CHAMPS Community Foundation

P.O. Box 15486

Washington, DC 20003

202-543-1845

Introduction ................................................................................................................... 4

How these interviews came to be.

Tape #1, recorded February 27, 2000 ........................................................................... 6

Overbeck's arrival on Capitol Hill; first native American inhabitants;

Tape #2, continuing the February 27 session .............................................................. 20

The idea of a Central Exchange; division and development of land;

Tape #2 (cont.), start of March 1, 2000 session .......................................................... 28

Hill life and topography before 1800; layout and development

Tape #3, continuing the March 1 session .................................................................... 36

Early land holders; early buildings; the harbor and Central Exchange.

Tape #3 (cont.), start of March 7, 2000 session .......................................................... 46

The early Navy Yard and its impact on Capitol Hill;

Tape #4, continuing the March 7 session .................................................................... 53

War of 1812; Navy Yard and Marine Barracks; early 19th Century

Tape #5, recorded March 12, 2000 ............................................................................. 68

African Americans on the Hill in the 19th Century;

Tape #6, recorded March 14, 2000 ............................................................................. 83

Stories of slaves and free blacks; emancipation in D.C.; the Civil War

Tape #7, continuing the March 14 session ................................................................ 100

Lincoln Hospital; Philadelphia Row; life in D.C. during the Civil War.

Tape #7 (cont.), start of March 21, 2000 session ...................................................... 111

Capitol Hill decline and "gentrification" in the 20th Century.

Tape #8, continuing the March 21 session ................................................................ 119

Evolution of Capitol Hill housing; effects of World War I, the Great

Tape #9, recorded March 30, 2000 ........................................................................... 132

Discussion with Overbeck and Peter Powers about the Capitol Hill

Tape #9 (cont.): a final word, April 2, 2000 ............................................................. 148

Upon Overbeck's death.

Index ..........................................................................................................................149

Early in the Winter of 2000, I received a phone call from Steve and Nicky Cymrot bringing the sad news that Ruth Ann Overbeck, beloved Capitol Hill resident and unparalleled expert on the community's history, had been diagnosed with a far-advanced cancer and was not expected to recover. The Capitol Hill history she had long planned to write, based on some thirty years of research, now would not be written, and a vast store of information about the early life of our community would go with her to her grave.

Did I know anyone, they asked, who might be able to interview Ruth Ann – to tape record her words and preserve some of her knowledge for posterity?

I immediately volunteered – although at that time I knew Ruth Ann only slightly. I was aware of her reputation as a scholar and community leader, and had spent an evening seated next to her at the annual fundraising dinner of the CHAMPS Foundation in the Spring of 1999. In the course of that evening she had utterly charmed me with her wit and her knowledge of our neighborhood, and I had resolved to get to know her better – not just to enjoy her wonderful company but to deepen my woefully superficial understanding of my own community. I could not have guessed the unfortunate terms under which my wish would be granted.

The interviews transcribed here were conducted over a period of 32 days, beginning on February 27. By that time Ruth Ann's condition had deteriorated to the point where, for all of our sessions, she had to remain lying down, and although she stayed mentally sharp to the end, the reader will notice some diminishment, in the later sessions, in her ability to put thoughts clearly into words. To the very last, however – and we recorded our final interview only two days before her death – she maintained a clear-eyed acceptance of the fact that she was about to die, without ever losing her enthusiasm for our project or her marvelous sense of humor.

In these final weeks of her life, Ruth Ann was attended by a rotating team of longtime neighbors and friends. As they came and went, monitoring her condition and helping with daily chores, they were an ongoing reminder to me that Capitol Hill is indeed a small town within a large city. The community to which Ruth Ann had given so much was quietly, lovingly, giving back.

Ruth Ann, for her part, more than confirmed my first impression of her. She was a woman of incandescent intelligence, with a Southerner's gift for storytelling. She approached her research, her causes, her whole life, with joy and passion, and I trust the reader will sense this in what follows.

We attempted in these interviews to "start at the beginning" and proceed chronologically, but the reader will notice that we didn't adhere strictly to that pattern.
With occasional detours, our historical route was very roughly sequential up through the Civil War era, but then, at Ruth Ann's request, we jumped forward to discuss Capitol Hill development and preservation efforts in the 20th Century. Our intention was to return after that to the late 19th Century and the Boss Sheppard era, but our efforts were cut short by Ruth Ann's death. To help the reader navigate the route, I've included a subject index at the end.

I should note for the record that although Ruth Ann was best known locally for her research and preservation efforts on Capitol Hill, her work as a historian carried her far beyond the confines of this community and the District of Columbia. As she was careful to specify in our first interview, she didn't view herself as a "Capitol Hill historian" but as a historian whose interests included the origin and development of her own neighborhood.

It's also worth remembering that Ruth Ann conducted her historical research in an unusual way – as an independent business person, taking on projects for various paying clients. The projects included work for history-minded homeowners, for architectural and engineering firms, and for various large institutions such as the U.S. Naval Academy and the Department of Justice. Approaching her work in this way, I believe, helped to keep her out of the ivory tower to which historians are prone to retreat and gave her an especially keen appreciation for the "interconnectedness" of a community's life over time. In other words, it made her a better historian.

In closing I must express my thanks and admiration to Ruth Ann's devoted husband Robert Hughes, who worked with her in her business and now holds her precious trove of notes, photographs, maps, and other documents and materials. Special thanks are also due to longtime Capitol Hill resident Katie Jane Teel, who generously volunteered her services in transcribing all of these interviews. Hers was an act of kindness and community spirit that Ruth Ann would have appreciated.

John Franzén

December 2000

Franzén: This is Sunday, February 27th, in the year 2000. I'm John Franzén, and I'm here at Sibley Hospital in the room of Ruth Ann Overbeck, who is here as a patient. Ruth Ann is a long-time resident of Capitol Hill and an expert on Capitol Hill history.

Ruth Ann, why don't you start out by telling us a little about how you came to Capitol Hill and got interested in this subject.

Overbeck: I came to Capitol Hill because, first, I had been to Washington, DC, and I absolutely and totally loved Washington when I was here as an urban study student one summer. I decided that if I could possibly get back I would. So in between college and graduate school – it was 1968, in the spring. And in May, on Mother's Day, the house tour takes place for the Capitol Hill Restoration Society.

It never occurred to me that I would be doing anything unusual or different when friends asked me to go along on the tour. Later that afternoon, I found out every other house and garden tour in the city had been canceled that spring because of the fear of additional problems following the assassination of Martin Luther King. And here we were, walking through this neighborhood of little bitty to medium-sized buildings, some frame, some brick, some very plain and some highly ornate. Moms and dads were out with babies in strollers. There were middle-class people who were obviously mid-level government functionaries. There were people who were not so middle-class who were decked out in Easter finery, or maybe their everyday finery, and they were out looking to see what the decorators would have done to the houses.

It was a long tour that year. If memory serves me right, the tour house that was farthest east was in the 100 block of Kentucky – which was really pushing things at that point because a lot of people felt that that just wasn't part of Capitol Hill, and that it was almost dangerous ground, as it were.

So, off we trekked and in we went. And out the front doors we came, and it had such a sense of community and such a sense of: "Hello, how are you? I haven't seen you in six months." Well, nobody sees anybody in the winter in Washington. We all stay inside, unless we go to a party or something like that.

So, it really was an interesting take on a community within a city. I had spent my earliest years in Dallas. I absolutely and totally loved Dallas, hated being moved from Dallas to Denison, which was a small Texas town, but knew the advantages of both – the art museums and the symphonies, and [on the other hand] the little, tiny town-ness, where you can walk into the bank and say: "What is my balance, please?"

And this seemed like it was a good place for me.

My people in Texas – friends, and not so many relatives, because relatives didn't want me to come to Washington, DC – but my friends had said, if you go to Washington, the very least you should do is move to Capitol Hill because that's where all the eggheads live. Well, that was a definition I wasn't really sure fit, but that's okay.

And before I went back to Texas and to graduate school, I had bought a house. Now, buying the house was at the fringe, because I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time doing rehab, because I had other things I wanted to do. So I bought a house in the 100 block of 12th Street Southeast, at number 148, to be precise.

It wasn't the first bid I put in. I put a bid in the 600 block of North Carolina Avenue, and that didn't go through – and thank heavens, because that house later, I found out, had structural problems. I put a bid in on a house at [148] 12th Street Southeast.

Real estate agents were very clever; they still are. Some of my best friends are agents, so don't take offense. But nobody told me that two of the few murders that had happened on Capitol Hill during the riots had happened at 148 12th Street. An elderly woman had left her door open while she walked across the street to the corner of 12th and Independence to post a letter. Two little boys – the oldest of whom was 11 – being opportunistic, saw an open door to a house and they decided they wanted to help themselves. They got surprised when Mrs. Schofe [sp?] went back into her house. There she was; there were these little boys. They started evidently pummeling her or tackling her. She screamed and an elderly man from across the street came over, armed with fireplace tongs. The little boy was strong enough to succumb both of them. Mrs. Schofe died on the spot and the elderly man died later.

And all of this was because these kids had thought it would really be neat to have deep-sea fishing rods.

We thought, the majority of us thought, at that point, of 11-year-olds and younger as being kids. Some of that has changed now, that attitude.

So, in the 32 years there have been social changes, there have been wonderful opportunities, there have been new things that have happened on the Hill. There have been some old things we have lost, but for the most part the Hill has remained a community.

I got out of graduate school in 1970, in May. I came and I moved into my house on 12th Street. And I have never left it.

Franzén: Now, you came with an interest in history already – you were a student of history – and you simply applied that interest to the place where you came to live, yes?

Overbeck: Yes. I'm from Texas, as I said. In Texas, one does not get out – or at least when I was in school – did not get out of school without having had Texas history at fourth, eighth, and eleventh grade. And no matter what your major in college, if it was in anything in the liberal arts, you had to have had at least one semester of Texas history. So you were well grounded, you were rooted, you knew where you came from, you knew who the people were who had given their blood, their sweat, their tears, their joy. In many ways it made the place make a lot of sense.

In Washington, I found that not very many people knew what made Washington make sense. Most of the history that had been done, to that time, had been focused on the "monumental" Washington – certainly not on Capitol Hill.

Georgetown had gotten more than its share of history, because it was the oldest part of the city. It predates the rest of Washington, as we now know it, by at least 50 years. And we also had a whole group of people who were interested in very specific aspects of Washington, such as city planning, the Congress's interaction with the city in terms of such things as where Congress had lived, what had been the influence patterns of Congress, et cetera. But about hometown Washington, I could probably have put everything that had been written in my two hands and it would have measured a stack of maybe six inches. It was very frustrating.

There was a lot of mythology running around. The Restoration Society had done its share of mythology. The real estate community had certainly done its share of mythology. And as I began to try to find the answers, I got deeper and deeper into it. This was not necessarily my primary work, because my primary work was owning our history company, that let people have access to their history, whether it was the general public or the Congress or another Federal institution or whatever. So, digging for Capitol Hill history was tangential, for the most part.

Somebody the other day suggested that my tombstone say "Ruth Ann Overbeck, Capitol Hill historian." I kind of bristled because that is sort of the last of the things that I would have put on there. I would have said "Historian," but I would not have put "Capitol Hill," because I haven't done Capitol Hill history yet. And that is part of what we are doing now.

Franzén: You don't want to be remembered as just a Capitol Hill historian.

