921 owner was Bessie C. Kennedy, who is referred to as a widow, and her two sons, Edwin Russell Kennedy and Benton Chase Kennedy. Although she is mentioned in the newspapers for her social engagements (president of the Chevy Chase Garden Club and officer of the District Daughters of the American Revolution), not much else can be easily gleaned about her. A 1911 news story reported that she had been granted custody of her children by a District Court over her husband. In the war years, she applied for a temporary zoning variance to operate as a boarding house, with four residents upstairs and four residents down. It was denied, but was under appeal in 1944. Bessie died in Garfield Hospital, intestate, in 1956 and is buried at Congressional Cemetery with nothing but her name and date of death marking her gravestone.

The house passed to her son Benton and stayed in the family until late 1978, when his wife died, leaving it to an assortment of 28 cousins and other relatives. It was sold to a divorced woman in 1978, who then sold it to a couple four years later. The current owners have lived there since 2008.

5607 Chevy Chase Parkway: Missing Fireplace

The first owners of the house next door at 5607 Chevy Chase Parkway — the one missing its Victorian fireplace — were Roger C. and Etta M. Wells. He was a chief chemist for the U.S. Geological Survey research laboratory. Etta stayed in the house after he died in 1944, and upon her death in 1954 it was passed down to sons Arthur B. Wells and Roger C. Wells. Etta’s grandson, Michael Wells, a statistician who now lives in Silver Spring, said he often visited the house where his grandmother and uncle Roger lived, but he was only six years old and doesn’t have any memory of whether a Victorian fireplace existed or not  in the living room.

The Wells family sold the house in 1954 to Patrick S. and Mary Kathleen Cooney. Mr. Cooney, a retired Labor Department official, died of a brain tumor at age 60 in 1966, but it remained in the Cooney family until 1972, when Lawrence H. Schwartz and his wife Judith Schwartz bought it. Lawrence Schwartz was a lawyer and public defender who taught at George Washington University Law School. While living at the house, in 1988, he helped win the largest medical malpractice claim in DC history at the time, a $3 million settlement against Greater Southeast Hospital for a three-year-old who had been paralyzed during her childbirth. The team of plaintiff attorneys, Schwartz included, shared a $1 million payout. The Schwartzes moved out the following year. (Unfortunately, Mr. Schwartz died of a brain hemmorrhage at age 58 in 2000. By that time, he was living in 16th Street Heights.)

In 1989 Freya and Burton Sonenstein bought the house from the Schwartzes. Freya Sonenstein recalls that the house did not come with a Victorian fireplace. “I had heard that the original fireplace had been removed by some owner in the past,” she said in a telephone call recently. They sold it in 2003 to the current owners who likewise have no knowledge of a Victorian fireplace previously existing in the living room.

5609 Chevy Chase Parkway: Gray Marble with Gold Flecks

The house next door is 5609 Chevy Chase Parkway. The original Branson structure was torn down in 2009, but the fireplace was saved. In its early years, the house appears to have gone through several owners, changing hands every 10 years or so. Its 1924 owner listed it with urgency, asking only $15,250 (the original asking price was $16,500 but what the exact terms were are not public.). The home address made the newspapers for various events: A lawn party to benefit the Mount Vernon Chapter of the Children of the Revolution was held in 1953; in 1950 a pair of “irreplaceable delicate Chinese lanterns” were stolen from the back yard Friday night.” The lanterns were recovered in a stolen beer truck that also contained 350 cases of beer, 50 cases short of its load, according to the Washington Post on Sept. 10, 1950.

When Mary Strauss and her husband Patrick bought the place in 2007, they decided to tear down the house and build new, doubling its size. They searched for architectural elements to preserve. “The house was rather mundane. There was nothing fancy in it except for the fireplace. It stood out,” Mary Strauss said. When asked about the provenance of the fireplace, she recalls hearing that it might have come from a hotel downtown, but she never got to the bottom of it.

With painstaking effort, they disassembled the fireplace and stored it. “It came apart in about 30 pieces. We were afraid we weren’t going to be able to put it back together again,” she remembered. But they did, thanks to a tile specialist hired for the job.

The Victorian fireplace now sits in a cozy front parlor of the 4,800 square-foot bungalow with double front-facing gables. The living room in the back part of the new house was just too large in scale to support the fancy original, Mary Strauss said. “We were just happy the guy could piece it together again.”

5611 Chevy Chase Parkway: Pink Marble

The Simchaks were in a long line of former owners of 5611 Chevy Chase Parkway. Online tax records are confusing so it’s difficult to say how many times it changed hands in the early years. But a signature under the wallpaper on the stairwell traces the house back to a family who bought the house in October 1938. When the Simchaks renovated the house in the ’70s, they had wallpaper on a stairwell removed, and there written on the plaster wall was the name of the wallpaper hanger and the date, October 1938.

The tradesman reportedly worked for the family of Jane Dortch Gray, who owned the house for a decade, raising her children there.

 “I was at the house one Sunday when a woman came up the sidewalk and said she lived in this house in the late ‘30s, early ‘40s,” Simchak recalls. She told him how all the neighborhood kids played in the street and one day they noticed a black car parked with two men inside wearing overcoats and hats, sitting and watching, day after day. The kids asked them who they were and what they were doing there, but got no answer. Then, Simchak said recalling her story, “the men got out of their car, walked up to a house across the street and arrested everybody there as spies.”

The incident he was referring to occurred across the street from his house at 5700 Chevy Chase Parkway, where a Hungarian ambassador lived in 1941 and was indeed taken into custody like other Axis-power diplomats in Washington after Pearl Harbor. The woman who told him this story — along with verifying the wallpaper hanger hired by her parents — was probably Jane Gray Cumings, who was a child of eight at the time of Pearl Harbor. Her daughter, Catherine Cumings, who grew up in Rockville but now lives in Florida, told me she’d heard the spy story more than once.

“My mom loved that house,” Catherine Cumings said, noting that her mother died at age 85. “When we were kids we would drive by and she would talk about what it was like to live there. Everything, even the groceries, were delivered.”

In the 1980s, the Simchaks moved two blocks over to Morrison Street (they now split their time between Massachusetts Avenue and their country home) and the family they sold it to — Kit and Marnie Briggs — lived there 36 years, the longest of anybody. In 2019, the Briggs sold it to a couple who plan to do massive renovations — but are keeping the marble fireplace.

Branson’s Later Years

Bruce S. Branson made newspaper headlines in 1924 when he swerved to avoid an oncoming car and plunged 15 feet over an embankment into the sunken gardens of McMillan Park at First Street and Michigan Avenue Northwest.

“Passers-by rushed down the incline into the park expecting to find Branson severely injured, but were greeted by the contractor climbing out of his overturned machine,” a story in the Oct. 24, 1928, Washington Post reported. With a heave-ho of spectators, “the machine was righted and a bent fender and headlight was found to be the only damage.”

