Glover Park sits astride the old boundary between the rural part of the District of Columbia that was once called Washington County, and the former city of Georgetown. Upper Georgetown, along High, Back, and Madison Streets (i.e., Wisconsin Avenue, Tunlaw Road, and Whitehaven Parkway) was characterized by tradesmen and truck gardeners on small plots of ten acres or less. In the surrounding areas of Washington County, however, the typical size of properties such as the Cox estate Burleith, the Barber estate (now the Naval Observatory), and Greenwood (north of Guy Mason) was closer to seventy acres.

In the early days of the federal city, people on the top rung of the social ladder - judges, officials, bankers, merchants — sometimes had two houses. One was a town house, convenient to business. The other was a country house, on an estate, where the owner and his family hoped to escape the city, and, in particular, its diseases. According to the prevailing “miasmatic” theory, river vapors caused people who lived in the low-lying parts of Georgetown and Washington to sicken and die. The heights above the cities, on the other hand, got the healthful benefit of what were invariably called “the salubrious breezes”.

From a modern perspective, it may be more to the point that, before the days of Governor Shepherd, the cities of Washington and Georgetown had been obliged to dispose of sewage in vacant lots within their own boundaries, or to let it run into various stagnant canals. It was illegal to haul “night-soil” out into the County, so naturally the air smelled better there, and the wells were less likely to be polluted. (Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950, I:255)

The words estate and farm were often used interchangeably in the past, with the only discernible difference being that, unlike a farmer, the owner of an estate was likely to have had another source of income, such as a government salary. As these salaries rarely rose, any additional income was welcome. Estates were therefore almost always expected to provide whatever revenue they could from some combination of gardens, orchards, vineyards, nurseries, pastures, and dairies, as well as wood lots, loam pits, gravel pits, quarries and mills. (Green, I:85)

To judge by the censuses of 1850 and 1860, it would appear that the labor force of an estate often lived on the premises, or else in nearby tenements from which the estate owner collected rent. There were a few estates and farms in our area where the work was done by German or Irish immigrants, or by “Free Colored” laborers, but on most of them it was done by slaves, or by a combination of hired labor and slaves.

Some of the local gentry, the descendants of slaveholding families from southern Maryland, brought their inherited slaves with them when they settled in the District of Columbia. Their maids, cooks, coachmen, and farmhands were also their property. Of course, a country house in the District hardly required as many slaves as a tobacco plantation, so people who owned more slaves than could be employed in their own household would hire out their surplus slaves to others, to work as cooks, maids, laundresses, carpenters, draymen, barbers, and waiters. A slave with a useful trade was a source of income to the owner. Miss Mary Ann Clark, who lived near Wisconsin and Calvert, seems to have depended entirely, in her old age, from hiring out her slaves. (Diary of Ann Green, ms., DAR Library)

At any given moment between 1810 and 1860, there were about a hundred slaves owned by the residents of Upper Georgetown and the adjoining estates, but it’s hard to say how many actually lived here. Hired slaves tended to live with their employer, who might be several houses away, or down in Georgetown, or on the other side of Rock Creek. Indeed, many slave owners in this neighborhood would not have been able to say where their slaves were on any given day, except at Christmas, the traditional time for settling accounts and renewing contracts.

Carlton Fletcher

(This article originally appeared in the Glover Park Gazette, February, 1998, as “The Social Ladder”. All rights reserved.)