Overbeck: No. Somebody said, okay, fine, put "Historian, parentheses, Capitol Hill." [Laughs] Which is probably okay.

It's not that I'm not delighted with the work I've done on Capitol Hill. I'm proud of the work that I have brought to Capitol Hill. It's just that it has not been by any means the full flesh of the history I've done. But most people on Capitol Hill have no idea of the history I have done, so they focus on where we are.

One of the first things I found out was that the mythology was that Daniel Carroll, the original proprietor – and this is not the signer of the Declaration of Independence; it's his nephew. He always had applied a place after his name – not always, but most of the time – this Daniel Carroll had applied after his name something written out as "of Duddington" or "of Ddngton" – any kind of short form like that – and there are people who can't translate it well. So, even in a wonderful manuscript collection such as John Nicholson's Papers, the things that refer to Daniel Carroll are written wrong because "Duddington" is listed incorrectly.

Franzén: What does "of Duddington" actually refer to?

Overbeck: It refers to the fact that he lived on Duddington, and the other Daniel Carroll didn't. It was the same thing as saying John Carlisle of Boston versus a John Carlisle of Queens, or something like that. Just letting you know, but usually in more proximity.

People had a tremendous time naming themselves for each other. Families would perpetuate names. We would have as many as five or six John's, James's and Tom's in the same large family. And trying to keep track of all these people got kind of horrendous. That was one of the reasons why something like "of Duddington" got applied to Daniel Carroll.

Franzén: I know there is a Duddington Place on Capitol Hill.

Overbeck: Duddington Place on Capitol Hill is part of the land that Daniel Carroll owned. It may or may not – because I haven't platted it out – contain an actual piece of the property that he retained and on which he had his estate, his town estate, after the city divided up the property.

Franzén: He called his estate Duddington?

Overbeck: He called his estate Duddington. The Duddington name [for the street] is recent. The real estate industry got into it again. The original name of the street when it was carved out after Daniel Carroll's estate was torn down in the 1880s, the original name of the street was Heckman [sp?] Place.

Franzén: Heckman.

Overbeck: And that didn't sound fancy enough and it wasn't going to intrigue people to come and look at anything that was there.

Franzén: This was when?

Overbeck: Probably 1950s, I believe. I haven't checked the exact date on the map.

Franzén: The name changed that recently?

Overbeck: Yes, yes. It was definitely a let's-get-people-to-move-to-Capitol-Hill place.

Franzén: Daniel Carroll owned a lot of the property in what is now Capitol Hill, going back to when?

Overbeck: To the 1680s. The Carroll/Young family had inherited it from the original proprietor, who had received the land grant from Lord Baltimore when the English came over to form the colony of Maryland.

Now, over time, other people got land along the west bank of the Anacostia River, but starting with the original land grants, from the mouth of the Anacostia River, all the way up to what we now know as, certainly, the Roseville area or Isherwood area of Capitol Hill up by Benning Road, it was dominantly under the control of the Carroll's or the Young's, and they were cousins and intermarried and all that kind of good stuff.

Franzén: So it was a plantation?

Overbeck: All of the land was listed in its granting as plantations. Whether we would think of them as plantations or not is altogether a different matter. There was nothing like a Tara that stood on Capitol Hill. Zero.

The person who owned the biggest chunk of land east of Daniel Carroll was a man named Walter Houp [pronounced "Howp"] – that funny "o-w" diphthong that they say in Maryland for German "o-u." And you'll find his name on the street maps, and it's new too. It's Walter Houp Place, or Walter Houp Court, and it's just north of East Capitol Street between 11th and 12th. And one of the things I did was get to name the street, because you cannot have mail delivered to an unnamed address in the District of Columbia. A property was grandfathered in as having been in such constant use that it was going to be allowed to be an alley dwelling, even though alley dwellings had been a problem for years and years and years.

The client who owned the house said: "Ruth Ann, can you come over and fix this thing? We've got to have a name." Well, it took me going back to the 17th Century to find a name that would be acceptable to all of the people who had to rule on it, which began with the ANC Commission, the ANC 6A, which is dominantly African-American. So, [we could pick] none of the people who had slaves, virtually no one who was white-white, in Jim Crow days, none of the big speculators who had come in and bought some of the property that belonged to some of the African-Americans, certainly no one from the pre-Civil War era. On and on and on.

Walter Houp was the one person that I could find about whom there was no record of slave ownership. That does not mean he did not own slaves, and I explained this to the ANC Commission. But it does mean that he neither abused them – nothing came up in the court records about them, which means if he had family groups he kept them intact, because he didn't sell them, et cetera.

So they decided they would accept Walter Houp Court. So that's another new name.

Franzén: Now, you mention slavery. All of these land owners on what is now Capitol Hill were slave owners?

Overbeck: I don't know about Walter Houp. I am talking about people who lived here. The first group of land owners on Capitol Hill – patentees, the ones who got the grants – for the most part did not live here. They used the land for maybe the first 10 to 15 years for barter.

We have a record of Mr. Gerard [sp?] trading one piece of property for 40 hogsheads of tobacco. Other people traded for different commodities – [but] primarily tobacco, because tobacco was the major product of the Chesapeake region, and we do fall in that Chesapeake region. As far as I can tell nobody really took residence here until about the 1680s.

Franzén: It would have been wooded land up to that time?

Overbeck: Probably, part and part [not]. You have this long history of the Nactcatanke Indians.

Franzén: Nactcatanke. Spell that.

Overbeck: Oh gosh. That again is like Duddington, the spelling. The simplest version of it is N-a-c-t-c-a-t-a-n-k-e. Now, there was a glottal stop at the beginning that the Jesuits combine with an "A" to get it to be able to be pronounced – because the Jesuits were the ones who made the first effort of making sure that the language became known, and so on.

The Nactcatanke Indians lived primarily on the east side of the Anacostia River, as far down as Bolling Air Force Base. Right at the end of what we now know as the East Capitol Street bridge was a major settlement of them.

They moved. They did slash and burn, which means as they wore out fields they would move, let those fields lie fallow, do the next field, and go on.

Franzen: They were farmers.

Overbeck: They were farmers, but primarily they were diversified. They were settled. They were fisher persons. They had wonderful ways of seining the Anacostia River and catching the herring runs or shad runs that would come up.

Franzén: With nets.

Overbeck: Yes. In addition to this, they were very, very active in trading, and they tended to be, from all that we are going to find out about them, the anchor group that enabled products of Indians from as far – this is pre-point of contact, which means pre-settlement by whites or even pre-contact by whites – that enabled Indian products from as far away as places like the Great Lakes, such as copper, to get all the way down, not only to the Washington area, but all the way on down to the coast.

The residual culture of this is wonderful. It is contained for the most part at the Smithsonian, and they are very proud of the collection.

Additional digs were done up and down the river. There was a major discovery just found down around the K Street freeway on the west side of the Anacostia, where no one was expecting it to be, and it probably more than doubled the amount of artifacts that we already had from the Native Americans.

Franzén: Are there place names now here in the area from them? The Potomac, for example, that's an Indian name.

Overbeck: That's an Indian name, but not from the Nactcatanke. The one from the Nactcatanke is the Anacostia. And the Anacostia River used to be called the Eastern Branch of the Potomac. Old maps show it as that. It was St. Isadore's Bay at one point. It was St. James Cove at one point. There were a whole bunch of changes right early on. Then it became the Eastern Branch of the Anacostin [sic].

However, even with that, I have found about three of the original or secondary levels of title transfers that say the Anacostin River.

Franzen: Anacostin?

Overbeck: Yes. They were calling it the Anacostia, or the Anacostin River – ending with a "t-i-n" – as far back as the late 1600s. So it's had a very checkered history with its names and it's very difficult to follow. You have to know the chronology if you're working on things like bridges and so forth, to know when they really occurred.

Finally, "Anacostia River" was, I believe, adopted in the 1920s as the final name of the river.

Franzén: That's very late.

Overbeck: Very late.

Franzén: Let's get back to this mythology issue. You said a lot of people's assumptions about the early history of Capitol Hill, in terms of who owned what and where, are mistaken.

Overbeck: Basically they thought Daniel Carroll was God – he owned everything, he did everything. He did an awful lot, but in terms of the Federal city, he was not necessarily as pro-Federal city as we have all been led to believe. First of all, he was a curmudgeon.

Franzén: Can I interrupt for just a moment? I want to get this straight. The Daniel Carroll we're talking about now – when did he live?

Overbeck: I think it is the 1770s to 1834. He died a very bitter man. There were people who accused him no end of being parsimonious about his land, that he wanted too much money for it, and therefore people wouldn't move there; that he wouldn't play all the games – although he played a lot of the games because he furnished the land for and helped to build or pay for the building of the Capitol that was in use after the Brits burned the original capitol.

He built a beautiful row of six houses that stood facing the Capitol and would be along the line of just about across A Street where the Library of Congress now stands, the main library, and so on.

Franzén: So, he was the owner at the time that the city was basically laid out and planned as the Federal city. Now, what exactly did he own?

Overbeck: He owned a lot of Southwest, which people ignore. He owned a lot of Buzzard Point, over to about 2nd and a Half, 3rd Street, 4th Street, and gerrymandered up into the north, all the way up into Northeast.

It was a nice little narrow strip. These lands were laid out, in many ways, the way old European lands were. You fought very hard to get water frontage.

Overbeck: Yes. And he had made an aborted effort at forming something called "Carrollsburg" back in the late 1880s, to form a town.

Franzén: 1880s or 1780s?

Overbeck: 1780s, of course.

He made a very aborted effort of forming this little town, hoping people would come and buy, and so forth. Very few people did. Even fewer people decided to live there. So that sort of bellied up. But he made whatever money he was going to make. A very tiny thing, maybe six blocks long by four to six blocks deep from the river, which is what we consider a very small town.

He ended up land poor. And in the 1820s he lost a lot of his land to taxes, or had to sell it very low for that. His obituary lets you know that he is not one of the most popular people in town, but that rather he had a heart of gold and he was a good man and so forth.

One of the things that plays into this, and none of us have really sorted it out how much, is that he was one of the remaining Catholic families, and once the colony of Maryland declared Catholicism as a religion persona non grata.

Franzén: Which was when?

Overbeck: In the 1700s. Then it became Episcopalian. Christ Church on Capitol Hill is the oldest church chartered in the Federal city of Washington. Remember, we're not talking about Georgetown, and we're not talking about anything above Florida Avenue or east of the Anacostia River. It came as close to being a state church as we would ever have had in the United States. There were pews for the President. They were expected to attend every so often. It was the official church of the Marine band and the Marines. They marched down there every Sunday morning and they went to the balcony – their preserve, as it were.

Phil Ogilvie has done some studies and we'll cite his monograph because he's done a study on Masonry, Episcopalianism and Catholicism, and how the different people held office, what kinds of control they had.

Now, Daniel Carroll built himself the house that he thought was going to be "the" premier house in Washington – certainly over in this end of town – as an estate. This is jumping ahead. I will jump back. Because to understand the business of how these people with acres and acres and acres of land that stretched from the Anacostia all the way up into Northeast suddenly ended up with 800 lots of land that were not necessarily contiguous, you've got to know how the city got itself divided.

Franzén: Divided?

Overbeck: Divided. George Washington, once he determined where he was going to have the city – because it was left up to him by Congress to do this – and once he decided where he was going to do this, he then sent some emissaries out to buy land as if they were buying it for themselves.

Franzén: To pretend they were buying it for themselves?

