History of the Maret School at 2118 Kalorama Road

The famed Maret School at 3000 Cathedral Avenue in Woodley Park was founded as a French school for girls in 1911 by Louise Maret, a teacher born in Switzerland and educated in the United States.  Success was immediate in Washington, and by 1923, the school was able to raise funds, expand, and commission the Tudor Revival building at 2118 Kalorama Road, seen here.  The Maret School expanded again, admitting both boys and girls, and in 1952 moved into the Key mansion and its seven acre estate coined ‘Woodley’ that continues to serve as their campus. 

      

Louise Maret established the school with the aim to “procure for American students a complete course of studies including preparation for college, music and art, with the added advantage of acquiring a through knowledge of the French language.”  Speaking French while at school was required as soon as the pupil mastered the elements of the language.  When it was located on Kalorama Road, the High School, for girls, included boarding and day departments, with a complete academic course and college preparation.  The Lower school was a day school open to both boys and girls, with a complete course in studies and French beginning in the first grade.  

         

The school building at 2118 Kalorama Road was built in 1923 with 25 “sunny and airy” rooms in close proximity to Rock Creek Park for recreation purposes.  Offered at the school was tennis, basketball, skating, riding, playground games, football, baseball, folk dancing for girls, and swimming, which was held at the Shoreham Hotel swimming pool.  According to a 1930 school program, the building itself featured “specially designed windows for scientific ventilation” in addition to a gymnasium, library, assembly hall, dormitory rooms, and roof top garden and playground.

The school provided automobile transportation for day students as early as 1930.  School plays were given by students twice a year in the assembly hall, and the school published a magazine coined “Hand in Hand,” or “La Main dans la Main.”  However, “no social clubs or secret societies” were permitted at the school!  School tuition fees in 1944 ranged according to class, from $200 a year for first grade, to $400 per year as a junior or senior.  Hot lunches were served at $50 per semester, as was milk and crackers at recess, for $7.50 per semester.  Additional fees were charged for use of the laboratory, piano, athletics, art, dramatics, and graduation exercises. 

          

The school greatly expanded and changed by 1952, when it moved into the ‘Woodley’ estate on Cathedral Avenue, which it had purchased some years earlier, and became a coeducational, college preparatory school.  Philip Barton Key, the uncle of Francis Scott Key, had bought the 250 wooded-acre estate in 1797.  In 1803, he built Woodley, the Federal style house on the hill that would later become home to a number of statesmen, including U.S. Presidents, Secretaries of War, and General George Patton. Its last resident owner was Henry Stimson, Secretary of War during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, who helped direct the American war effort from the study, which is now the school’s library computer room.  For one hundred and fifty years, the woods, parks, and vistas of Woodley provided a quiet retreat for politicians and presidents.

 Copyright Paul K. Williams

The Other Octagon House in Washington DC

Today considered a rare site, octagonal houses in the United States have dotted the landscape since the 1600s, reaching their zenith of popularity in the mid 1800s.  Washington, DC had five, one of which was built at 1830 Phelps Place on land that is today known as the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood.  It was constructed in 1865 by two brothers, William and Edward Bebb, and it stood at that site until 1950.
      
The brothers then worked at the Patent Office, but William had once served as the Governor of Ohio, from 1846 to 1849.  He had been born on December 8, 1802, in the small town of Paddy's Run (later Shandon), Ohio.  Their father, Edward Bebb, was a Welsh immigrant. 
 

Many book published in the mid 1880s told the virtues and uniqueness of living in an eight sided house, but it was one in particular that perhaps best explained the many advantages of storage, closets, ventilation, and economy of construction: A Home For All by Orson S. Fowler.  His book was printed with eight editions, and included plans, drawings, and suggestions for construction, and was responsible for more than 500 such buildings constructed along the eastern seaboard. 
 

Shortly after it was built, the Bebb brothers sold the house to Leroy R. Tuttle, who served as the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury from 1866 to 1876, during Reconstruction.  He later made a fortune in real estate speculation in the city, and had the noted New York architect Stanford White design a new house for him close by at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Leroy Place (razed in 1955 for a hotel).  Tuttle continued to own the octagon house, however, and rented it to various families over the next several decades. 
 
