NEW TOUR SPOTLIGHTS GEORGETOWN'S LIVING HISTORY
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Everyone wants to go to Georgetown. They arrive, walk around, perhaps shop, and then eat in one of the many fine restaurants here. They leave and think they've seen Georgetown - vaguely old, sort of federal, part of the capital but how, when or why is a muddle.A tour that begins this Fall in Georgetown will give them the Kennedys and the mansions but it will also give them Georgetown's fascinating past. We all know that history is complicated - but most of us don't know that Georgetown University owned slaves and sold them to raise capital in 1851, yet 22 years later gave us the nation's first Black college president.
This tour highlights a Georgetown that flourished when the capital was still frog ponds and fields, a town where huge hogshead barrels of tobacco once rumbled through the streets to the British ships waiting in the harbor. This was a company town founded and run by Scottish tobacco merchants with tobacco as the main currency. The first Presbyterian minister was offered 2900 pounds of tobacco a year plus some odd pounds sterling to start a church. At its 19th century heyday, there were 15 taverns in Georgetown that became the town's political and cultural infrastructure. Need to pay taxes? Meet the tax collector at the City Tavern. Want to read a book? There were 2000 volumes at Suter's Tavern where George Washington met with the area landowners to discuss the new federal city, and they were guaranteed not to corrupt the youth. A stagecoach to Annapolis? Try the Union Hotel where Louisa May Alcott later nursed union soldiers wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg. So when you go to Georgetown for a drink, you are part of quite a respectable history.
Merchants and planters prospered enormously until tobacco destroyed the land. But Georgetown turned its transportation hub to wheat, lumber and finally coal and refused to become a "Williamsburg - lovely but dead. By the last quarter of the 19th century, 500 barges hauled by mules brought goods into Georgetown on the canal. In fact, when the Confederate Army crossed the Potomac farther north, it was the barges coming into Georgetown who sounded the alarm.
However, by the turn of the century, the railroads had killed the canal and Georgetown had become an unfashionable industrial backwater of the newly emerging federal city. Well, at least until gentrification hit in the 1930's, ironically spurred by New Dealers who loved the quaint inexpensive houses, many of which had sprung up in alleys when the town swelled with Black refugees from the South. Eventually most of the Black community, who were a substantial part of this town from the very beginning, were displaced, as were the descendents of the many Irish and German workers who built the C&O Canal, when they weren't battling each other.
The elegant homes from the early Federalist period, when regulations set the size of bricks, now play host to our era of Kennedys, dignitaries, and spies. This town has restaurants and shops as hip as they come, and after the tour, people will now know that the building where the Gap sells baggy jeans once housed Civil War deserters -- and that the town winced at the sounds of executions. The site where a hot new Italian restaurant peddles pasta was once an auction block where human beings were sold until 1850.
The tour gives the Georgetown's legends - the Corcoran who gave us the wonderful art gallery and the romantic Oak Hill Cemetery, where more stories are buried in graves and vaults than could be told in a week of Sundays. In this cemetery both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis buried sons and once walked the paths in grief. There is also the church where Abraham Lincoln was observed weeping by a reporter from the Evening Star.
They will also see the schools and churches turned into hospitals during the Civil War, an event that split this largely Southern-sympathizing community. Perhaps most affecting at a time when the nation debates an apology for slavery, they will see the churches of the resolute Black community, who also formed their own businesses and schools and operated a link to the Underground Railroad even while slaves were auctioned on Wisconsin Avenue.
After the tour of Georgetown, people might want to stay and go in the house and gardens of the magnificent Tudor Hall, where the family of one of the town's founders married into the family of George Washington, who in turn married into the family of Robert E. Lee. It was recently the elegant site for the wedding of John McLaughlin of McLaughlin and Company. (Can you imagine the vows? "Until death do you part?" "Wrong, bride bird brain!"). And then you can get a real feel of 19th century canal life by taking a National Park sponsored ride on a mule-driven barge through the original Georgetown lock system. And as a sign that we are all not totally ignorant of our own history, the hot new Georgetown restaurant of the moment - a breakaway from Kinkead's - is named Tahoga after the Indian village upon which Georgetown was formed.
After this tour, when asked if you "did" Georgetown, you can honestly answer yes. The Fall season begins after Labor Day. For more information call Mary Kay Ricks, TOUR D.C., at 301-588-8999 or E-mail at tourdc@erols.com. A van tour or a walking tour, or a mix of both, for individuals or groups, is available. The tour is suitable for mature children over ten years of age. Private tours for individuals or couples are also available upon request. We can also recommend more good restaurants even if they don't have interesting historical names.
Mary Kay Ricks is a recovering Washington lawyer who believes that you can't know where you're going until you know where you've been. A 2-hour tour costs $12.00.
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