Overbeck: Yes, but to, in fact, be buying it for the government.

That didn't wash very well. Too many people in town knew too much. And a man named William Prout came down from Baltimore who had recently arrived there from England, and Prout had the land that had been originally Walter Houp's and two or three other people's. They combined them over time, they had been combined. He bought the whole schmere.

Prout had a different idea about his land, in that several years earlier he had tried to find land in England that would be income-producing property – an estate that would have a village, that would have industry, et cetera, similar – far-flung, but similar, though certainly not on the scale of one of the villages or estates that Prince Charles owns. It's self-contained.

He understood that kind of use of property. I don't think Daniel Carroll ever understood that kind of use of property. This Mr. Prout's ideas about land use were much more realistic than virtually any of the other proprietors in the Federal city in that he knew what it took. Because he had gone through years of this in England, watching how small communities built up, how estates built up, how they functioned, what kinds of things it takes to make them run.

Anyway, when Pierre L'Enfant was tapped by George Washington to look at the city, he told him to start down along the Anacostia at the east end. Again, this was one of George Washington's ploys. Just as he told his buddies to go out and buy the land for the city and to do it on the east end, L'Enfant was to start on the east end to make people think that was where things would really happen. L'Enfant was an engineer and he had looked at the city and he came up ...

Franzen: By "east end," you mean where?

Overbeck: Capitol Hill.

The only thing that was included in the Federal City was, using your fist, if you have it pointing towards you and the knuckle below your thumb is Fort McNair and you follow the line along Hains Point and the Potomac River, up to where Rock Creek really comes underneath one of the bridges and keeps on going up to P street, then there is a little lump. If you look at the map, there is a little lump there at the top that goes sort of over from P Street down to Florida Avenue. Then follow your knuckles down to the third knuckle along Florida Avenue, then the little pinky usually drops down enough, and that is where Benjamin Stoddard owned some land.

He didn't want to be in the Federal city. And his good buddy George Washington gerrymandered the line so he didn't have to be. And that's how we got that funny little lump over there by the Anacostia that drops down and goes over down to C Street Northeast on Capitol Hill. Then right down there you take a turn down in the outside of your fist and you're along the Anacostia River and the stadium, and get back to this lump that is the base of your pinky and you are sort of by that point close to the Navy Yard. Go on across and follow that and get on back down here to the original bump under your thumb, and that's where Fort McNair is.

That's all that was ever intended to be the Federal city.

Franzén: All the area in Northwest ...

Overbeck: That was Washington County. And so was Washington County over on the east side of the Anacostia. The incorporated city of Georgetown was part of the District of Columbia, and the incorporated city of Alexandria was part of the District of Columbia, and Arlington County was part of the District of Columbia.

Franzén: But this perfect diamond shape ...

Overbeck: That's it, the District of Columbia. The ten [four?] points contained all these other things, but Georgetown operated autonomously, Alexandria certainly operated autonomously. The county had its own justices of the peace.

Franzén: Washington County?

Overbeck: Washington County and Arlington County. And here we were, this little thing in the middle, and we are the city. Now, all of these other areas were supposed to be the buffer zones. They were supposed to be the support system. We could lean on the infrastructure that was already in place in Alexandria and Georgetown, until we got our own banks, our own libraries, our own whatever started well enough to be involved.

Franzen: This was George Washington's concept.

Overbeck: Yes, but not by himself. Madison played a role in this; Jefferson played a role in this. Some of the leading lights of the world played a role in this, as it were.

At any rate, the city was only supposed to be in this little knot. And in that little knot, according to George Washington's public professions, the east end of it was for Capitol Hill. From the Capitol on east would have been the biggy.

Franzén: The biggy?

Overbeck: The biggy. It would have been the city.

Now, this suited L'Enfant beautifully. L'Enfant was an engineer. He was excellent at it, a very good designer. Temperamental as heck. He came across the ferry at about the end of 14th Street Southeast and he came across what he called essentially this "plain," and he rhapsodized about what a wonderful place it would be for – and started listing all of the city things that should be [located] there.

Franzén: This "plain."

Overbeck: Yes, it was almost like a plain. It was lumpy, but it was not mountainous. It was not a valley. It was not deeply gorged. We had a creek going across Pennsylvania Avenue – or where Pennsylvania Avenue was going to be. There was a creek going down to the Anacostia. You can deal with creeks.

Franzén: He was referring to Capitol Hill as a plain?

Overbeck: Yes. The interesting part of it is, when people say, Where is Capitol Hill, the cab drivers will tell you: to 2nd Street, or the [edge of the] Federal enclave, or maybe, if they're generous, to 6th Street. Now maybe they will say out to Lincoln Park, if they want a good tip. Past Lincoln Park is still sort of verboten.

But L'Enfant looked at it as a whole. Eighth Street would be the commercial center. It would be the seat of the Central Exchange.

People who travel and go to England and so on would know that there is something called the Royal Exchange. What happens at the Royal Exchange is stock brokering, same thing as the New York Stock Exchange. However, in those days of sailing ships, the way that took place was by the water, where people could see the ships coming in, get the latest news of the ships, see whose ship had gone down, whose ship had made it, whose ship had taken on an extra load, what a commodity was selling for in Barbados or Portugal or wherever, and then they would do their speculating on that basis, on that information. Very fresh information.

This is why water was so important. This is one of the reasons why this city ended up being located here. One of the reasons the Anacostia River was so very important was because of the water. There would have been no reason to have an international capital that could not be reached by anything other than land because there was no good land transportation.

Franzén: And this is about as far up as you could navigate with a large ship on the river, yes?

Overbeck: Certainly on the other side, because on the Potomac you could not get past the Three Sisters and the rocks up there, and on the Anacostia you were beginning no longer to be able to take big ships up to Bladensburg. By "big" ships we are really talking tiny ships. We think of them as big ships from a historic point of view, but they are not. They are really tiny.

Anyway, a perfect place – 8th Street from Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast to the river was going to be the seat of the Central Exchange, with the exchange being the public reservation that was right there on the water, or at the water, at the foot of where we now have most of the Navy Yard. The Navy Yard now consumes more than that, but much of the Navy Yard was there.

Among other things, he had planned – L'Enfant planned to have the local government sited where Garfield Park is. It was going to be where the legislature, the mayoral offices, all of those things were going to be. There were going to be all sorts – the public market was going to be down by where the Marines are now. Where the Arthur Capper housing projects are – that was going to be the site of the public market. The public market was crucial. In those days of non-refrigeration, things we take for granted were luxuries, and the market was critical.

There was going to be a canal that connected from just east of 2nd Street, I believe, Southeast, all the way up to Canal Street now, which is up the diagonal street that goes below the Rayburn building that goes over to Independence. The canal was going to continue there. The canal was going to go on up and go across the foot of the Capitol and then turn to the west and go straight along what is now Constitution Avenue, out to the Potomac.

Franzén: That canal was built?

Overbeck: Part of it was built, a lot of it wasn't. And there was going to be another leg that went down Delaware Avenue, down to Ft. McNair, but that's a whole different story and it doesn't get in here. It didn't happen, either, until much later.

Anyway, with all of these plans and things that were going to go on, it turned out that virtually everything except the Capitol and the congressional buildings – which weren't planned for because they didn't think they would need them – and part of the Navy Yard had been platted on Mr. Prout's land and not Mr. Carroll's land. So the real city of Capitol Hill, our real hometown, was not Daniel Carroll's of Duddington; our real city was Mr. Prout's city.

Franzén: Maybe I'm getting ahead of us here but I have a question about names. Jenkins Hill – what is the significance of that name? I remember when I first moved to Washington I was told this was originally Jenkins Hill and this was a sheep pasture, a farm, or some such thing. What's the basis of that story?

Overbeck: There supposedly is a lease to a man, a farmer named Jenkins, on that hill. I have never really bothered with it. One of the reasons I have never really bothered with it is that right across the Anacostia, in a direct line with [Capitol] Hill, out Alabama Avenue, there is a Jenkins Hill. That is Jenkins Hill. It belonged to the Jenkins family for years.

So if no one knows anything more about the Jenkins Hill name than I just told you... There is supposedly a lease running around with a farmer's name on it – "Jenkins" – for the Capitol [Hill] for a short period of time.

Franzén: But it cannot be documented?

Overbeck: It is supposedly on a lease. I've not seen the lease.

Franzén: But he was not an owner of the land.

Overbeck: No. In terms of any of the names of anything that we need to name things, we have a lot of heroes and a lot of scofflaws and so forth that we would do better naming things for than Mr. Jenkins.

Franzén: So, it was Prout, more than anyone else, who owned the land that is now Capitol Hill.

Overbeck: Almost every school, almost every public school is on Prout land, what was Prout land, including the natatorium, the market, the new Eastern Market, going right on up.

Franzén: You said the "new" Eastern Market. Why do you call it the new Eastern Market?

Overbeck: Because the original market was built down on two reservations that are between K and L and 7th and 6th Southeast.

Franzén: That was a market somewhat similar to what Eastern Market has become? An open-air gathering place – or partly enclosed, partly open air?

Overbeck: There are no written descriptions of the market in its original state that we have been able to find. We have looked and looked and looked. That doesn't mean they won't turn up tomorrow.

In their plan, Washington, Jefferson and Madison all set down parameters of what they thought was crucial. Jefferson is the one agrarian who thought that public markets were absolutely crucial to survival of the city. So he planned for there to be one in the eastern section of the city, the central section of the city, the western section of the city, and the northern section of the city.

Central Market is the one that was built first and it was down on the [National] Archives site.

Franzén: On the canal?

Overbeck: Back on the canal. It made great sense. Mr. Prout lobbied throughout the 1790s to the city commissioners to build a market in the eastern section. There is a wonderful petition from people who lives and worked east of the Capitol in 1798, I believe, and for the most part it lists their occupation, their country of origin. There are even women on it – I thought, great! – and they wanted a "flesh and fowl market." Remember, this is that 10-hour workday, six days a week, and if they're going to go shopping – there is no refrigeration, it's hot in Washington, and if everybody and their family are trying to pull their weight working, then they are off down to Central Market. That is a long way to walk up and down that bloody hill and come all the way back down to the river area.

So finally, in 1804 or 1805, Mr. Prout and a couple of his buddies down by the river send a letter to President Jefferson and he okays it. They start building the market immediately.

Now, whether or not it was anything more than a covered shed arrangement initially – we do not know because we do not know yet which floor we found. It is a beautiful brick floor. We don't know if we found the 1823 addition floor or if we found the original floor.

Franzén: The floor of the old market that was found during construction of the Marine ...

Overbeck: Not even demolition yet or construction. It is during the presentation for what is called "mitigating the land" for the expenditure of Federal money on a Federal project.

It is so exciting to see that floor come up. They called me and said, Ruth Ann, get over here. I said, great. It was really great. We don't know yet. We will find out.

People are asking, What will we find there? What kind of things should we find? Well, hoops from barrels; nails, obviously. Probably virtually no cans at all, because America was laggardly in getting cans into production. They probably wouldn't have gotten their cans into production and useful enough to be taken to a diversified market until after the Civil War, which is when this market ceased to be used. Certainly any kind of jugs that would have held oil or olives. Any kind of glassware that would have been used to import things. The land in Washington is very acidic, so to expect basketry to have survived is a little bit out of line.

Anyway, we are all excited about that. Our knowledge of the market expanded by a thousand-fold when we found that.

Franzén: When was that found, exactly?

Overbeck: December.

