Chevy Chase at 250: Beyond the Burgers & Fireworks

How Can We Live Up to the Nation’s Founding Principles?

As we approach the 250th anniversary of our country’s birth, HCCDC challenges its neighbors with a three-part webinar series, launching Jan. 29,  to ask what we as a community can do locally to redeem the promise of our nation’s founding documents.

The free, three-part series will explore those challenges century by century. Chevy Chase DC has had, after all, a unique opportunity to witness much of this history first hand due to our geographic proximity to the seat of the world’s longest-surviving democracy. History tells us that the citizens who shaped Chevy Chase DC literally crossed paths with the founders as colleagues, nation builders, and also as enslaved laborers. In fact, we can trace the stories of residents whose DNA tied them to people once enslaved by George Washington.

The Jan. 29 Webinar will reflect on the first 100 years of America, from the early 1700s to the early 1800s, when the land that would become Chevy Chase DC was doled out by the Crown for tobacco production. We will view this period though the eyes of people like George Pointer, born enslaved and rented out at age 13  to work on Washington’s Potomac Canal project. By the mid 1850s his descendants had become landowning farmers on Broad Branch Road. Or people like Caroline Branham, a woman who was enslaved at Mount Vernon and whose descendants served at Arlington House until eventually becoming free landowners along Broad Branch Road.

The Webinar will feature presenters Jocelind Julien, a descendant of enslaved persons at Mount Vernon and later  landowners on Broad Branch Road; historical anthropologist Mark Auslander, who will share research on the role of African Americans on both sides of the Revolution, including George Pointer; and Carl Lankowski, PhD International Relations, who will introduce the panel discussion.

The two additional installments – the second is scheduled for March and the third in June – will draw attention to the re-founding of our republic and its betrayal as we examine the role of Chevy Chase DC in the Civil War, Reconstruction, our suburban expansion under Jim Crow, and displacement of locals who did not fit into the racially exclusive community envisioned by its founder, Francis Newlands.

The final installment, in June, looks at the local response to a modern democracy, with visionary leaders that included local citizen Walter Tobriner, and how the Great Migration – into and out of Washington, DC – affected life within our neighborhood. The webinar will  look at redemption efforts targeting  the promises of the nation’s Declaration of Independence.

The series is the finale of what started as a poster exhibit to tell our local story from Colonial times to the present, including the little appreciated stories of free African Americans who participated in the agrarian industry that once defined these rolling acres; the advent of modern suburban development in the 1880s; the building of an exclusive, utopian neighborhood; and the unfortunate history of land dispossession that  gradually displaced all Black landowners from Chevy Chase DC by the 1940s. We conclude with more recent efforts at restorative justice and truth telling that aim to honor the full multiracial history of our community across the past 250 years.

This effort  turned into a  public awareness campaign, titled “Windows 250: A Neighborhood in the Nation’s Capital,” and has been rolled out in sections over the past 10 months. We have displayed posters in storefronts along Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase DC’s commercial corridor. We also addressed issues identified by a committee of local residents (RASE) tasked with considering how our uniquely advantaged neighborhood can meet future growth demands while ensuring inclusivity and diversity. Now, HCCDC launches a webinar series to acknowledge and reflect on the arc of American history that runs through our neighborhood.