Tuttle recounted one rather unusual story that took place during his tenure at the Treasury Department.  At the onset of the nationwide financial panic of 1873, his college at the New York City branch of the Treasury Department telegrammed that $10 million dollars in cash was needed with no time to spare.  Concerned about theft, Tuttle dressed down, packed the cash in large carpetbags, and made the nine hour train ride to New York overnight to avoid suspicion.

The octagon house was eventually sold by the Tuttle family to the Holton Arms School in 1948.  It was razed two years later for an addition to the school that never materialized, and the lot remained vacant until a series of new townhouses were built there in 1976.  Before it was torn down, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) carefully recorded the house with measured drawings of many of its details, elevations, and sectionals, all seen here and housed at the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

Copyright Paul K. Williams

The Oldest House in Washington, DC

To the casual passerby, the large yellow and white Georgian styled house at 2401 Kalorama Road, NW in the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood might be mistaken for a recreation or a slightly out of place house built in the 1930s when Colonial-styled architectural revivals were popular. Its origin, however, dates from its initial construction in Danvers, Massachusetts in the middle of the 18th century, and is as authentic as its painstaking rebuilding in Washington between 1934 and 1936.

The Lindens was eventually named after the many Linden trees that originally surrounded it in Massachusetts. It was, however, first known as “The Great House” when it was built by wealthy merchant and English Loyalist Robert Hooper (right) whom his neighbors called “King Hooper.” It was built in 1754 as his summer house in Danvers, just outside Marblehead, where Hooper maintained a large town house.

By the 1930s, the Lindens was threatened with demolition after decades of neglect. In fact, its main floor parlor paneling had already been sold to the Kansas City Museum. After searching for a Colonial era house to move to Washington for years to house their antique furniture collection, the Lindens was bought in early 1934 for $10,000 by George M. and Miriam Hubbard Morris. It was documented with exquisite measured drawings and photographs in January of that year, carefully labeled, disassembled, and placed in six freight train cars for its move to Washington.

The Lindens pictured in 1934 at its original location in Danvers, Mass

The Morris’s hired Williamsburg craftsmen and architects to assist in the project, which took 34 months to complete. George Morris was a local attorney who eventually became president of the American Bar Association. While at Dartmouth, he became interested in antiques when he took a course by Homer E. Keyes, founder of Antiques magazine. His wife Miriam, a 1909 graduate of the National Cathedral School, was also keenly interested in antiques following a course of study in Paris (below).

The young couple married in 1918, and with Keyes as their advisor, began to collect American Queen Anne and Chippendale furniture and accessories. They eventually purchased a vacant lot in Sheridan-Kalorama on the northwest corner of 24th Street and Kalorama Road where they indented to build a recreation of the Byrd family’s 18th century manor, coined Westover, which was located along the James River. That dream ended with the 1929 stock market crash, according to Morris.

Instead, they located and purchased the Lindens five years later. Following a three year rebuilding to exact standards, the Morris’s moved into 2401 Kalorama Road with their three children in 1937. Miriam oversaw what was then considered an expert restoration, concealing lighting fixtures and phones, using electrified candles, and even built the radio into a false bookcase in the library to conceal its location.

The exterior paint was combined with sand to replicate a stone finish, a building material in short supply in the 1750s. The parlor walls were recreated from measured drawings from the original at the Kansas City Museum, but the remainder of the interior paneling and grand staircase was complete and had been moved intact from Massachusetts.

Miriam’s exhaustive research on every aspect of architectural and antique furnishings for the house led her to eventually become one of most regarded experts on the subject in the United States. She eventually lectured on early Americana in such far away places as Singapore, Thailand, and Japan. She served as the only woman on the State Department’s Fine Arts Committee, established in 1961 to study and acquire early American antiques for the departments Diplomatic reception rooms.