Franzén: Just this past year, 1999?

Overbeck: Yes, 1999.

Franzén: And that [site]will be thoroughly excavated before the construction of the Marine facilities goes forward, is that right?

Overbeck: It's supposed to be, if everything falls into train, yes. And we are hoping even if everything doesn't fall into train, someone will have the insight – and I have talked to the Council member about this – that somebody will have the insight to know how important this is to Capitol Hill, because we have nothing on Capitol Hill that is an artifact trove like that would be. So we are excited about it.

That market – and then all of a sudden the Central Exchange didn't happen.

Franzén: We are beginning tape two. I'm John Franzén. I'm interviewing Ruth Ann Overbeck, talking about the history of Capitol Hill.

Ruth Ann, you were talking about William Prout who owned the land that at the foot of what is now 8th Street on the Anacostia River. When that land was designated as the place that was going to become the commercial center for the new Federal city, did he make a lot of money from the subdivision of that property, and the lots and so forth? Was that a windfall for him? What happened?

Overbeck: I think he anticipated doing that, but it's not exactly what happened, and certainly not up front. Prout speculated in the land. He protested to his family back in England that he had had no idea that his land was going to be so valuable.

On the other hand, with all the rumors that were going around here and in Baltimore, and with the people that he knew, even though he was a newcomer to the United States, there was almost no way that he didn't know pretty well what was going to happen. Maybe not that the Central Exchange would be there, but that this would be very valuable land.

Now, what happened is that L'Enfant loves [Prout's] land and thinks that it is absolutely great land, planned for the Central Exchange, for a market and the commercial corridor, et cetera. The way in which the city land became divided into lots and squares, which is still our standard dimension for land parcels, is that the commissioners had each piece of land surveyed – of each proprietor – and then they offered back to the proprietors a deal that George Washington had talked them into taking, which he said was a deal they couldn't refuse, which was really a deal they probably should have refused.

Out of each piece of land, divided into lots and squares, half of the lots were to be given back to the proprietors for them to keep or sell as they wished. They got no recompense for streets, alleys, sidewalks, public reservations.

You think about the fact that out of Prout's land had to come the reservation for the market, the reservation for the Central Exchange – a pretty big chunk of land – and they had the onus of marketing their land in direct competition to the lots in the same locations where the government was marketing theirs.

Franzén: So the government itself owned some of the land and they became land speculators, too, in a sense.

Overbeck: Absolutely. That was how they were going to pay for constructing the Capitol and White House, et cetera.

Franzén: And Prout and the others who owned the land could only make money off the land that was going to be lots. In other words, the government didn't pay them anything for the public space.

Overbeck: That's right. Anything the public was going to use, kiss it goodbye.

Now, we have one person in the city who had sense enough to say that George Washington was a you-know-what, and that was little Davy Burns [sp?], whose land is down where the White House is, and the Van Ness mansion, which is now where the DAR et cetera is located.

And Davy Burns politely told Mr. Washington that he had no business messing with their land. After all, the only way he [Washington] had gotten land was to marry the rich widow Custis.

Anyway, Davy had a pretty good idea about what was going to happen.

Mr. Prout, on the other hand, unlike George Walker, who was a man who owned the land east of Prout – if you think of the Anacostia going from west to east of South Capitol Street, you would say Daniel Carroll is on there until about 4th Street, and at 4th Street Mr. Prout picks up for about seven squares and goes over to almost 11th street. Then there is George Walker, a Scotsman, and so on. These are speculators who have bought in. These are not people who – with the exception of Daniel Carroll – who had owned the land and farmed it and knew the land. People like George Walker didn't make the money they thought they were going to make and got tired and went home. They just cut out.

Prout had a better sense of how to do things. First of all, and how much this has to do with anything we are not exactly sure, but it probably had a lot to do with his mortgage. He ended up marrying one of the daughters of the man from whom he had bought his land, and the man from whom he bought the land was Jonathan Slater. So he got an extension on the time he had to pay. It was not a formal extension, you can just tell it happened.

Then Prout maintained his mercantile store in Baltimore, giving himself a firm foundation in finance. He opened a mercantile store in Georgetown shortly after 1790, giving himself another pretty firm foundation, and also making some pretty good friends of people like Samuel Davidson, and so forth, who had inside information because they were good buddies of George Washington.

He then decides it is about time for him to move to Washington. In the meantime, he has been trying to get the commissioners who have oversight over all this land, its use and disposal and so on, to do several things, one of which is to get busy faster in terms of promoting the land. And he also has a deal going wherein he is offering up lots not only for sale but for lease.

Now, their income is a very big problem with Mr. Prout. Mr. Prout is used to the British system of metes and bounds in terms of measuring land – metes and bounds, which means feet and inches, chains and so forth, this whole series of different ways you can do metes and bounds. The standard city lots of Washington were laid out in rectangles that were feet and inches, and that was that. All of a sudden we come to a deed from Mr. Prout and it will say 90 feet from Virginia Avenue due north X number of feet, due east X number of feet, et cetera, et cetera.

It made following his land transaction a real pain, but he was able to get his land leased and he leased a surprising portion of it, actually. He didn't sell as much of it as he had hoped to sell, but he moved to Washington, into the enclave that had been the Slater homestead, or home place.

When you talk about a "home place," in this particular time, you are talking about the place in which the family actually dwelt. It may not be the house. It could be the house, but it may just simply be the location. The Slater's had lived between 7th and 8th and M and Virginia Avenue. The family graveyard was there at the corner of M and 8th Street, right above the gate of the Navy Yard. So they left the houses and barns standing. And in one of his letters back to England, Prout says that he has more buildings on his property than there are in all of the rest of the city combined.

Well, we don't think so, because we know there were not that many buildings on Slater land, and Carroll had a substantial number of buildings. Certainly people like Nutley down in Southwest had a substantial number of buildings, but he did have a good coterie from which to select.

There is one intriguing ad from about 1793 that says that the Eastern Branch Tavern is opening in the former home of Mr. Slater. If that is true – and there is no way to disprove it or really to prove it unless something else comes to light – if that is true, that is the earliest commercial tavern/hotel established in the city of Washington. And it would be down there to serve the people along the wharf – a wharf was being built. They

already had wharves at the foot of South Capitol Street to take stone and timber up to the Capitol because that was the easiest way to bring it here – by water, then sled it up.

They already had wharves there for boat owners, ship owners. And the reason they had those was because, again, if you are going to have something like a Central Exchange you have to have ways for people to exchange information. So you are trying to entice the boats to come, unload there, hopefully first, and they can give as much information as possible to those people who want to do the speculation and so on.

Franzén: Did you say what the year was for the tavern?

Overbeck: I think it was 1793. We probably better check it, but I think it was 1793.

Prout also talked about the fact that he has warehouses in Washington. Well, the only property he actually owned in Washington is the Slater property, so we're assuming that he had warehouses where he was going to be storing additional merchandise for his enterprise – either in Georgetown or in Baltimore, or both – temporarily, until he could be storing it in some of these barns. But we don't know that for sure.

Now, he marries and doesn't move here for a couple of years. And there is a question in some of our minds about why he didn't move here immediately. Part of it has to do, I think, with the comfort of his wife. She was expecting, and they'd lost their first child. And part of it has to do with there just wasn't enough here yet to do and he could make more money in Baltimore as a merchant until he could get down here and get his group together to buy from him.

But he set his nephew up in business over in Georgetown, and that seemed to work for a while. But the nephew was a scofflaw and that wasn't truly successful.

Then in 1794 or 95, it becomes very clear he is getting ready to move. One of the biggest indicators is he buys a piano forte – because you don't move one of those around very much. There is a house that is built. We have no description of it. We know the approximate size of it from a map. We know the approximate placement of it from a map. There is absolutely no written description of it. And it is in the square that is bound by 7th and 8th and M and L Southeast. And he built it almost in the center of the square, as if it was going to be a town estate rather than being a house that's out on the street edge. And there are other houses there as well, other buildings there as well. One of these he built is probably the store for his nephew.

Franzén: That house no longer stands?

Overbeck: That house no longer stands.

When we tried to figure out what to do about the Navy Yard and the Navy Yard area, we tried to find out what the given date was that the Navy Yard became an operative place. Where was it, what can we talk about at this point in time that existed in the Navy Yard neighborhood, et cetera.

Franzén: I would have assumed the Navy Yard was there first.

Overbeck: No, no. That was one of the last things that George Washington selected was the site of the Navy Yard before he died. Right now it is celebrating either the third or fourth "anniversary" because of the different levels of Congressional resolutions that had to be signed, and the Navy Yard has had a wonderful series of anniversary parties.

Franzén: So when did the Navy Yard come in?

Overbeck: Oh, 1798, '99. And the Prout's are already there. I was looking to find something that could show anybody that was there when the Navy Yard got there – Prout's house, Tunnicliff's Tavern, which was a tavern that was of fairly good repute up at Pennsylvania Avenue, 8th, 9th and E.

Franzén: Tunnicliff's, as in the current-day Tunnicliff's.

Overbeck: No, that one is named for it.

Franzén: I understand that, but that's where the name came from.

Overbeck: That's where the name came from.

Franzén: So the Navy Yard comes along and basically screws up the whole plan for that area being the commercial area?

Overbeck: Absolutely. And at first the two people who have to cede land in order for this to be big enough to work are Daniel Carroll and William Prout.

You remember a few minutes ago I said something about Benjamin Stoddard negotiating with George Washington so that his little part of the Hill wouldn't be in the city? Well, the reason for that was that there was a spring on it, and he was Secretary of the Navy – he wanted to have the Navy Yard built next to his land. But it was unsuitable. And if he had checked it out early enough he would have known that, because the mud over there slips and slides – it's a disaster, it's not stable.

So the next nearest place along the Anacostia River was the square for the [Central] Exchange.

Franzén: The Navy Yard was established for defense ...

Overbeck: It was.

Franzén: I would have thought that was the first thing they'd think about.

Overbeck: It was one of the first things George Washington talked about in defending why he was going to put the city where he did, and that was that anywhere along the Anacostia River would render a safe harbor from which American Navy vessels could sally forth and head down the Potomac to take care of anybody who was trying to invade.

Of course, that is not quite the way it worked, but that's the theory – a good theory. He felt that the Potomac River was not adequate. And it wasn't. It was too shoaled and the channels were bad, and all kinds of reasons, but he wanted them to be able to come out for the element of surprise. But nobody got around to putting the Navy Yard there. There wasn't that much here. We had one tiny little gun at the foot of Ft. McNair defending the whole city; a little tiny thing.

Anyway, Daniel Carroll backs out, gets mad. He doesn't like the idea that he is going to lose the Central Exchange, and so he delays the process considerably. By this time, I think that William Prout probably just simply wanted to be able to get on with the show, and it didn't make that much difference if it was sailors or if it was businessmen in frock coats. He figured they would come.

Well, the next thing you know is they start having the Navy Yard built, and people begin coming there. I have gone through a whole series of efforts trying to find out what is the oldest building we have left that is outside the Yard gates. We know what the buildings are inside the Yard gates. Those are well documented. But outside the Yard gates, what have we got?

There is an enumeration of habitable buildings for May 1800, and it goes on up to November 1800 and then into 1801. And we have been able to identify each of the buildings that were on that habitable list and where they were along the Navy Yard. And not one of them from 1800 is still standing. Not one. And there are a number of reasons for that, but it has to do with economics, it has to do with probably the character of the buildings themselves, and so on.

