RIP circa 1814 – 2024
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.