Miriam Morris’s collection of antiques wasn’t her only passion in life, however. In 1916, at the age of 25, she drew plans for a bright yellow convertible sports car with crab eye headlights that was made to order by the Biddle Brothers in Philadelphia. She was also an enthusiastic aviatrix, noted as the first woman to fly over Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls in a single-engine plane. She remained at the Lindens with her large and impressive collection of rare early American antiques until her death in June of 1982. The home’s contents were auctioned at Christies in New York the following January. The humble beginnings of the collection, purchased during the Depression brought more than six figures for many of the numerous furniture pieces.

According to public records, the Lindens recently sold for $7.165 million in February of 2007 and was featured in Architectural Digest in February of  2014.  

Copyright Paul K. Williams.

Photographs from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

No Need to Empty the China Cabinet: Just Pick Up and Move Your DC Townhouse in 1907.

When we begin a house history and literally hit a brick wall when we start researching, something is amiss.  We double checked lot numbers, house numbers, and even the Square number, but one recent project left us stumped.  Of all possibilities, we never would have guessed that the three story, 114 year old townhouse we were researching had been moved just eight years after it had been built.  Moved only 25 feet, that is, without the need to even empty the china cabinet.     

The owner  of the vacant lot where 2108 Bancroft Place, NW was to be constructed beginning in 1899, John James Hemphill (left) likely never envisioned that his soon to be built house would be astonishingly moved in its entirety to the adjoining lot just eight years later, in 1907. The house he constructed at 2108 Bancroft was indeed painstakingly relocated next door, where it is found at 2110 Bancroft Place today (right). 

 “JJ” Hemphill as he was known, applied for and was granted an Application for Permit to Build numbered 1778 for the house on June 7, 1899.  He listed architect Lemuel Norris (1838-1940) as responsible for its design, and William P. Lipscomb as the general contractor. It was estimated to have cost $12,000 to construct.  

John James Hemphill (August 25, 1849 - May 11, 1912) was a U.S. Representative from South Carolina, elected as a Democrat to the Forty-eighth and to the four succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1883-March 3, 1893).

 

The Moving of 2108 Bancroft Place to 2110 Bancroft Place

Shortly before April of 1907, Hemphill’s neighbor to the east constructed a high brick wall that Hemphill felt obstructed his views. A good brick (fence) wall apparently did not make good neighbors, and Hemphill took the drastic step of planning to move his house twenty-five feet west onto an adjoining vacant lot. It was a risky maneuver, and had not been accomplished in Washington prior to 1907. In addition to the move, the house had to be raised eighteen inches to accommodate the street grade. It would cost $4,500.  Remember, the house cost $12,000 to build!

Hemphill obtained a Permit to Repair or Reconstruct Buildings numbered 3346 on April 24, 1907. He indicated that a mechanic at the Sheeler Company would oversee the operation and an article in the May 26, 1907 Washington Post revealed that the move took about three weeks to accomplish.  They planned on supporting the wood bay on the east side with copper, and would add a rear brick addition measuring twelve by sixteen feet once the house was in its new location. The text from the Post appears here.

Mary Clements recalls in her oral history interview with homeowner Elizabeth Hemphill that she had indicated that she didn’t even have to empty her china closet the move went so smoothly. Interestingly, despite the fact that the house had been moved to its new location at 2110 Bancroft Place and a new house was under construction at 2108 that began in 1909, the 1910 census still refers to the Hemphill family as residing at 2108. It was likely due to the address number still affixed to the exterior, replaced when the house to the east was finished. In any event, it showed Mr. and Mrs. Hemphill as occupants, along with their 17- year-old son John. They had one live-in, Mulatto servant names Sarah J. Johnson, who had been born in Virginia about 1872.  

Somewhat surprisingly, just two years after the drastic move due to his loss of view to the east, Hemphill himself obtained a permit to construct a new house on the lot where his own had been moved. He once again hired Lemuel Norris to design 2108 Bancroft Place, which was constructed shortly after the permit was issued on March 23, 1909. It was built by the Lipscomb Company at a cost of $15,000. The front elevation plan was included along with the permit, illustrated at left.

   

Copyright Paul K. Williams