Franzén: What can we assume about the character of the buildings? What were they made of – stone, brick, wood?

Overbeck: The city law required that all buildings facing primary streets sit parallel to the street they faced, be a minimum of two stories high, and be of brick or stone – in other words, fireproof.

But this was a very poor city. People went bankrupt like crazy. People defaulted on loans. People picked up and left their tools. One woman went running out to Benjamin Latrobe in about 1810, grabbed at him and said: "Please buy my fowling piece. My husband has died, my children are sick. This is the only thing I have left of value, and I need money."

That is a graphic description of how poor it is. There are tales that are legion of workmen going in the middle of the night and taking down doors and so forth from other houses to resize to use for the houses they are working on, because they can't get supplies.

Franzén: Stealing doors?

Overbeck: Stealing doors, windows, pieces.

It's really pathetic when you read what happened to this magnificent dream, and what was allowed to happen because there was not a sufficient backup of funds. It's incredible. It's a wonder we ever got anywhere.

Franzén: Lack of wealth ...

Overbeck: One of the major investors in this city was Robert Morris, who was the financier of the Revolution. He spent time in debtors' prison because of over-speculation. He did nothing except in a grand way.

John Nicholson, same thing. He was Morris's colleague from Philadelphia. To keep your shirt from being burned off, you either had to have money or you had to stay out of Washington, in terms of expecting to make money here.

This is one of the reasons why William Prout is such an interesting character, because he came here, stayed here, and did make money. He didn't make a huge amount, but he made good money.

Franzén: Getting back to the houses. So, many of these houses were not made of brick or stone, but were made of wood.

Overbeck: Made of wood.

Franzén: And of a pretty low-standard quality.

Overbeck: Made of a low-standard quality. They were one or two rooms wide on the first floor, maybe a max of four; same thing upstairs – if they had an upstairs. They were supposed to have an upstairs, by law, but didn't necessarily.

Franzén: Were they actually abutting each other as we have our town houses today, or was there space between them? Or do we know?

Overbeck: Some were, some weren't. Row houses were tried down on South Capitol Street and down in Southwest, up on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, and New Jersey Avenue Southeast. And they were rather unsuccessful because there were not enough takers.

So people began building, instead of six houses at a time on spec – in which the economy of scale gets lost very quickly [?] – they would build one or two at a time. They did not have to be on the lot line, the side lot line. But if they were built on the side lot line, they had to be prepared to share the party wall with their neighbor. They could be as far back from the front lot line as they wanted or as close up to the front lot line as they wanted.

And that was a Thomas Jefferson thing, and is absolutely traceable. He said nothing bored him more than Philadelphia, with all those straight lines of buildings and no "surprises of the oblique." And he wanted the surprise of the oblique.

That situation lasted clear up until the 1870s, when we got new laws that standardized where buildings had to be relative to the front lot line, because of pipelines.

Franzén: Pipelines. You're talking about sewer lines ...

Overbeck: Yes. Gas lines, the first gas lines, were laid in the 1850s, and they were okay because not that many people could afford them. But by the time we got to sewer and water and standardized gas for everybody, then everybody had to line up. You can walk around Capitol Hill, and we'll show you some pictures ...

Franzén: Should we see a house that's set back from the line of the other houses, we can assume it was built before 1870?

Overbeck: About 1878, yes. And there are also tons of houses over there, hiding behind facades, which you'd never know were there. We found one building on 8th Street that looked for all the world like an 1880s building, and was. And as we began the rehab for it, we found three additional houses in it, including the original one, which was a good 40 feet back from the front lot line.

Franzén: Three houses within it. So, what you're saying is the front of the house kept moving forward.

Overbeck: They kept accreting.

Franzén: Adding to the front of the house.

Overbeck: Yes. We have all of these wonderful things going on that make it look interesting and tremendous. What we did, finally, to determine where the Navy Yard actually was – because there has been some question, there have been questions about where is the Navy Yard, the end and beginning, or the Capitol neighborhood end and beginning. The earliest city directory lists buildings by location, close to a particular place, because most of the houses did not have numbers. So, it would say: M Street, near the Navy Yard. Or 4th 1/2 Street, Navy Yard, between L and M. Something like that.

So I calculated all of those and platted them so we would know where the Navy Yard was. The Navy Yard's western boundary is right down the alley between 3rd and 4th. It goes straight up to Pennsylvania Avenue, comes right back down, and goes all the way over to 14th street. Now, that doesn't mean that was completely filled in the 1820s, because believe me it was very sparse. But those people who were associated with the Navy Yard either as worker bees or furnishing supplies for them or whatever, were given that kind of an address.

Franzén: It went to what is now Pennsylvania Avenue. So it was much larger then.

Overbeck: Much larger than what we think of the Navy Yard as being – because the Navy Yard is one of the most important things that ever happened to Capitol Hill.

Franzén: Okay, we've had to take a break. It is now a couple of days later, three days later. It's Wednesday, March 1st, 2000. We're back at Sibley hospital.

Ruth Ann, when we broke off on Sunday we were starting to talk about the Navy Yard. But let's take a step back before we continue with that. Let's take a step back to what Capitol Hill looked like back before that time. Let's go back into the 1700s, and take us step by step from the raw land to the layout of the city as it is starting to come into being, around 1800.

Overbeck: One of the best examples to consider is that if you were standing at today's point of 8th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast and you were standing on the land that then existed at the time of the point of contact of the Native Americans and settlers or the explorer-pioneers, whatever we wish to call them from Europe, you would find you were standing at least eight feet higher in the air. The land was not terribly [inaudible], not to be construed as mountainous or whatever. It was, for land, fairly level, but it did have an enormously rich ecology. And part of that ecology included six streams that crossed Pennsylvania Avenue going generally from northeast to southeast down toward the Anacostia River.

Franzén: Right across Capitol Hill. And you say it was eight feet higher?

Overbeck: At that point it was eight feet higher.

Franzén: So that got landscaped as the city was developed.

Overbeck: Yes. Also, some of that landscape had already been changed to adaptive use for plantation farming over time.

Franzén: Woods had been cleared?

Overbeck: Some of the woods had been cleared – not all of them.

Early on, you would have seen white-tailed deer, all sorts of animals, heard wonderful birds, lots of flush snipe – for whatever good it would do you if you didn't have the proper armament to get food on your table.

But it was really an area – 1600-1619 – when the first point of contact of the Americans-to-be, the settlers, came up the river, they would have heard the guttural language of the Nactcatanke we talked about before and they would have seen this enormously beautiful land. Now, some of the land had been burned over for fields, for the Indians to plant their corn. Some of the land was still standing with large, large trees. The trees were so tall that they absolutely and totally amazed the Europeans. They were taller than anything they had seen in England. You could build a whole mast for a ship out of one tree – which by that time in England was almost impossible, because the tall trees had been cut back so much.

So if we were standing there at 8th and Pennsylvania and we were just listening, by 1720 we would have heard very little of the guttural language of the Nactcatanke because for the most part they were long since gone.

Franzén: Gone where? What happened?

Overbeck: Many of them died from diseases of foreign countries. Some of them were sent off or moved off to go with other tribes. The Colony of Maryland actually established the first Indian reservation in what became the United States. It was down in southern Maryland. Some of the Nactcatanke may have gone down with them. There is a group of descendents who believe they are probably Nactcatanke descendents that are down on the reservation now.

So, they would have more or less disappeared except for trading parties that were not Nactcatanke that would come down out of the western mountains and trade with the settlers. They were still using the old patterns of trade to get what they thought they needed and to get things they had never seen before or heard of heard of before – European goods.

By the 1720s you also would have heard not only the English language spoken regularly, but you would have heard the very soft language of people speaking African, African dialects, and learning to speak English – a polyglot kind of English, because that's how they picked up their language.

For the most part, the land itself wouldn't have changed that much. Certainly the streams would still be there. You would still hear the rushing water, there would still be snipe. The deer would have learned to be more frightened and they would be at the margins of the forest because of the guns, which the Indians, of course, had not had. Other animals, also, would be lurking more toward the edges of the forest rather than into the heart of the land, and coming on to the stream to water early morning, late at night.

The land would have begun to be plowed – very primitively plowed, as far as we're concerned – but it would have taken shape in the form primarily of tobacco crops, because that was the main focus of finance.

As we get nearer to the 1790s, this would simply have all intensified somewhat, because more settlers would have come into the area to stay. Basically, we feel there's about a 1719-1725 cut-off between pioneers and settlers, because of the people who were really pushing the frontier. We begin to have much more organization within parishes, within voting precincts. By that time, the sheriff, all of those people, were beginning to be in place.

So, that takes us up to a defined agricultural land in 1790. Then there is this map that is, in general, laid out, when Washington decides, yes, we are going to use this particular area which is from Rock Creek to the Herb Branch, back up to about Florida Avenue, which is part of the general boundary earlier, and that would become city. So that was the part that was being platted.

Now, the first survey for all for this had nothing to do within Capitol Hill itself. That survey was out along the ten-mile line. They had to establish that and fix that at the Federal district before they could fix the Federal city.

Franzén: The 10-mile square.

Overbeck: The famous 10-mile square that is not a 10-mile square anymore.

Anyway, the move from the 10-mile square inward was slower. Now, there was massive speculation going on and people wanted to buy thousands of lots. George Washington did not want anyone buying an excess number of lots because he – rightly so – felt this would ultimately lead to a collapse in the economy and it would be detrimental to the city to have landscape dominated by any one group of people or any "combine," as it were, merchants, whatever. That didn't stop the speculation from going rampant. Some speculated with one lot, some speculated with thousands.

I've talked about the big financiers, Morris and Nicholson, and we will discuss in a few minutes people named Thomas Law and William Mayn Duncanson.

In the meantime, what we had to do was get the squares and the lots laid out.

Franzén: Was L'Enfant involved at this point?

Overbeck: No, L'Enfant is already out.

Franzén: Out?

Overbeck: L'Enfant never laid out the lots and squares because he'd been fired.

Franzén: When was that?

Overbeck: I don't remember the date. He had made enough people angry, including, in particular, Daniel Carroll, because Daniel Carroll had cited his new home down on G Street Southeast where he thought it ought to be, and it hung out into the road, into the street line. And L'Enfant had the foundation pulled down in the middle of the night. Didn't endear the man. He had the ego of an artist. And he was a wonderful character – tremendous drive and energy. No tact whatever.

He felt that Washington probably was a God and could protect him from all else. Washington by this time was well weary of all of these people fussing, and had made sure that he gave as much of the power – to transfer the power, at least the blatant overpower – to the commissioners as possible, which is a group of three men who were responsible for the Federal city, the commissioners of the Federal city.

Franzén: So L'Enfant was out of the picture by some time in the 1790s?

Overbeck: Yes.

Franzén: And stayed out?

Overbeck: Well, he was this forlorn, haggard figure that was seen walking around from time to time with his dog, looking sort of raggedy, petitioning Congress to pay him what it owed him. What else is new in Washington?

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that a square is a square – whether it is a circle, a triangular base, polygon or a square – in Washington. Still the large unit that contains lots is called the square.

Franzén: What we normally think of as a block.

Overbeck: A block, yes. Those were begun to be laid out, on demand, over by Rock Creek and near Pennsylvania Avenue. Obviously we're still playing out this game ... by this time, which is about 1791 or 1792, most people really have given up on the idea that the game is that Capitol Hill is going to be the city. There are still people who have hopes and think they can swing it, but for the most part they have realized that if you really look carefully at what's going on, the city is going to be dominated by Rock Creek, west of the Capitol and not east.