Branson died of a heart attack at Georgetown Hospital in October 1942, having made it only 58 years. At that time, his address was listed at 3701 Massachusetts Avenue NW and he had been owner of Ironclad Roofing for 20 years. It seems the provenance of the fireplaces died with him.

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Ever notice two houses in the 3800 block of Legation Street NW that appear to be conjoined fraternal twins? They’re not a duplex, as each has separate exterior walls and roofs. What connects them is an odd little wing running roughshod over the property line, suggestive of a bygone era where kids and dogs and platters of food went back and forth between households.

But why? And are they still joined today? As is usual with houses in Chevy Chase, when the doors to these houses crack open, all kinds of stories spill out, and these are not exceptions. Who lived here and what they did with their lives often takes over the narrative.

“The story was, the daughter divorced and they built the house to accommodate her and her children,” said Elizabeth Jenkins Joffe, who bought the house on the left with her husband, lawyer Paul Joffe, in 1977.

Like most rumors that filter through generational neighborhood turnover, there appears to be a sliver of truth to that tidbit that was already half a century old by the time the Joffe’s moved in.

The records tend to agree with it, although they aren’t crystal clear and they say nothing about the family relationships. The lot numbers and physical addresses of these two houses — they were originally platted as three house lots — have been rejiggered several times as infill occurred through the years, making it hard to trace.

But starting from the beginning, the two-story frame house on the left, 3825 Legation, was constructed in 1910 for $5,500 by local builder Howard D. Fulmer for his parents, John H. and Louise Fulmer. The lot to the right, also owned by Fulmer, sat empty for the time being.

The Fulmer household was home to the senior Fulmers plus the builder and his family. The father died only a year after the house was built, at age 65. Newspaper ads attest to the fact that the son ran his home contracting business out of the house. He offered homes “not ready built, but built to order” with more than 50 designs from which to choose. It was a seemingly successful business, as evidenced by the number of houses in the DC databases that list him as builder.

By 1918 Fulmer moved his large family to a newly constructed house at 3901 Jenifer St. His mother, Louisa Fulmer lived another four years, and when she died in 1922 she left $11,000 to her unmarried daughter, Katie Fulmer, and divided the rest of the estate between all three of her children.

It appears the Fulmers rented out the Legation Street house fully furnished until 1924 when it was sold, along with the lot next door, to a man with the distinction of being the youngest person ever to earn a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Col. Robinson Barr Murphy and his wife, Lina Virginia Murphy, were the ones that had the 3823 Legation Street house built. By then in his 70s, Murphy had gone to war at age 13 as a drummer boy and became a scout. He was only 15 when, out scouting near Atlanta, he spotted Confederates cutting away at the right wing of the Federal lines, and he galloped on his pony to tell the commanding officer.

According to a Washington Evening Star accounting of the event, he had tears in his eyes when he reported this grave news. He was then asked to lead the regiment to the enemy. The teenager bravely did just that, and although his pony was shot out from under him, he survived and saved the day. Murphy, the kid, was known as “Colonel” and was officially bestowed the honor by President William McKinley in the 1890s.

In civilian life, Murphy’s business was a wholesale house in Front Royal, and he traveled around the country. It was already late in his life when he and his wife finally settled in Washington, DC, and had the Legation Street house built. They bought both lots —  the 1910 house and the empty lot next door — and hired architect George Santmeyers to design the new house. The drawings for a building permit in the Washingtoniana Collection of the DC Public Library clearly show the wing connecting the two homes. Undoubtedly it was specifically designed to deal with the socially awkward problem of a dependent divorcee, their daughter Martha Charlotte.

The Murphys had had  three daughters, and Martha Charlotte had married well. In 1905 she became the wife of Charles A. Macatee, the eldest of six sons and three daughters of a prominent Front Royal family whose patriarch was Capt. Charles Augustus Macatee, also a Civil War hero. The elder Macatee was a builder of institutions and a leader in dozens of organizations. He was also a U.S. Treasury Department agent and created a rifle company that was later the foundation of the Virginia National Guard.

Charles and Martha’s war-hero fathers just happened to die a week apart in 1934, but long before then Mrs. Macatee had left her marriage. She officially went by “Mrs. Martha Macatee” for the duration of her life. By the mid-1920s, she and her four children were at home at 3825 Legation St.– the house on the left. A set of French doors opened onto a hallway lined with windows that led next door to her parents’ house.

“There’s a pair of French doors rotting now in our basement,” Elizabeth Jenkins Joffe chuckled. “I understand they were identical to the ones on the other house.”

The Macatees were legendary in the neighborhood during the four decades they lived there, she said. Mrs. Macatee was very proper and had a chauffeur who would drive her around, and she was known to always be fitted out in hat and gloves. She was a Christian Scientist practitioner — a member of the Chevy Chase Christian Scientist church — and had maintained offices at 1317 F Street NW for her professional work up until she died at age 83. Her son, Charles Augustus Macatee III, was also known around the neighborhood.

In 1930 at age 20, young Charles was working as an airplane mechanic at what is now Ronald Reagan National Airport when he he made news headlines for successfully crash-landing a plane. According to the stories, “everyone” had told him he looked like Charles Lindberg — he and Lindberg’s first and middle names were the same — and he wanted to be like him too. He bought an an open-cockpit Challenger plane soon after finishing flight school in December 1929. Among his flight school colleagues was “Miss Mary Lincoln Beckwith,” granddaughter of Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s last surviving son.

According to the Washington Evening Star of March 13, 1930, Macatee was flying a friend, G. Stuart Parker, from Quantico, Va., when his engine overheated and forced him to land about eight miles south of Alexandria — where exactly, the story didn’t specify. He fiddled with a broken water pump and figured he could make it the rest of the way, so he took off again for “Alexandria Airport.” But the engine again overheated and he began losing altitude as he approached the runway. Telephone and power lines “strung along the Washington-Richmond road (now Route 1), bordering the field” stripped off the wheels of the plane, throwing its nose down. “Mcatee instantly opened his failing motor wide and succeeded in pulling up in time to set the fuselage of the plane down in a beautiful ‘pancake’ landing,” the Star reported, noting that “he and Parker stepped out of the ship uninjured.”

The Macatee family held onto the two houses until 1965, but it’s unclear who actually lived in the house on the right after Mrs. Martha Macatee’s parents died in 1934 (her mother and father died within three months of each other and are interred at Arlington National Cemetery). In 1937 a newspaper article referenced a soldier named Kenneth Belt who gave that address, so perhaps the family rented the house out. Eventually, all the Macatee children moved away except for unmarried daughter Lina Virginia Macatee, who lived with her mother in the house on the left. Then Mrs. Macatee died in 1961, and Lina died in 1965, and afterwards, the surviving Macatees divested themselves of the conjoined homes.

