We are honored to have our very first guest blog entry - a fascinating tale indeed! Paul
Discovering a Church’s Hidden History in My
Palisades Home
By Alex Knott
Nothing in the
realty ads, basic city records and closing documents suggested that our new
home once had a 61-foot steeple that towered into the Palisades sky. The
housing brochures also did not showcase how the kitchen and dining areas once
doubled as a 1900s-era Sunday schoolroom. Nor was there the century-old
claim that the living and family rooms had the capacity for nearly 200 church
goers.
Yet, further
research into my Palisades home bought in 2017 revealed that the building was
originally not a house at all, but one of more than 100 churches drawn up a
century ago by a famous architectural family.
Intrigued by Paul
Kelsey Williams’ “Lost Washington,” and the House History Man Blog, I began
researching my Palisades home. That’s when I was pleasantly surprised to learn
it was originally called Northwest Methodist Episcopal Church.
Ads for the house
on 4901 MacArthur Boulevard mirrored most of DC’s records saying it was just a
residence built in 1916. But a deeper dive into building records, newspaper
archives, and property records shows that construction on my home actually
began in September 1904, when it was granted a building permit as a church.
A 1907 map,
shows the church appearing on the northwest corner of W Street and Conduit
Road (which was renamed MacArthur Boulevard for General Douglas MacArthur a few
months after Pearl Harbor). At the time, the church was among the first 20
buildings constructed in “the Palisades of the Potomac,” a new group of
residential lots converted from the vacant farmlands on the northwest hills of
Georgetown.
The building’s
architects were Benjamin D. Price and Max Charles Price, a Philadelphia
father-son duo who drew up the “Church Plans” for some 100 churches
in at least 22 states stretching from Florida to Washington State toward the
end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Today, many of the
Prices’ other existing buildings are protected as American treasures under the
National Register of Historic Places including some local architectural work
on Alexandria’s clock tower and steeple for City Hall, left, and the new
market house/town hall buildings on North Royal Street.
The new parish was
reportedly the convergence of two smaller churches — a chapel branch of the
Dumbarton Avenue Church and the Little Falls Methodist Episcopal Church on
Canal Road sold a couple years earlier. The pastor heading up the new congregation
was the seasoned Rev. William H. Black, an 81-year-old Union Civil War veteran,
who worked in the records division of the pension office.
Northwest M. E.
Church Trustees paid an estimated $3,000 to local builder W. E. Pickford to
construct the church. Pickford was not known for building churches but rather
dozens of DC homes including, the shops and residences at 3403 M Street, the
Fremont condominiums in Logan Circle and a couple houses near the reservoir in
the Foxhall-Palisades neighborhood on 47th place.
Pickford appears to
have used a variation of the Prices’ Plan 54 (above at video link). The plan also bears a strong
resemblance to a construction photo of the Northwest Church that ran locally
in The Sunday Star on September 10, 1905 (right).
The accompanying
article highlighted details, like how the church’s main entrance was made
through the base of a belfry tower. Our current front porch was used by the
congregation to enter the building. Today’s kitchen and dining areas were used
as a Sunday school room 100 years ago. The rest of main floor was once the
auditorium, which was lined with pews creating a seating capacity nearing 200.
Other newspapers
articles detail a decade of events at the church, including regular services,
Sunday school, and memorials. The Northwest Methodist Episcopal Church was also
a venue for the West Washington Citizens Association (WWCA), which held regular
meetings there preceding a reorganization by members to create the Conduit Road
Citizens Association (CRCA). This offshoot local civics group first organized
at the nearby St. David’s Parish Hall on October 2, 1916, but has grown during
the last century through its iterations as the MacArthur Citizens Association
in 1942 and since 1950, the Palisades Citizens Association.
Following Rev.
Black’s death in 1909, the church continued to have financial issues and
ultimately was put up for auction. On the August 12,1916, the church
began its transition from a DC house of worship to a Palisades family residence
as the building was put up for auction as a home. Charles A Baker -- the
president of the CRCA and a former vice president of the WWCA, which held meetings
in the church -- bought the building in 1916, according to DC tax records.
The year also marks
the period when city records erroneously listed the incorrect year that the
house was built. Without any documents to substantiate the incorrect year, the
Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs has refused to multiple requests
with corroborating documents to fix this error.
On the night of
Monday July 31, 1922, an electrical short circuit sparked a fire in the
building. Engine 5 scrambled from the middle of Georgetown to battle the
blaze. Firefighter Lt. John Busher reportedly injured fighting the flames
when he fell through the bungalow second floor and was taken to Georgetown
University Hospital.
After the fire, the
church-like residence continued to be remodeled. The burnt frame was
reinforced. It was rebuilt, renovated and landscaped. During the 97 years
since, the home has seen many changes as it continued to hold large families --
whose kids still come back to see their childhood home and tell tales of
missing staircases, dirt floor basements and being huddled around air
conditioners during hot DC summers.
Copyright Alex Knott