Franzén: So, that reality had begun to dawn on people by the early 1790s.

Overbeck: By the early 1790s. They weren't happy with it, and some of them didn't believe it and felt it would still change. But if you look at it carefully it was a very uninspired person who couldn't figure out what was going on. The square numbers were assigned sequentially, one on up, and they were well into the 600s by the time they got to Capitol Hill.

Franzén: Did that pattern continue all the way through?

Overbeck: All the way through the part we have already talked about as being the Federal city. It was later extended outside the bounds of the Federal city but in a much more – I'm not going to say "unorganized" or "disorganized" pattern, but it is much more confusing once you get out into the county. And it is certainly confusing when you have the overlays of the square numbers over in Georgetown, over the ones that had been part of the original city.

Franzén: But otherwise, early on, we can more or less assume that the squares were numbered in the order in which they were laid out?

Overbeck: Pretty much they were laid out. They were certainly gridded out on paper in that order and then they were to be laid out on the land in that order. The laying out of a square took a surveyor and four small marble squares or cubes.

Franzén: At each corner.

Overbeck: One at each corner.

In order to establish street lines, if trees stood in the street they simply were cut down, but they were cut down at about knee height. So here you would go on your horse, or you and your own shanks mare – you would not take a carriage, there were very few places you could take a carriage if you had a carriage – and you would thread yourself carefully through stumps. And there were no street markers.

Franzén: No signs.

Overbeck: No signs, nothing of that nature. And the National Intelligencer and its predecessors – which were an assortment of various newspapers – are marvelous reading, if for no other reason than [to read]: "We are going to meet at Mr. So-and-so for So-and-so's event. We are going to meet there and it is the place near ..." and they will say Tunnicliff's Tavern or the place near Rhodes Tavern, it is the place near the boarding house, et cetera. A lot of confusion and a lot of wasted time went on for people trying to find their way to and from one part of the city to another.

Franzén: The little marble markers at the corners of the squares, can they still be found?

Overbeck: I've never seen one, I don't know. But no one has ever proudly shown me one. They are certainly not at any of the corners that I have walked on Capitol Hill, but whether or not one has been saved and put aside, or whatever, I don't know.

Franzén: Would they have been markers above ground level or under ground level, or where?

Overbeck: If they were typical, they would have been little markers, just slightly above the grade.

Anyway, then came dealing with turning the squares into lots. And there were certain dimensions that were felt to be appropriate. Anything probably ranging from about 30 to 50 feet was an appropriate frontal lot [dimension].

Franzén: That's quite wide.

Overbeck: It was. The wider the street, the larger the building, or the taller the building it was assumed would be built on it. If you look at the ideas behind some of these dimensions, it gives you an impression of some of the thought that went into it by Washington and Jefferson and so on.

Franzén: And L'Enfant?

Overbeck: L'Enfant did not have as much to do with the house business. He was the idea man of space, large use of space, and how the large spaces would work.

Franzén: But the look of the streets, and the setback from the streets, and the width of the lots – that was Washington and Jefferson?

Overbeck: In large part, yes. They were never out of correspondence with L'Enfant. And they are the ones who actually did the first building codes that were appended as a matter of implication to every deed, for every piece of land sold in the Federal city. That had to do with the setback we talked about the other day, it had to do with width, it had to do with how wide the streets would be.

East Capitol Street was as wide then as it is now. I don't know how many people on Capitol Hill know this, but East Capitol Street, like most every other street on the Hill and in the Federal city itself, goes from the face of the building to the face of the building across the street. You do not own your own front yard. You don't even own the yard on which your bay window sits, if that's what you have.

That's an enormous wonderful space there – a vista – plenty of room for troops to move if you need to move troops in a hurry in time of war. It is ceremonial. Remember, L'Enfant felt East Capitol would be a wonderful ceremonial street. So here you have this awe-inspiring vista, and to think of the fact they were doing this in 1790.

Franzén: It was unique in that respect among American cities, wasn't it.

Overbeck: Yes. Really, the first truly planned American city of that magnitude. A planned city usually was perhaps a 6-block by 12-block entity that ran along a waterfront. It was gridded off plainly, and maybe a town square position was marked off and maybe not. That was about the best you got for urban planning.

Franzén: Having driven in downtown Philadelphia, there is quite a difference. Amazing.

So continue, please, with the laying out of the lots.

Overbeck: Laying out of the lots was done so that the lots could be divided between the commissioners of the public and the original proprietors. We spoke the other day about that and the fact that the original proprietors were in no way given back all of the land they had had. This is part of the deal. So those proprietors who had lots on squares that were in the area of interest for purchase were the ones, for the most part, who got their lots laid out first, who knew there were going to be X number of lots. You did not necessarily have them all gridded out for you, nor the alley cut shown, on the land. You had it on a piece of paper. You can do a whole lot on a piece of paper, but you cannot necessarily sell it, so you have to have the other things done as well.

There are all sorts of instances in which Mr. So-and-so wrote the commissioner that he needed to have his lot line laid out because somebody was ready to build. That was an exciting day because the one thing they needed were buildings. The one thing they were not getting with any degree of plenitude were buildings.

People were not that interested in coming to the city to live on a permanent basis. Many of the workers at the Capitol lived in dormitories that were built right on the Capitol grounds. Many people were building "tempos," and far less, for the most part ...

Franzén: Tempos?

Overbeck: Temporaries. Far [more] temporary than the ones that used to stand down on the Mall from World War I and World War II that the military built. These were almost shanties that people were living in. The houses on the front of the street – I think we have covered this – the primary houses were supposed to be fireproof, brick or stone, and only back buildings, i.e. toilets ...

Franzén: Stables?

Overbeck: Outdoor summer kitchens, could be framed. There was not enough money to go around. There were not enough tools, equipment, enough supplies, enough of anything. Everything needed to put the city together was lacking.

So, we have a lot of temporary building early on, and we have people clustered around nodes of work. You have people not necessarily needing their lots laid out. When they did, great excitement occurred. The lines got laid and the deed got recorded, and off we went to build a house.

The buildings could be built as close to the lot line as you wanted, side to side, front or back, and there was no such thing as a public utility, period. You were out there on your own. You may as well have been living in the country, except for the fact you had the city of Washington as a post office.

You had to furnish your own outhouse. You had either a summer kitchen, or whatever kind of kitchen you wanted. Many people found Washington so hot that rather than building kitchens in their basements they built outdoor kitchens. Some people built them in their basements, initially, and then he first time they went through a summer, they put a summer kitchen out back for use during the hot weather.

The houses, for the most part, were cube-like. We have very special houses in Washington – a couple of them are actually on Capitol Hill – but right now what I'm talking about are John Doe/Jane Doe houses. They would measure anywhere from one room that was 11 feet wide, maybe even as little as 10 feet wide, to two rooms, with maybe a central hall, that would be as much as 30 feet wide. The larger the house, the more it was the exception. For the most part, the houses were between 10 and 20 feet wide. One room, if they were less than approximately 15 feet wide; [if more,] two rooms across the front and maybe another two rooms across the back, and maybe not. Then they would grow like monopoly houses, to the second story or to the third story.

Some of the houses are grander. One of those is the house of William Mayn Duncanson that still stands on Capitol Hill.

Franzén: Mayn?

Overbeck: Yes, Mayn with a "y." He was an Englishman. He came with Thomas Law to the United States. They were illustrious in their careers in India with the East India Trade Company. They made an enormous amount of money, brought that enormous amount of money with them to Washington and established their homes. The Duncanson house stands in the 600 block of South Carolina Avenue.

Franzén: Still there?

Overbeck: Yes, on the north side of the street. It faces in a more or less southerly direction. It is one of the few houses in the city that does not parallel the street it faces. It parallels in back, on D Street. We are not exactly sure why this happened, whether there was an error in alignment or whatever.

Duncanson was the only man in the city whose slaves or whose servants wore full livery. And they took a real ribbing for this. Duncanson built his house in 1795, 1796. It took about two years to get it finished. It is the epitome of what would be the Georgian townhouse. He designed it to be a townhouse to entertain. And indeed, it is a place where both Washington and Jefferson dined. He had gilt ballroom chairs. He had wonderful mirrors, beautiful silver, lovely, lovely furnishings. He had a wine seller that was rumored to rival that of Thomas Jefferson.

And he was one of the men who got caught belly up in the financial crash when all the mortgages started coming down, because he had not pulled his paper, his deeds away, or his mortgages away, from the combine of Robert Morris and John Nicholson.

His partner in coming to the United States, in coming to Washington, Thomas Law, on the other hand, had separated his paper out and did not go bankrupt.

Franzén: The Duncanson house is still a residence?

Overbeck: It is what is now Friendship House.

Franzén: Oh, yes ...

Overbeck: It was a residence until the 1930s, and an anonymous angel bought it in the 1930s, about 1935, to give as a gift to Friendship House. Friendship House was a very early settlement house. Friendship House was started down by the Navy Yard in the early 1900s, in the Hull House manner, to serve the community of primarily immigrants who had come to that neighborhood, to teach a second language, teach people how to become American citizens, take in the battered, the abused. It was a live-in social service agency. Like Hull House.

Franzén: This is tape number three. I'm talking with Ruth Ann Overbeck. It's still Wednesday, March 1st, 2000.

Let's continue. You were talking about Friendship House, which is what became of the Duncanson mansion.

Overbeck: Friendship House has a very checkered history. Its real history in place with Duncanson's house belongs in the 20th Century. We'll put it there. In the meantime [inaudible].

Duncanson, as far as we know, did not marry. He had a sister who came with him, a beautiful woman. She was well courted by lots of important people. An example of the circles in which Duncanson moved: his sister was a very close friend of the wife of the man who was the legate to the United States from England in the 1790s, and he was stationed in Philadelphia. So Miss Duncanson wrote to her friend, Mrs. Liston, to please come; she was starving for this good company. And she began talking about how the women in Washington behaved. And it's one of the most wonderful things – it's not very flattering, but it is wonderful – the men all went in one corner, the women all go in the other and they "simper."

Franzén: Simper?

Overbeck: Simper and "google." That gives us some sort of an idea of social life, as it was, in Washington in 1794.

In the meantime, his sister has died, and Duncanson had a true friend in Thomas Jefferson. Duncanson moved to a smaller house that he owned down in Southwest and tried to make the best he could of this scrambled mess that was going on in court. His estate was tied up in court until 1814 or 1815. The court, of course, would have been the court in Maryland, because we still didn't have a court here in Washington, DC, at that point, when it all started.

Anyway, throughout it all – Duncanson was still alive at the time Jefferson became President, and by that time Thomas Jefferson proposed Duncanson be the first librarian of the Library of Congress. He said that he has remained the one true republican. This I find fascinating – a man who had a sedan chair and liveried servants and as good a wine cellar as the President at one point.

Franzén: Did he become the librarian?

Overbeck: It got buried somewhere, probably in the Congress. He never did become that. There was an apocryphal tale that he was carried to his grave in Potters Field [?] on a cart. Very Mozart-ian. The real record doesn't show, but they weren't keeping good single records at that point.

At any rate, there are all sorts of legends about this house. This house is a center-hall house and it has a fan light over the door, appropriately. It has a lunette up in the pediment, which is the triangular part that faces the street at the roof line, and its basic configuration remains exactly as it was in 1794 or 95. It was designed by, we believe, Mr. William Lovering, who designed a lot of other houses on the Hill.