According to DC tax records, Daniel Fendrick and his wife Barbara Cooper Fendrick (she ran the contemporary Fendrick Gallery in Georgetown from 1970 until 1991) bought the two homes in 1965. It was the Fendricks who separated the houses, putting up a firewall on the right side, and gifting the older house with the newer wing. Why they didn’t remove the wing is unknown by the current owners. The Fendrick’s, bought the houses as an investment, as they maintained a home in Chevy Chase, MD. Mrs. Fendrick doesn’t recall the details, and her husband died in 1992.

A 1967 newspaper ad lists the houses together, but gives individual prices for each — $25,000 for the one on the right and $33,500 for the one on the left. The house on the left, 3825 Legation,was sold to journalist Thomas I. Dowling and his wife Janet, and the Dowlings turned the passageway into a sunroom. His nascent book collection — now up to 9,000 volumes — was partly accommodated by a new bookcase they built along the wall where the two houses once joined. 

The house on the right, 3823 Legation, was sold to Bettina F. and Van Vechten Trumbull. He worked for a Congressman, then the Environmental Protection Agency, and periodically as a copy editor at the Washington Post. They lived there until 1983 when they retired to Nova Scotia. Married for 65 years, they died in 2002 within 10 days of each other, both after long illnesses.

The Dowlings lived on Legation Street for about a decade before they sold it to its current owners — the Jenkins Joffes — and moved one street over to Military Road, where they still live today.

Now 84 and retired, Dowling has had an intriguing career. He was with the State Department in the 1960s (as was Fendrick, from whom he bought the house), then became a writer for The Washingtonian Magazine and later reported for the Washington Evening Star. Early in his journalism career, he said, he “fell” into a book contract about Vince Lombardi. The book — Coach: A Season with Lombardi, published in 1970 while he was living on Legation Street — is touted as one of the best ever written about Lombardi.

While working on a story for The Washingtonian about Jack Anderson, the journalist who exposed political corruption through his widely syndicated newspaper column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Dowling recalls he was riding shotgun in Anderson’s car when Anderson stole bags of J. Edgar Hoover’s garbage behind his Forest Hills home. TV cameras captured the whole thing. Dowling remembers details of what was in that trash. His resulting article is titled “Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? Jack Anderson Knows” (The Washingtonian, May 1971).

Dowling said that after the Hoover escapade, he suspected his phone on Legation Street was being tapped by the FBI and mentioned this when L. Patrick Gray, acting FBI director around the time of Watergate, called him to try to fish for some positive press. “I could tell immediately he wanted to be my new best friend,” Dowling said. He asked Dowling if there was “anything he could do for me and I said, well, I’ve noticed this clicking noise on my phone.There was a long pause so significant you could see that he was thinking, ‘what I am getting myself into!’ And then he hung up and I never heard from him again.” Dowling roared with laughter at the memory.

The Joffes, who purchased the house from the Dowlings in 1977, used the extra wing as a reading room but always thought they would eventually take it down. “It has windows on both sides, so it has nice light,” she said. As the years have passed, there didn’t seem to be a point in removing square footage, so it has stayed. And continues to taunt passersby with its mystery.

Have an interesting story about your house? Tell us about it at cate.atkinson@gmail.com.

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by Cate Toups Atkinson

In the 1970s Anastasios Vrenios was a rising tenor on the international opera stage. His world was filled with the beautiful melodies of Puccini, Mozart and Verdi. But his peripatetic singing career meant that his wife, a soprano who was head of the American University voice department, was raising their two sons alone. He was barely 32 when he gave it up.

Today, a different symphony accompanies him. It rises from fanciful stones that swirl underfoot in the front and back gardens of his brick colonial on 32nd Street NW in Barnaby Woods. In an alternate firmament, his yard could be home to fairies, with its gentle gurgling waterfalls and undulating walls, all softness and curves, without a sharp edge in sight.

But the creation outside — a work in progress that has bewildered more than one stone mason he has hired to carry out his designs — came later. First he reshaped his career as a voice  instructor at American and Howard universities, among others. He performed locally. He and his wife Elizabeth raised their two sons on a diet rich in art and music.

When tragedy struck, it came from above. In 1988, their oldest son Nicolas, then 19, was studying photography at Syracuse University in London. While he was flying home for Christmas, a bomb planted in the luggage compartment of Pan Am Flight 103 detonated over Lockerbie, Scotland, trailing debris for 70 miles. Nicolas – whose guitar, camera, and skateboard were prize possessions — was gone.

Vrenios sees poetry even in tragedy. So many memories of Nick were in the house, and he relished being there. His wife couldn’t bear to live among them. “I had to stay in the house. She had to get out,” he says. So, while they remain married and spend holidays and other times together, she lives happily in California and he has his life in D.C. Their son, Chris, a successful reggae artist, “Cristos DC,” recently married and lives in the area.

Vrenios, a youthful 79 who goes by the Greek nickname “Taso,” has lived in the house 51 years. In its 83 years of existence, the house has had only two owners. It was constructed in 1937 in a group of three homes in the 6600 block of 32nd Street Northwest by Muhleman & Kayhoe, a Richmond builder of “early American and Williamsburg type” houses. The first owners were Herbert L. Wooten, a controller at the Federal Public Housing Authority, and wife Elizabeth “Betty” Wooten. Like Taso and Elizabeth after them, they too raised two boys in the house. When the Wootens retired and put it on the market in 1969 to move to Myrtle Beach, the Vrenioses moved in.

It was a normal suburban yard in those early days. The Greek tenor in him saw a back deck as a delightful place to one day hold concerts for friends, so that was added. Then, after Nick’s death, he began longing for a waterfall. “My wife would say, why don’t you do it?” Finally, in recent years he started building. “I did not necessarily have a plan,” he said. “I had creative impulses. The next thing I knew I was caught up in this … in a way, it’s an indication of where I would have gone with my music had I continued with my career. I’m still trying to reach my audience!”

When asked how he describes the whimsical  work, he says he does not have a word for it, but that his inspiration comes from harmonies in nature, and from the architect Antoni Gaudi. When workers are translating his designs into the landscape, he sometimes sees them employ hard edges. But he wants curves — such as the rhythmic swells of a brick retaining wall around an enormous poplar tree in the backyard. The copper-green art deco railing on the front walk is more like a sleek, stylized encircling of arms than a barrier.

“With a curve, the line doesn’t have an end. I will say, no! Do it this way. And they say, but that’s twice as hard!” he laughed. “Eventually, they bend to what I say and after it’s complete they are so pleased.”

He said the place is a balm for the tragedy that befell him 32 years ago, and is one way to combat the continuing hurt. After Nick’s death, they learned their son had a foreboding of his destiny. They found a note written the summer before the bombing that said “I’m going to die very soon. I’m going to hit a hard surface and perish.” Another time, he had written a poem that “basically describes a plane falling from the sky.” And when the Vrenioses flew to Scotland to collect their son’s belongings, lying on a box waiting for them was a picture of Nick sitting on a Swiss mountaintop, appearing as if in the clouds. A man had found it while out walking in a forest some 70 miles from the wreckage. Nick’s remains were found in a field with at least 100 other bodies near Lockerbie. 

