Henry Threlkeld (1716-1781) was born in the Parish of Kirkoswald, in Cumberland. The circumstances of his coming here are unknown, but may be connected to the fact that Whitehaven, in Cumberland, was one apex of the “triangular trade”, exporting manufactured goods to Africa to obtain slaves to sell in America, and returning to England with tobacco, rum and sugar.

Threlkeld is thought to have come to America at the age of 24. Some time after that, he married the widow of the Rev. Matthew Hopkins. In 1753 he paid one hundred pounds for three tracts of land north and west of Georgetown, totaling 629 acres, that had been the property of Rev. Hopkins. The house Threlkeld built probably stood south of Reservoir Road and west of 35th Street, on the highest spot now owned by Visitation Convent and School. (That the house was built in 1716 is unlikely, as that is the year he was born. The error, repeated by later writers, appears to have its origin in Washington, City and Capital, 1937)

Threlkeld called his house––and may have spelled it––Berlieth. It is thought to have burned about 1783, and another was built, which would have been the home of Henry’s son, John Threlkeld, in whose time the more familiar spelling appeared: “Died on Sunday last at Burleith, residence of John Threlkeld, Elizabeth R. Threlkeld, in her 16th year, 8 days after mother.”

John Threlkeld (1758-1830), Henry’s son, was a leading citizen of Georgetown. During the American Revolution his name appears as one of the county’s Committee of Correspondence. Threlkeld was a director of the Bank of Columbia. He served as an alderman when Georgetown incorporated in 1789, and was elected mayor in 1793 to 1797. Later, he sat on the Levy Court, which governed the part of the District of Columbia outside the cities of Georgetown and Washington, called Washington County. He took a keen interest in agriculture, corresponded with Jefferson about fruit trees, and experimented with raising merino sheep (from which we may deduce a possible use for land described as “thin and stony” in 1785 assessments).

The property assembled by John Threlkeld and his father, consolidated in 1791 as Alliance, consisted of well over a thousand acres, and included what is now Georgetown University, Visitation Convent and School, Duke Ellington High School, the Washington International School, Foxhall Village, Burleith, Hillandale, Wesley Heights, Whitehaven Park, Glover-Archbold Park, and much of Glover Park.

By 1827 Alliance was no more. “Marshall’s Sale of lands and tenements in Washington County, D.C., seized and taken in execution as the estate and property of John Threlkeld, to be sold to satisfy debts due by him to the Union Bank of Georgetown, Clement Smith and the Bank of the United States.”

John Threlkeld died in 1830. “Died: On August 30, at his residence, on the heights of Georgetown, D.C., John Threlkeld, in his 73rd year. Born and resided during his life on the spot where he died. Before the separation of this county from Maryland, he represented his fellow citizens in the Legislature of that state. Mr. Threlkeld was an industrious and worthy man, with a numbrous family. A few years since, misfortune overwhelmed him, and he was stripped of his property. A few days before his death he was active and in hale health.”

Carlton Fletcher (The information in this article originally appeared in the Glover Park Gazette in December, 2004. All rights reserved.)

Sources:

Richardson, D., and Schofield, M.M., `Whitehaven and the eighteenth-century British Slave Trade' in Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, xcii, 1992, pp.183-204

Frederick County Land Records, Liber E, f.180-3

Threlkeld and Cox files, 1785 Assessments, Peabody Room, Georgetown Branch Library

Fredericktown Herald, August 11, 1810

National Intelligencer, August 17, 1810; May 7, November 6, 1811; August 31, 1826; January 5-19, December 24, 1827; September 9, 1830

Rev. Thomas Bloomer Balch, Reminiscences of Georgetown, 1859

Abstract of Title to “BURLEITH” in Frederic W. Huidekoper, 1887: ms. 127, Historical Society of Washington

Washington, City and Capital, 1937, pp.369, 745-6

“Mount Hope Lives Again”, John Claggett Proctor, The Sunday Star, February 8, 1942

Edgar Farr Russell, A Short History of Burleith, 1955

Ann Lange, “A Brief History of Burleith”, Burleith Newsletter, 1985, September-October 1998: http://www.burleith.org/history.html)