Now, the staircase is still in its original place. Much of the house's interior has been changed pretty dramatically over time. But one of the things that we were able to do in a couple of projects that had to do with preservation, related to Friendship House or the Maples or Mr. Duncanson's house, as it is variously called, was to pull one of the nails from the attic. It was analyzed at Yale as having been made [under] a patent that had been issued in England in the 1780s, and evidently the keg of nails for this particular house had been shipped over from England because the nail would not have been available on the local economy.

Franzén: Patented nails?

Overbeck: Yes.

Franzén: A unique shape?

Overbeck: They have almost a rosette head, but not quite. By "rosette" I don't mean the kind of decorative rosette that designers put on furniture and so on. They are very well made, very sophisticated. That part of the house's history is now a matter of record, even as far away as Yale.

Franzén: So we have a pretty good idea what the Duncanson house looked like. But all these other houses, these far more modest houses that you described, do we have building plans for those houses? How do we know what they looked like?

Overbeck: For the most part, you didn't need a building plan. If you were a master builder, you knew what to do. If you and your owner walked the land and said, I want it to face here, I want the corner here, I want the doorway here – and they might negotiate on it. If the master builder said the doorway will look dumb there or it will not be structurally sound, then the master builder would know what to do and contract out for what work he couldn't do.

A true master builder would be a brick mason, probably, and would simply hire the carpenter. He'd have his own apprentices. Apprentice papers abound of children as young as six and seven having been "bound out" in Washington for learning a trade.

Franzén: As young as six or seven?

Overbeck: They didn't have to go to school. They could go to school, depending on their parents. But they could be bound to learn the domestic trades – the printing trade, et cetera. And then the master, whether it be a printer or a builder, as we're talking about in this case, was responsible for providing X number of clothes, and providing maybe for teaching the child to read and write – or to do sums, more particularly. Sums were more important, the math being the ruling thing of the day in terms of how you figure, how you calculate your work. You can do that without having to write down a word.

Franzén: Getting back to my question, on what basis do we know what [the houses] looked like?

Overbeck: Well, we have a few remnants. We know we have some that pre-date the British coming through. And those are the ones that are basically the models.

Now, fortunately, at least two of them are brick. And one is on 8th Street, a small, two-story building. It's across from the Marine barracks, painted red. Not painted red anymore. Pat will have to go find out what color it is. It has been changed, as any building that has had mercantile use has been altered to suit the merchandise being sold from its first floor.

Typically, at this point, people who could not afford to do anything else but still could afford to own a piece of property used their first floor or at least part of their first floor as their place of work, their business, and then used the rest of the house as a residence. That was the step up to the American dream. Once you could get past that, then you could move on to your own full house and rent that part, and there you went.

Franzén: So there was nothing remotely like zoning commercial or zoning residential.

Overbeck: Oh heavens, no. There would have been a whole lot of people who would like to fuss, who would not have had anything to fuss about. Oh, they might fuss, but it wouldn't have done any good. Those houses are going to look very similar to Mr. Duncanson's houses, they're simply going to be very small. They probably will have a gable roof with the ridge pole of the roof running parallel to the street, rather than having the fanciness of a pediment facing them.

If they are two stories, then the likelihood is that the windows line up over each other, one to a room in the front, because they wouldn't have had the money to have more than one window to a room in the front. And then there would be one window above the front door.

We are talking very simple.

Franzén: Essentially symmetrical.

Overbeck: Not necessarily. Could be asymmetrical because you wouldn't have had [all] center-hall houses. If it was one room or two rooms, you don't necessarily need a center hall.

Franzén: Would they have been deep, the same idea as we have now with our town houses that are narrow but go way back?

Overbeck: No. For the most part, they would be no more than one or two rooms deep. In the first place, they were built like a box. The idea of the dumbbell coming in, allowing more light in there on the side, is not true – this is for houses built side by side that have no space between them.

A very interesting thing elsewhere in the city I have not found on Capitol Hill yet – I would not be surprised to find it – where there are light easements, so that no matter who builds next to you, even if they build their house right there, they have to provide you with the easement for the light if you have built your house right on the side [of the lot].

For the most part, you didn't put windows on the sides of your houses. Remember, windows were very expensive, glass was very expensive. For the most part, it had to be imported.

There is a famous story of George Washington's Delaware Avenue houses, up north of the Capital, technically on Capitol Hill ...

Franzén: Owned by Washington?

Overbeck: Yes, the only houses he owned in the city. He was having them built, and he sent off to Boston for the proper size and proper number of panes of glass. They got shipped to Baltimore and he got shipped the wrong size. That sort of thing happened more frequently than not. And glass was an expensive commodity. If you planned to have your 15-foot house on your 30 foot lot added onto, whenever you got enough money to purchase or to build, you certainly wouldn't put windows in the side where you were going to add your rental property. That would make no sense.

So you generally had a shaft of light coming through the house from front to back, back to front, and that was pretty much it.

Most of the houses, they had brick chimneys. Depending on what the ...

Franzén: The chimney would have been at the center, the side, the back? Where?

Overbeck: Depending on the sophistication of the design and to some extent the money that was available, and their taste, it could have been within wall or without. "Within wall" meaning it was totally encased within the wall, which actually gave the owner more lot to use because you could use the part of the wall that was behind the chimney and in front of the chimney as extra width.

It was also very popular to have, if you were building more than one house at a time, shared chimneys. You can see a good example of that over in the block of Sixth Street between E and D Southeast facing east.

Franzén: Two entirely separate houses – two properties, two different owners – sharing the same chimney?

Overbeck: Yes.

In the case of the Duncanson house, there are wishbone chimneys.

Franzén: Meaning?

Overbeck: Meaning that, since his house was only four [?] rooms deep .... He had only one chimney, but below the roof we have this lovely curved wishbone that came down with a pair of chimneys for each floor. A pair of chimneys for each floor, one chimney per room on each floor.

Franzén: For a fireplace in each room.

Overbeck: For a fireplace in each room, and those were on the outside walls.

Franzén: Those would have been wood-burning fireplaces.

Overbeck: Absolutely.

Franzén: No coal.

Overbeck: No coal. We don't get coal for quite a while. We also have a lot of trouble during the 1790s with people not being able to afford a cord of wood or a bundle of wood to heat their house. Times were really desperate.

We have a dichotomy of this beautiful house that Duncanson is building, and he builds it facing the Anacostia River so that he can see down the river, down the Potomac. He was going to be a speculator.

He and Thomas Law, at one point, intended to have their version of the East India Company here in Washington. So that comes to fruition, the Central Exchange, 8th Street. Duncanson built on Sixth. He is a block and a half off 8th Street, a perfect position, to be right where he needed to be to go to the coffee houses, to the gossip centers of the day, to get the information he needed to be able to make his fortune. He is probably the one man who truly bought into the concept of the Central Exchange to the point that he invested so much of himself into it.

Franzén: The Central Exchange. Are we at a point where we should start talking about the Central Exchange and what happened or failed to happen? I know we covered it a little bit, talking about how it was going to be located at the foot of 8th Street, where 8th Street meets the Anacostia River. The original idea was that that was going to be the center of commerce for the Federal city.

Overbeck: Right.

Franzén: How did that go off the track?

Overbeck: It went off the track very early. And to be perfectly honest, as far as I can figure out, it was the idea of one other man and Pierre L'Enfant, and the other man was George Walker, who was the Scotsman that we talked about earlier, who invested heavily in the city before.

There is a wonderful anonymous tract that has been traced to George Walker that appeared in a Baltimore paper about a year and a half before the Federal city actually got funded and formed and identified by George Washington. And if you read George Walker's description of what the Federal City should be like carefully, it's almost a blueprint for L'Enfant.

And George Walker is also the person who in the early 1790s published, under his own name in England, a tract saying what was going to happen. That also talked about the Central Exchange and 8th Street. There is a short article about him in one of the historical quarterlies. So, the genius of taking those words from that tract, by L'Enfant – now, whether L'Enfant had seen the tract – he must have seen the tract; he had to have seen it. Because his idea, when he saw the "plain" as he came across the ferry, and saw what he thought was the plain, and of course terminating with the "pedestal awaiting a monument" that became the site of the Capitol, he must have had this somewhat in his head.

As I told you, everything I can figure out points to the fact that cronyism – whatever "ism" you want to accuse him of having – George Washington used when it came to this city.

I think he had absolutely and totally no intention whatever of allowing anything spectacular to happen east of the Capitol.

Franzén: But he went along with that story, right?

Overbeck: He is the one who sent the people over here. He told L'Enfant to start doing the surveying so people would think such and such. He's the one who told Stoddard and his buddies to come over here and invest the public money, to get them invested over here. Now, part of this could have been to try to get more of a balance, because he knew he had investors in the Georgetown area. Those people weren't going to turn their back on something that could be so lucrative that was so close to them.

Franzén: Georgetown was already there ...

Overbeck: Georgetown was already there, there was a bank ...

Franzén: Something to build onto.

Overbeck: There were amenities, et cetera. But in terms of George Washington's attitude about Capitol Hill, I take it with a great deal of salt.

Now, it became pretty clear that the wharves along the Anacostia River were going to be used. That had to happen because of the amount of equipment that had to be brought in, the amount of supplies and so forth that had to be brought in, to [build] the Capitol.

Franzén: And that was a good harbor?

Overbeck: That was a good harbor. The public harbor was basically at the foot of South Capitol Street, which made a lot of sense because that is the closest straight line to haul it up that hill.

From there up, there were assorted wharves. One was owned by the Barry family. They were friends of Thomas Law and William Duncanson, and they did rather well. They had some fairly substantial houses that have more or less been well described by descendents, but there is no corroboration anywhere, so I pretty much let those things rest.

All the way on up the river, if you look, it is sort of snaggle-toothed and jagged. The wharves were supposed to be serviced by something called Water Street, which would be the street that would run behind all the wharves and connect them. You could take your horse, carriage, or whatever you needed, and take your material and supplies. Those things didn't really happen.

If you look at that particular section of the Anacostia, it would have been very difficult for it to happen because it is so jagged.

There were boat builders along with Anacostia, boat repairers. The easiest way, for years, to get to Alexandria from Washington, and even for a long time to get to Georgetown from Capitol Hill, was by boat. So there were little packets and ferry boats that would leave on the third hour of the tenth month, whatever, and they would post their departure times and their costs and so on in the newspapers. Some of those were in Southwest and on Mr. Caroll's original property, and some of them were over on the east side of South Capitol Street and off Mr. Carroll's land. More of those tended to be on Carroll land than not. Whether that was for ease in ship landing or whatever, we really don't know.

When you get back up by the seat of the Central Exchange, we have a titillating ad that says that the Central Exchange is opening on such and such a date. It has to do with William Prout. We have no description of whether or not there was a real Central Exchange building. We don't know whether or not these people met in Prout's mercantile office. We have absolutely no idea. It's almost like an ephemeral piece of smoke. It says it's there, and that is almost the last we know of it, the last we hear of it. Within three years the land is being acquired for the Navy. Clearly, it didn't happen. The Central Exchange didn't happen anywhere else in this town, either.

Franzén: There was an ad. Roughly what was the date of that?

Overbeck: 1795, '96.

Franzén: Somewhere in there. Saying the Central Exchange was about to open?