In the yard, the spring planting is like a strings section, sending lovely notes of fragrance in the air. The colored stones of a serpentine walkway beguile like flutes. And the twinkling of cascading water adds rhythm to Taso’s foundling orchestra. One might expect the Greek tenor’s soulful aria to be one of tragic pain. But instead, its meaning is best revealed by a quote from him in a story in the Washington Post in August 2009 about the international uproar over Scotland’s decision to release, on compassionate grounds, the only man ever convicted of the Pan Am bombing. Abdel Basset Ali a-Megrahi of Libya was dying of prostate cancer and Scotland set him free.

“I am thinking as a decent human being. Let the man go and die in his own country — he’s dying anyhow. Keeping him in prison is not going to cure the illness that this whole thing is an example of, the killings and murders and the things that go on in mankind.”

Bravo, Taso!

Have an interesting story about your house? Tell us about it at cate.atkinson@gmail.com.

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Alley walkers know the place — a medieval-looking “castle” behind a house in the 3900 block of Livingston Street NW. With its thick stone walls, slate roof and solid red door with iron fastenings, it could be in Germany atop a walled fortress touching the clouds.

This odd little stone structure has stood by while two families raised their children, grew old, moved on. It’s now on its third family doing much the same. Walk by on a pleasant evening and you might catch the kids tossing a ball in the yard.

It’s a testament to how quickly time forgets, as no one alive today, not even the sharp 84-year-old granddaughter of the original owner from 1929 — knows who built it or why, despite fluid family memories about it always being a  fixture there along with a stone koi pond containing prized goldfish.

Nor do they retain the details of the long-ago owner’s other life passion — he was an amateur “ham” radio enthusiast, likely using the turreted room for his equipment. The 80-foot pole standing next to it with a busted weather vane and pulley on top almost certainly is the radio tower. But it’s just an old pole now, not on anyone’s radar for the exotic connections it once made possible through the Chevy Chase DC night sky.

Current owners Alison Barnes and Stephen Cohen who bought the house in 2005 said that they knew only what was told to them at purchase — that it was probably built by a former owner to remind him of his distant homeland.

“We originally thought we’d use the building as a playhouse for the kids. But it’s spidery and dark in there,” Alison said with a laugh. “We had no idea about the pole. We had always wondered about it and even called the utility company. They came out and looked at it but said it wasn’t theirs. The neighbors didn’t know either.”

Then one day a man stopped by and introduced himself as having grown up in the house, putting some of the pieces together for them.

The Al-Faqih Family Years, 1954-2005

“Everybody always asked, why on earth is it there? But for us, it was just part of our house. The pond was a swimming pool to us. That’s where our father taught us to swim,” said Fadey Al-Faqih, who had stopped by his childhood home a few years ago and introduced himself to the new owners. Pleasantly surprised by a call to his home in Rehoboth, he percolated with memories of the place. “We used to call it the castle. We’d play hide-and-seek back there, war games, just kid stuff.”

Fadey’s parents, Wajih and Hind Al Faqih (pronounced Al-FA-KEY) were Lebanese immigrants who came to America to work at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in 1947. A close family member, Sheikh Asad Mansur Al-Faqih, had been appointed Saudi’s first ambassador to the United States, and also to Canada, Mexico, and the United Nations. He was also a delegate to the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945.

When Wajih’s brother-in-law, the ambassador, transferred out, Wajih and his wife decided to stay in America. They bought the house on Livingston Street and he served as the financial attaché at the embassy for 45 years. They raised four sons in the house, and then it became a multi-generation household. After Wajih died in 2004, the family decided it was time to sell. Mrs. Al-Faqih now lives with one of her sons in California.

Realty company Shannon & Luchs advertised the house for sale in 1954 in the Washington Post. One listed the house — a “gardener’s paradise” — for $28,500. Another called it a “picture book lot” with wrought iron fencing and a stone fish pond. No mention was made of the Cinderella structure in the backyard.

But Fadey said his family always believed the “castle” was built by the house’s first owner who they assumed had been a stonemason from Germany, as evidenced by the fine workmanship of the turret, a stone pond, and a brick and iron fencing that originally encircled the property. He remembered his father saying the former owner was also a ham radio operator and used the turret for his radio equipment. Fadey remembers wires that led from the castle up the pole when they moved in, but they got rid of them.

A New House: The Lorenz Family Years, 1929-1954

What we do know for certain is that the 4-bedroom house was built by Robert H. Sanford, with an upstairs sleeping porch and a two-car garage underneath.  He constructed “600 homes in Chevy Chase in the 1930s” while living at 3913 Military Road, according to his 1961 obituary. The building permit — in which Sandford is listed as builder and designer — estimated the house’s value at $12,000.

It is unlikely Sanford took the time or expense to build the turret. Plus it is a completely different architectural style from the brick center-hall colonial house, a design he used repeatedly in his spec houses. A look at the building permit inspections on file in the Washingtoniana room of the DC Public Library might shed some light, but those offices are closed due to coronavirus concerns.

Online tax records indicate that Sanford sold the house in December 1929 at the start of the Great Depression to Eugene G. and Catherine B. Lorenz and carried their mortgage of $4,000.

If Lorenz was a stonemason, it was a hobby, not a profession, because he was an accountant — a profession that three succeeding generations of his family would follow. But he was indeed from Germany. Born in 1884, he immigrated from Berlin through the Port of Baltimore in 1890 with his parents Julius Franz Lorenz and Josepha Anna Lorenz.

A great-granddaughter who now lives in Potomac, MD, and has done some genealogical sleuthing said she believes that Julius Lorenz was a New York shoemaker and lived at 242 E. 28th St. in Manhattan. She did not know when or what brought the Lorenzes to Washington, DC.

The only records I found in New York City newspapers of anyone named Julius Lorenz referenced an orchestra conductor, musician and  professor who worked with competitive German choral societies, or “Saengerbunds,” that were held in major U.S. cities around that time. This Julius Lorenz was president of the musical Arion Society of New York and even played before President Teddy Roosevelt and his wife in February 1903.

More research is needed to determine whether or not this person was Eugene G. Lorenz’s father, but it is a fact that Eugene G. Lorenz and his three children were musicians, performing as the “Lorenz Orchestra” in the 1920s, and that his trumpet-player son Eugene H. Lorenz reportedly earned enough money through his music to pay for college.

I found two mentions of a “Julius Franz Lorenz” in Washington, DC, newspapers in the first decade of the 20th century, both regarding property transactions. Records also show that a Eugene G. Lorenz attended high school at Washington Business School (now Cordozo) in July 1900, when Eugene- the-accountant would have been 16.

The New York City connection is legitimized by death records, as both Julius Franz and Josepha Anna Lorenz were living in New York City when they died (1923 and 1937, respectively). Each was laid to rest in a family plot at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, as were Eugene G. and Catherine B. Lorenz. Catherine’s parents, Thomas T. Hurdle and Mary C. Hurdle are also  buried there.

Newspaper accounts tracing the family began picking up with the purchase of the Livingston Street house in 1929, although I found no mention in the local papers of a turret or a radio tower in the backyard.

“Wireless radio” or “amateur radio” hobbyists gained popularity in the early 1900s. Such radio transmissions were prohibited during World War I, but by the 1930s it became a mania for its transatlantic capabilities. By then, one needed a city permit to erect a tower. It is possible Eugene G. Lorenz applied for permits for the tower — and the backyard turret — but since D.C. government offices are closed for now, I’ll have to check them later.

Then, in May 1933 — only three years after buying the house — an obituary tells of the early death of Eugene G. Lorenz, identified as a “pioneer public accountant — one of the first in Washington.” He was only 48, had recently become a grandfather and his eldest daughter had just gotten engaged. His granddaughter, Jocelyn Lorenz Poerstel — who would not be born for another three years but who is now 84 — says he died of a brain cyst that should have been benign but it burst during an operation and killed him. He died at Emergency Hospital in Washington DC.

Among his pallbearers would be Howard P. Foley, a longtime client, whose company would in time become one of the largest electrical contracting firms in the country. Although he did not live to see it, Eugene G. Lorenz’s family fortunes would blossom many decades later based on that client connection, just as the modest real estate he apparently bought for $12,000 would exponentially increase in value.

“Family lore has it that his ham radio hobby contributed to his death. It was a very serious hobby that he was quite dedicated to,” said Janelle Lorenz Wright of Potomac, MD, a great-granddaughter to Eugene G. Lorenz who was referred to earlier as having tracked the family’s genealogy. The thread to how this hobby might have led to his death has been lost, she said. Nor does the turret factor into family stories that are otherwise rich with memories of German Christmas traditions in the house on Livingston Street, and the beautiful fish swimming in the backyard pond.

The Livingston Street house, with its high ceilings that kept things cool in the summer, was still full of his children when he died, as his son with his young wife and baby had recently moved back in when their Legation Street apartment grew too hot for a baby. Life marched on without him. Both daughters had home weddings as was common then — one in 1933 and the other in 1935. Social columns reported the “drawing rooms decorated with midsummer flowers,” but there was no mention of a romantic backyard castle.

Eventually Catherine B. Lorenz “bobbed her hair, began socializing and met a nice man and married him,” her granddaughter says. She and her new husband William J. McGarvey moved to a townhouse on Massachusetts Avenue in Northeast, leaving the house and stocked fishpond to her son. She died in 1950.

The son, Eugene Hurdle Lorenz – a CPA like his father and professional trumpet player — not only took over the house, he took over his father’s clients as well. He also earned a law degree from George Washington University. He and his wife Alma Corinne “Bonnie” Miller Lorenz raised their two children, A. Jocelyn and Eugene Kendall “Ken,” on Livingston Street during the Depression and through the war years.

Jocelyn has many happy memories of her 18 years in the house. She’s the 84-year-old granddaughter of Eugene G. Lorenz I mentioned earlier. A widow since 2009, she lives in an independent senior residence in Bethesda, has four children, nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. When she heard I wanted to talk about “the homestead,” she pulled out a “book” she’d written and rattled off dozens of things she found deeply satisfying about the house. She talked of the screened sleeping porch upstairs, two claw-foot tubs, the manual wringer washing machine and the smell of the coal chute in the basement. She remembers the live orchestras her father hosted for client parties, lazing in the glider chairs on the front porch, the rotary phone and the phone number “WO 0680,” the oval pond with fan-tailed goldfish idling under the frozen crust during winters, walking to Blessed Sacrament, and playing all day at Chevy Chase Playground until just before the streetlights came on.

The changes WWII brought were equally memorable. She recalls when the material for nylon stockings were reserved for parachutes instead, and lipstick factories converted to make ammunition. She even recalled mixing in the packet of yellow powder that came with the pale margarine because the dairy industry would not allow it to be butter-colored.

She fondly recalls the family’s maid, Rachel Jackson, an African American woman who arrived by bus every day to take care of her and her brother so their mother could escape homemaker tedium by working at her father’s office at the Investment Building on K Street by the Statler Hotel.

Her childhood was also chronicled by the newspapers, as they seemed to love Jocelyn. From the time she was three and declared “Most Beautiful” in the July 1939 “Chevy Chase Playground Dress-Up Day Contest,” she was a press-photographer favorite. She appears in the Washington Post no less than a dozen times — often in her bathing suit as she grew into a young woman  — as a Miss Glen Echo finalist, at a society tea, in a cloud of taffeta with debutantes, as Duchess of the Wilson High School annual country fair, and when crowned Auto Show Queen at the National Guard Armory.

One stand-alone photo carried a caption saying she knew better than to stand in the rain but there she was, drenched in a rainshower grinning up to the heavens. Another time, she demonstrated “perfect form” — an acceptable double entendre in 1955 before #MeToo — hoisting a sail, all curves and smiles in her swimsuit. Later that same year she married Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School sports star Kenneth Poerstel and they settled in Bethesda where he sold Cadillacs for 44 years. She worked for the government.

But she does not recall who built the turret and matched stone landscaping, saying that it’s possible her grandfather either built it or had it built. “It was just always there,” she said. “My earliest memory is of wrecking my tricycle at age six, and I remember it being there then. It had a concrete floor and a wooden ceiling. We called it the tool shed. We would sit in there to get away.”

Jocelyn was 18 when they sold the house and moved to Arlington. She started her adult life and her older brother Ken went into the family business with their father as an accountant. Among his clients was the aforementioned Howard P. Foley, who by then had been in business 40 years as a successful electrical contractor.

For six decades the Lorenzes would manage Mr. Foley’s personal finances — first Eugene G., then his son Eugene H., and then, after Eugene H. died in 1967, his son, Ken Lorenz, took over.  By then it was called Lorenz & Lorenz and operated out of the Shoreham Building. Six months before Mr. Foley died in 1969, Ken Lorenz drew up a final will and named himself and his sister, Jocelyn Lorenz Poerstel, as executors and trustees of Foley’s $4.1 million estate, with control of 51 percent of the shares.

The payoff was handsome — Lorenz was awarded 10 percent of the gross estate, $415,000 — to pay him and his sister “whenever and however he decides,” according to a September 1974 Washington Post article. And, according to the article, the will stated that if Mr. Foley’s daughter and granddaughter objected, they would lose all their inheritance.