Overbeck: Yes. It was actually going to be a fact. That is absolutely fascinating. It is titillating and one of those things that is – who put the scotch on it? None of the journals that we've seen, none of the collections of letters we've seen – nothing.

Franzén: So there is very little record of commercial activity actually happening at the Central Exchange.

Overbeck: Absolutely. Probably no more than maybe one hundred words, max.

Franzén: Can we assume that the merchants of Georgetown, which was also a river port, would have seen the Central Exchange as competition that they wanted to get rid of?

Overbeck: Yes, you can assume the merchants in Georgetown wanted to get rid of any merchants anywhere else. They didn't want to be undercut, undersold, bought out, et cetera.

The interesting part is we had the tavern down along the river that was in the old Slater house. We have Tunnicliff's Tavern that was at 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue. We have Mr. Prout's warehouse, and we have his mercantile house he built for his nephew and later took over himself. By 1800, certainly, he was running that himself. We have all sorts of people.

The leading commodity of the day in the Federal city was alcohol.

Franzén: Alcohol.

Overbeck: People wanted that more than anything else.

Franzén: And that was strictly an import? They weren't making their own.

Overbeck: No, they weren't making their own. At the very least, they would have had to import the rum, the sugar from the islands, and there was no place to make it. There was going to be a sugar factory down along the river, and there is a wonderful painting from the 1830s that shows the stack still standing there. Mr. Duncanson was involved in that with Mr. Piercy. That also went belly-up. But there was virtually no manufacturing going on. Everything was done by hand or brought in.

People have no idea how hardscrabble – that's an old fashioned term – people have no idea how hardscrabble the first decades of Washington's history is.

Franzén: It was whiskey, primarily, coming in – from where?

Overbeck: The islands. There was a big trade with the islands. There was the coastal trade. Which means that everybody from Boston or Charleston, whatever, was manufacturing whiskey or rum. Rum was the preferred thing, not really whiskey, but rum. They would have brought that in. It could have come in from England. Could have come in from the Netherlands. Whoever happened to have a ship that had it in it. That's what they wanted.

One tavern owner on Capitol Hill in about 1796 – which was really an awful year for Capitol Hill – said that he did well to clear a dollar a week on his sale of alcohol, even though that was the single most wanted commodity. People simply didn't have the money.

Franzén: Were there commodities being shipped out from those wharves as well? Tobacco? Anything else?

Overbeck: By that time, there would have been some tobacco shipped out. Timber, maybe. But we didn't have any kind of mercantile, we didn't have any manufacturing stimulus going on like Baltimore did. We were losing out very fast in that respect to Baltimore. We expected to be able to compete appropriately, but Baltimore by then was making chocolate. And you could have found people who would have made chocolates for desserts for someone's dinner here locally but not anyone who would have manufactured chocolates in the magnitude that they could have been sent out.

The only thing that could have been sent out for trade would have been such commodities as slaves, maybe some tobacco from east of the river, east of the Anacostia River up in Washington County. This would have been very agricultural in scope rather than what we would think of as mercantile. We had no weavers, no spinners, no manufacturers of anything.

Franzén: You mention slaves. There's something I forgot to ask you. I want to skip back for a moment. For the building of these houses, this first wave of houses in the Federal city, we can assume that a significant portion of the laborers on the building of those houses were slaves?

Overbeck: I've never made a statistical assumption I can't prove. I will say that certainly some were, but I know that there were so many underemployed Irish, Scots, southern, northern, whatever, white immigrants here, who were so desperate for money that they would have been involved as well. They would have been competing for those jobs.

Franzén: And would be first in line?

Overbeck: It depends on the skill, probably, and how low they were willing to sell themselves for. For the most part, the slaves that were in the city appeared to be under contract to the Capitol and the White House buildings and, indeed, were, if they could, allowed to live on the economy, because that meant they didn't have to be provided for by the person who had hired them from their owner. And it was one of the ways in which, very early on, Washington acquired a rather substantial free African-American population – because they moonlighted in the typical government way. Some of them simply worked for themselves, in terms of building their own house out of scrap and pieces of lumber. And there is some unsavory correspondence about a couple of the builders down in Southwest that had to post guards at the doors at night to keep materials from being stolen by some of the blacks and slaves. But that same thing was going on by people who were not of color as well.

Franzén: I think at some point down the line we will want to talk in greater detail about African-Americans in the Federal city, but let's continue and go back to where we were.

Franzén: It is some days later. It's now March 7th, and we're on Capitol Hill, in the home of Ruth Ann Overbeck. We're out of the hospital, thankfully, and we are going to continue. We are still on tape three.

We're going to continue with our conversation about what happened at the foot of 8th Street, back in the 1790s, the establishment of the Navy Yard and what that meant, ultimately, for the neighborhood around it.

Ruth Ann, we had the Central Exchange that was going to be in that area, and along came the decision to establish the Navy Yard.

Overbeck: The United States had no Navy Yard until a series of properties were acquired, including that one, and that one essentially was considered the first of the Navy yards for the U.S. Navy. It was a ship-building Navy Yard ... [Pause for recorder adjustment]

The U.S. Navy had no property until it acquired several pieces up and down the eastern coast, and Washington's Navy yard is considered to be the oldest of the Navy yard properties. And therefore, it is the queen of the Navy yards.

The land was purchased, acquired, as were the other lands, to be ship-building Navy yards. As such, the Anacostia was suitable. Its draft was still deep enough for whatever kinds of ships the Navy was going to need. We did not produce large ships at the Washington Navy Yard, but certainly the lighter ones with fewer sails and masts and so on that could dart out, do damage, and get back to home port.

Guns were also made there, but they were a secondary item. The primary item was the ships.

Franzén: Can I ask you a question? You say there was no other Navy yard in the country prior to this time, but there was a Navy ...

Overbeck: Right.

Franzén: Sailing ships, in need of ships. Where did they come from?

Overbeck: Where did the ships come from?

Franzén: Yes.

Overbeck: Usually private arrangement. Some of them had been confiscated during the Revolutionary War. Some of them were "privateers" in that they sailed under a letter of mark for the private owner to be able to participate as a military operation.

Then the Navy did have uniforms, it did have servicemen, and it had acquitted itself very well during the Revolution, and so it was logical to extend it and continue it. Certainly at that time – and it is something that is very, very difficult for us to comprehend – a Navy truly was the only way that a nation could defend itself from foreign invaders along anything other than a common land line such as between the United States and Canada. There were no planes, no ballistic missiles, and you have to erase everything we know about modern war technology to put yourself in the frame of mind to understand how important the Washington Navy Yard and other Navy yards up and down the coast became.

Now, the Navy was under the stewardship of the first Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Stoddert [sp?]. He lived in Georgetown. His house is still standing over there. He was a major speculator. You may recall he was one of the people whom George Washington sent to the eastern end of what was going to be the Federal City, to put up the blind, by buying properties and making people think that is where the city was going to be. So he was in cahoots with the big guys.

The Navy has just celebrated either its third or fourth 100th [200th] anniversary. The congressional actions that came through and the funding levels that came through are such that it gave it a whole series of birthdays. And the tall ships that came in June of 1999 celebrated the last of those [200th] anniversaries. So, it has been there [200] years and it doesn't show any signs of leaving. Its mission has changed dramatically over time, however. It's importance to the neighborhood ...

Franzén: Its 200th birthday.

Overbeck: Yes, I'm sorry, 200th birthday.

Its importance to the neighborhood never changed materially, however, until after World War II. It had basically the same function from 1798 until the late 1950s, and that was as a major source of employment of people with high technical skills to work with their hands – whether it be sail makers, caulkers, wood planers, gun manufacturers, whatever.

As a commercial entity, shall we say, it was the most reliable, the most stable employer in the District of Columbia for well over a hundred years, far more dependable than Congress in terms of getting the Capitol built, because sometimes the Congress just ran out of money, and it wouldn't appropriate more. And that was probably quite rightly done, because we were still going through, if you remember, whether or not we were going to have another war with England, whether or not we were going to be invaded by France, a whole series of things that were happening certainly up to the 1820s in terms of needing a Navy, and we needed a Navy more than we needed to house the Congressman.

After all, there were so few of them, if they really wanted to, they could do what they did when it was just too cold and they couldn't get the [Capitol] warm enough. They adjourned over to one of the taverns.

Franzén: Did they ever meet at Tunnicliff's?

Overbeck: Probably not the Tunnicliff's on 8th Street, but once Mr. Tunnicliff left 8th Street and sold it to someone else, there was a different Tunnicliff's tavern across 1st Street from the Capitol.

Franzén: Right across from the Capitol.

Overbeck: Right. And they would meet in those taverns up there, so I have a feeling they were at Tunnicliff's.

Now, in the process of all of this hiring and construction work, you had a very mixed group of people who were available with their skills. Many of them were people who were immigrants to this country, as was true of much of Washington – primarily the British Isles. You had people from the coastal states who came to work here. There was a man from Norfolk, for example, who offered to bring 20 workers to work at the Navy Yard if he was sure he could get employment for them. There were slave blacks and there were free blacks who worked at the Navy Yard.

The Navy itself has taken an awful rap – and probably rightly so – for some of its discrimination policies in the 20th Century and the late 19th Century, but certainly in its early days down at the Navy Yard that was not true, because some of the highly skilled craftsmen in the shipbuilding industry along the Atlantic seaboard were blacks. Men like Moses Liverpool, who received his freedom in about 1804 from his previous master, who died down in Virginia, and he headed for Washington. He basically was an extremely skilled house carpenter, but he had enough working knowledge of caulking that he became a major caulker at the Navy Yard. And that enabled him to earn enough money to buy property on Capitol Hill. He became part of our very early nucleus of mixed-neighborhood owners, and helped set the base for a different kind of lifestyle than one might have expected in the Federal city.

Now, other people were here, too. Benjamin King was from England. And Benjamin King was a rough, tough old guy, but he was Chief of Works, a civilian Chief of Works, down at the Navy Yard. And although he had a temper and moodiness, he commanded the utmost respect for his skill from Benjamin Latrobe, who was one of the very best architects in this country, one of our first American-trained architects. So we ran the gamut of where people were from, what they did, and what talent they brought.

A man named John Davis came over from Delaware, where he had worked on ships. And at that point in time, to distinguish people from each other with the same name, you would frequently get something else added onto the end of your name. This particular John Davis was called John Davis of Abel.

Franzén: Of "Abel"?

Overbeck: Of Abel, which was a family first name. Sort of like the Russian names. You carry "the son of." Or [like] the Scandinavian, where you carry "the daughter of." And so on. So there was some of that going on here, as well. It was quite an interesting polyglot.

John Davis of Abel became a master plumber. It's he who ultimately took over the running of the first of the steam pumps that Benjamin Latrobe brought to the Navy Yard, and that pump came in 1810.

As all of these things began coming and focusing and forming, the Yard increased incrementally, and for the most part, steadily and upwardly, certainly until after the War of 1812.

Franzén: You say the first steam pump came in 1810?

Overbeck: 1810.

Franzén: That was a steam-powered pump for what purpose?

Overbeck: A steam-powered pump, believe it or not, not for ships, but for manufacturing of the guns and the various and sundry – running the lathes and so on and so forth, to build the ships.

Now, the War of 1812 – for Washington basically it was the War of August 1814. By that time there was a fairly substantial nucleus of buildings and shops and so forth down around the Navy Yard. To set the tone, we need to know that there was a bridge across the Anacostia River ...

Franzén: At that point ...

Overbeck: At that point. It was a low bridge. Nobody was doing h