A family schism eventually occurred around this financial arrangement, and the brother and sister “had a bit of a falling out” and went their separate ways, according to Mrs. Poerstel. The Foley family business eventually dissolved in bankruptcy, as it also hit troubled terrain. In the 1980s its officers were indicted on federal charges of bid rigging and price fixing and the company’s president, Bancroft Foley Jr. (Howard P. Foley’s nephew), settled with a plea deal to serve a year in prison and pay a $3 million fine.

Meanwhile, E. Kendall Lorenz’s business thrived. Among other things, he built the $70 million office building at Two Bethesda Center — the “Lorenz Building” — above the Bethesda Metro before retiring in Potomac, MD.

Nine decades of change, but turret remains

The stone turret missed all this family drama, as it had switched owners back in 1954 when the Al-Faqihs moved in. And even though Eugene G. Lorenz had been dead for 21 years when they bought the house, the wires left over from his hobby still dangled from the pole. Not much changed at the house during their half-century there either, Fadey Al-Faqih said, but he greatly admires the interior renovations its current owners have done. “I always dreamed of doing the same things with the house,” he said.

He said he was especially careful to maintain the castle. Through the years he replaced the glass in the two embrasures, filled in cracks in the original wood door, and replaced the slate roof when shingles came loose. He said that relinquishing his childhood home was “heartbreaking” but he is happy to see that a young family is there. And that the pole out back remains straight and sturdy.

Still, there have been major changes to the landscaping that make him sad. The iron fencing is now gone, replaced after an underground water source destroyed the foundation, and the pond was buried by the new owners who worried about the safety of their toddlers.

Fadey said that seeing recent photos of the castle reminds him of stories he used to fabricate to the neighborhood kids who were mystified by the structure. “They would always be asking me, what is that thing in the corner of your backyard? I would tell them that’s where my parents would put us when they punished us, and tortured us! It was the funniest damn thing! Thank you for the memories.”

Comments or to get on our email list, contact cate.atkinson@gmail.com

The post A Backyard Castle on Livingston Street NW appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

May 2020

On Stephenson Place, halfway between Broad Branch Road and 33rd Street NW, is the second highest elevation in the District after Fort Reno. On this spot, amid the cows and cornfields and patches of tall oaks, Gen. Henry Clark Corbin built his retirement home in 1907. He and his socialite wife Edythe Patten Corbin called it “Highwood.”

Now long gone, the handsome “country” home is mostly remembered around Chevy Chase as Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing’s residence after the Great War. Few are aware of its impressive credentials. Highwood was designed by world renowned architect, Daniel H. Burnham of Chicago, whose legacy includes Union Station in Washington, DC (1907); the Chicago Columbian Exposition site (1893); and the Flatiron Building in New York (1901), along with Wanamaker’s, Gimbels, and many more. His buildings don’t usually disappear without a trace.

So, what happened to this grand residence, Highwood? Newspapers were mostly silent on its demise, and people who grew up in the area tend to have only a vague notion of where it once stood. The tight grid of new homes replaced it so thoroughly that nearly every vestige was obliterated.

Except one.

In an alley off Rittenhouse Street and 34rd Place, peeking above a fence, is an eponymous cement gatepost, announcing itself as “Highwood.” For decades it has stood mostly forgotten in someone’s backyard, withering and cracking through the winters, watching over an alley where Model Ts once rumbled by looking for an elegant lawn party.

“We’ve always wondered if it has some protected-landmark status,” joked Rebecca Post, who owns the house at 3361 Rittenhouse with the gatepost in the backyard. She and partner Steffan Frey, who bought the house in 2014, have treated the post respectfully but are as mystified as most people in the neighborhood about what it’s doing there. This past year they widened their fence opening to accommodate their daughter, who uses a wheelchair, and in the process provided a sort of community service — this little bit of history is now unobstructed for all to see.

Rebecca Post is not alone in in her limited knowledge of the true story behind the gatepost in her backyard. The estate hardly made the papers when it was razed. Only one small caption under a photo of the abandoned estate in the Sunday, July 4, 1937, Washington Post serves as its obituary: “Pershing’s Former Home Razed for Development.” All other headlines on the page were dominated by real estate deals and super-charged housing sales.

This was pre-war Washington after all. Progress was of the steam-rolling suburban variety. No matter that this elegant home was barely 30 years old when the wrecking ball came. In its place would soon be 25 Mikkelson-built homes with modern GE electric kitchens and knotty pine libraries over two-story garages. Built to sell at $15,000 a pop, the brick colonials are now far older than Highwood ever was, and they carry price tags that would make the Corbins turn over in their shared Arlington Cemetery grave. Most are priced at $1.3 million or more. 

A Military Hero and a Socialite

The mystery of Highwood’s demise begins with the story of the family that birthed this special home. Henry Clark Corbin was born in Ohio in 1842 and was studying law when the Civil War broke out. He volunteered in the 79th Ohio Infantry and eventually rose to the rank of infantry major, with distinguished service in the battles of Decatur and Nashville. He married young to Frances Strickle Corbin and they had seven children together, three of whom made it to adulthood, before Frances died in 1894.

By 1877, Corbin was serving at the White House as an aide to Rutherford B. Hayes and in 1881 he was present at the deathbed of James A. Garfield, killed by an assassin’s bullet. Corbin fought Native Americans in Arizona, served in the Spanish American War and was posted to the Philippines before he retired in 1906.

The Pattens

Highwood was the product of Corbin’s second marriage to Edythe Patten Corbin, a wealthy heiress and the fourth oldest of the famous “Patten sisters” of Dupont Circle. After 44 years in the military, Gen. Corbin wanted to build a dream home where he could enjoy his retirement with his new young wife Edythe, 27 years his junior. The land where Corbin chose to build Highwood had belonged to his wife’s mother, Anastasia Patten. She had married Edmund Patten, a California pioneer, who struck it rich on the Comstock silver lode at Gold Hill, Nevada. Soon after winning the lottery his luck ran out and he died of typhoid fever, leaving behind an immensely wealthy wife and five young daughters. After getting her husband’s affairs in order, Anastasia Patten whisked her girls to France for a proper education and returned to Washington eight years later, ready to launch them as debutantes.

Of the five sisters, only one — Augusta — had married by the time Anastasia died in September 1888. Anastasia’s will specified that if any sister married without unanimous consent of all the others, she would not maintain her inheritance. It is said that Edythe Patten, the fourth daughter, had become engaged to a man five years before marrying Gen. Corbin, but the sisters did not approve of him and she broke off the engagement. The sisters consented to Corbin, however, and “adjusted their private affairs so that the future Mrs. Corbin will hold her own wealth separate and distinct from the rest. Family belongings, jewelry, etc., have also been equally divided among them.” (Evening Star, June 29, 1901, page 5) The other three never married.

Although Edythe’s 1901 wedding was to have been a “simple affair” in light of the recent death of President McKinley, 600 oversized invitations were sent out and “hundreds of gifts filled several large rooms,” including dozens of gold plates, a gold-lined silver punch bowl, gilt clocks, Persian rugs, and a gold toilet seat. Edythe’s sisters gave her a “dog collar of diamonds and pearls.” Corbin gave her a “brooch of diamonds surrounding a turquoise.” (The Evening Star, Nov. 5, 1901, page 5)

Upon returning from a lengthy sister-trip to Paris for her wedding trousseau, Edythe and Gen. Corbin were married at the baronial Patten family mansion at 2122 Massachusetts Ave., often called the “Irish Castle” for its over-the-top splendor and its Catholic chapel where a priest said mass for the sisters. The Dupont Circle mansion, so solid it took three weeks to knock down in the 1960s, has been replaced by apartments.

The wedding drew President Roosevelt and dozens of senators, representatives, Supreme Court justices, admirals, generals, ambassadors, royals, and Corbin’s father, Shadrach Corbin “hale and hearty” at age 90. Edythe’s wedding gown was stunning, trimmed with lace inherited from her mother. “It was built on graceful lines, impossible outside of Paris,” a society columnist gushed. (Evening Star, Nov. 5, 1901, page 5)

Although the newlyweds had built a house on 22nd and R Street NW (now the Brazilian Aeronautical Commission), Corbin wanted a retirement home in the country, and in 1903 he announced his intentions in the press. The site of this home would be a 30-acre parcel near Chevy Chase Circle, which Anastasia had purchased from Horace S. Jones shortly before her 1888 death. It must have been only a portion of the original Horace S. Jones farm, as Jones continued to live in the family farmhouse (where he was born) – south of the parcel he sold to Anastasia – until he died in 1910. That house, built in 1862, still stands today at 3326 Quesada St., and is the oldest house in Chevy Chase. (Evening Star, June 29, 1910, page 3)

Anastasia owned a considerable amount of property, and had invested heavily in suburban real estate, especially along Massachusetts Avenue that extended into Washington “County” beyond Florida Avenue. When the Corbins bought the Chevy Chase parcel from the Patten estate in 1903 they began “cleaning and grading” the grounds. (Evening Star, May 15, 1903)

An 1887 map that has Horace S. Jones still listed as the owner shows a long driveway with a circular park that leads to a house. There is no mention of what happened to that original structure, but it is in the approximate spot where Highwood was eventually built. We know this because the wide knoll, at 390 feet above sea level, was a natural place to site a house, and it was the highest elevation where Highwood was built. Plus, the old driveway leading up to the house was unchanged for Highwood. The high point was later marked with a U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey marker and remains there today on the curb in front of 3351 Stephenson Place. Nearby Reno Park is 410 feet.

The next map that exists of that area is dated 1891, and by that time the ownership of the Horace S. Jones parcel was listed as belonging to Anastasia Patten’s heirs. While this was still considered far out in the country, the nascent suburb of Chevy Chase was already in high gear. Francis G. Newlands, a young lawyer, rich with his late-wife’s inheritance, had secretly accumulated more than 1,700 acres along Connecticut Avenue and had laid rail for a streetcar line. Corbin reported that he intended to capitalize on this later by carving off part of his 30-acres parcel and building handsome homes for purchase that would have city water and sewer.

But at the turn of the century, most of the area remained peaceful farmland, a place where boisterous summer religious revivals were held without bothering any neighbors. An 1897 newspaper article announced one such gathering in a patch of woods near Rock Creek Ford and Broad Branch roads, the vicinity of Anastasia’s property. The Rev. H.S. Hestor and his assistants stood on a raised platform and the congregation was seated on rough plank benches. “From that point of vantage, they easily wrought the audience into a high pitch of fervor with their earnest and impassioned words,” the report stated.

Construction of Highwood commenced in 1906 with designs created by Corbin’s personal friend, Daniel Burnham. The two had met in the Philippines while Corbin was stationed there, and Burnham was mapping out a master design plan for Manila. It was there that they sketched Corbin’s dream house: a two-story, southern-facing spread to be built of reinforced concrete with a dark green tile roof. It was to have 22 rooms with a formal porte cochere on the west and a large covered garden veranda on the east where meals in the summer could be taken outdoors. He specifically did not want the house to be too pretentious, but big enough to “entertain his friends.”

True to the original plans, the home was 126 feet wide and shaped like a “T,” with seven rooms for servants in the back wing. “For light, Gen. Corbin will use electricity, and the water supply will be derived from an artesian well sunk directly beneath his house. By means of a compressed air pump, the water from the well will be pumped throughout the building,” a newspaper reported. The ultimate cost of the house was a whopping $40,000.

An Evening Star reporter visiting the construction site in early 1907 described it as a “French chateau with a Japanese tile roof.” Marveling through the rapturous reporter’s eyes, you can almost see the terraced lawns with views of the far-off city, a fragrant rose garden behind a Chinese gate, and the stately row of oaks standing guard along a macadamized driveway that opened onto Rittenhouse Street, then called Rock Creek Ford Road. The last sentence of the article has a gold nugget: the newspaper reported that the driveway ended at a “gate supported by two massive cement pillars.”

The Highwood gatepost!

A Hilltop Place in High Demand

A Washington Post article of July 14, 1907 pointed out that the General had the best of both worlds — fresh country air and a quick commute, a goal not out of style today. “Gen. Corbin’s new house occupies a splendid site for a country home, and yet it is within easy distance of the heart of the city. For within 10 minutes and without violating the speed regulations, Gen. Corbin can go from his new home to the White House.”

Highwood was made for entertaining. It had two large, open fireplaces in the drawing room and was finished in hardwoods and furnished with French imports. In the study was a desk that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson. The horses and cows got their own matching house to the northwest on a side hill that permitted box stalls for the animals and a garage on the first floor, with three “mens’ rooms” on the second floor. The stables backed up to Stuyvesant Street.

By 1907, a couple dozen houses had already been built by the Chevy Chase Land Company on the Maryland side, but building was only just starting on the DC side. Although the maps show a patchwork of farmhouses in the vicinity, newspaper reports noted that Corbin’s “nearest neighbor” was Rudolph Max Kauffmann, editor of the Evening Star, whose summer residence was where St. John’s College High School sits now. Other farmhouses were closer, but they were likely discounted as they did not share Corbin’s social class.

That same year, a nearby house, which came to be known as “Edgewood,” was under construction by attorney George S. Rees. Although a street grid had been mapped, Edgewood was plopped in the lower middle of an entire city block of four acres on Rittenhouse and 33rd streets. That house remains today, its old gentility tucked far back from the street and its front door now facing the back yards of a row of 1940s-era houses on Rittenhouse. (More on Edgewood in another blog.)

In the first two years that the Corbins lived at Highwood, they were busy throwing parties and traveling, according to society reports. Edythe was the General’s constant companion, and together they were received at Buckingham Palace and by the Empress Tsuhsi in China. But his health was deteriorating due to a renal condition. In June 1909 they traveled to Carlsbad, Germany, “where he hoped the waters would affect a cure,” but after initially feeling better his health worsened. Doctors in Paris recommended he return to New York City where emergency surgery at Roosevelt Hospital was performed immediately upon his return. He failed to rally and died 24 hours later at age 67. (Washington Post Sept 9, 1909)

At Corbin’s funeral, his body was borne through Arlington Cemetery on a caisson, followed by his horse, now riderless, and with Corbin’s boots placed backwards in the stirrups, an old military custom. Leading the charge was “Sgt. Alexander Oglesby, colored, who served in Gen. Corbin’s old regiment, the Fourteenth United States colored infantry, in the Civil War.”  (Washington Post, Sept 10, 1909, pg 16)

Corbin was laid to rest near the grave of Maj. Gen. Henry Ware Lawton, under whom he had served. He reportedly told Edythe on their drives through Arlington Cemetery that he wanted to spend eternity next to Lawton, but when she went to make the arrangements, she was told all the space near him was taken. But a happy coincidence occurred — a growth of shrubbery just happened to be removed at that time — and Gen. Corbin got his plot. (Washington Post, Sept. 25, 1907, pg 7) The earthy bottom of his grave was strewn with heliotropes and roses, clipped from the home garden he had been cultivating for his young wife. Some of the telegrams of condolence that “deluged” Highwood upon his death now sit in archival containers at the Library of Congress.

In 1910, a few months after Corbin’s death, at least 12 acres to the west of Highwood were sold by Edythe for $50,000, and houses started going up to Chevy Chase Land Company specifications. Meanwhile, Edythe moved back to the family mansion on Dupont Circle to live with her sisters and rented Highwood to dignitaries. A receipt on file at the Library of Congress indicated it was rented in 1909 for $500 a month, with unfettered access to the produce from the vegetable gardens, poultry yard and milk from the cows, plus three groundskeepers.  Add an extra $100 for a chauffeur, with car.

Highwood’s most famous tenant was Pershing, who moved in after his victorious return from France in 1918. He stayed more than two years, making it his headquarters for the U.S. Expeditionary Forces and reorganizing the American Army to prepare it for its next engagement. The Chevy Chase Historical Society writes about one memorable tea Pershing hosted for a group of girls at Chevy Chase Junior College http://www.chevychasehistory.org/excursions-tea-general in the sunny drawing room.

Since it was primarily rented as a summer residence, the widow Corbin occasionally moved herself and her prize dogs into the home when it was free of tenants, which is what she was doing in December 1923 when it caught fire. The newspapers said she was inside “playing Mah Jongg with Mrs. Henry Spencer of New York and Mrs. Lynn of Washington” when a close neighbor, Mrs. H. B. Myers, discovered sparks hitting the roof and telephoned to announce the house was on fire.

While a growing crowd helped pull furniture and war relics gathered by Gen. Corbin to safety — even Chevy Chase Country Club patrons came running — the three-alarm response was hampered by Highwood’s elevation. “Firefighters were compelled to run their hose lines more than a quarter of a mile” to the nearest hydrant, a newspaper reported.

The fire caused significant roof and water damage inside, but six months later a Mr. and Mrs. Golden Donaldson were tenants (possibly R. Golden Donaldson, president of Commercial National Bank in 1924), so all must have been promptly rebuilt, and apparently expanded, as later pictures of the house show that a second story had been added to the east wing.

During these years newspaper society columns breathlessly covered the counts and ambassadors and VIPs who held salons and soirees and “at homes” at Highwood, such as Prince de Bearn, counselor at the French Embassy; Japanese Ambassador Matsudaira and his wife; the Argentina Charge d’Affaires Racedo, and U.S. Secretary of War George H. Dern. All these VIPs navigated their way up Connecticut Avenue and Rittenhouse Road before swinging left and following the “twinkling lights” of the estate.

Meanwhile, Edythe sold another slice of the property in early 1935 — the southern half that fronted Rittenhouse — to G. F. Mikkelson and Son to build 70 homes. Stephenson Place would be cut through directly in front of the house and Highwood acquired a new address — instead of 3301 Rittenhouse it would become 3333 Stephenson Place. (That address today is assigned to a house further east of the Highwood site.)

The macadamized driveway must have been moved at that time to open onto Stephenson Place, while the previous long driveway was knitted into the street grid with only the small entrance section repurposed as an alley for the new Mikkelson homes. That is also likely when the old gate posts found themselves adrift. No mention of them is found in the available records. It is likely that the lone survivor is the eastern post, while its mate gave way to either the alley or to the first house on the west side of the alley.

Within a year, the new Mikkelson homes were slowly squeezing Highwood out of existence. Their efficient modernity stood in stark contrast to the Old World charm of Burnham’s creation. They touted super-suburban mores, such as all-electric kitchens with steel cabinets, linoleum floors, washable wallpaper, and a “servant’s toilet” in the basement for live-out maids.

Ads invited prospective homeowners to tour the model home at 3311 Rittenhouse. When that sold, the model home became 3361 Rittenhouse — the house where the Highwood gate post stands today in the backyard. No ad mentions this oddity or the historical significance of what must have seemed strangely out of place to prospective buyers. The ads for this home commented only that it was “situated on a beautiful lot.” Perhaps they decided to leave it up to the buyer to decide whether to get rid of the post? If so, we have a succession of six owners to thank for hanging on to this piece of history.

Secretary of War George Dern proved to be Highwood’s last resident. He and his wife Lottie — incidentally they are great grandparents to actress Laura Dern — installed themselves at Highwood in the fall of 1933. Dern served in the Roosevelt administration during the Depression years, when the U.S. had a more isolationist approach to foreign policy, so his tenure wasn’t particularly consequential. But the papers were full of the couple playing host on the diplomat circuit. After he died in office in August 1936, the death knell started ringing for Highwood as well.

A small classified ad whispered the news. “Entire contents of one of Washington’s most beautiful old homes known as ‘Highwood’ for sale at once on premises. All to be sold before July 1st,” so stated the Evening Star on June 12, 1937.

I have found no surviving record of who attended the estate sale, or what was sold. When Edythe Corbin died in 1959 — the last of the Patten sisters to go — she had many treasures to bequeath, including a portrait of Corbin painted by Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Muller-Ury, which she gave to the National Gallery of Art. Two high-back armchairs once owned by Pope Pius X (now Saint Pius X, making them infinitely more valuable!) were given to Georgetown University and placed in its Hall of the Cardinals. Many of Edythe’s papers are on file at Georgetown.

There’s no easy way to trace what became of a table that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, which was reportedly part of the “rich furniture” at Highwood. It may well have been sold to a high bidder at the estate sale announced in June 1937. The only thing around that witnessed it was the gatepost. And it’s not talking.

Cate Toups Atkinson can be reached at cate.atkinson@gmail.com. Does your house or street have an intriguing past? Tell me about it!

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