Archive Record
Images
Metadata
Object ID |
2009.1055.46 |
Title |
CCHS Newsletter: 2001 |
Object Name |
Newsletter |
Date |
2001 |
Creator |
CCHS |
Description |
Spring 2001 Angela Lancaster, President Next meeting listed as May 6, 2001 CHEVY CHASE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Newsletter Spring 2001 SPRING GALA TO BE HELD IN 1895 HOUSE 8 West Irving Street William and Valerie Grace have agreed to host CCHS' annual spring gala, on Sunday, May 6`h, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. The gracious interior and exterior spaces of Mr. and Mrs. Grace's impeccably renovated home at 8 West Irving Street will provide a beautiful as well as an historic setting for this year's event. One of the earliest houses in Chevy Chase, 8 West Irving Street is a large 1895 country Victorian sitting on a double lot in the West Village. The materials used in its construction are an eclectic and noteworthy combination from ground to roof. The two foot wide stone foundation gives way to a cedar shingled first level, with double layered thick shingles cut in a sawtooth pattern. The second floor consists of distinctive pebbledash stucco topped by an ornate English half timbered frieze surrounding the house just under the overhanging roof. The roof has very elongated eaves supported by more than one hundred soffits, up to five feet long, which are carved into fanciful animal like figures. Inside the house are expansive upper and lower foyers, connected by a curved double staircase. Ornate woodwork, including wainscoting and abundant molding, is found everywhere. The interior was designed to enhance musical acoustics and in the 1920s the house was known as the "Chevy Chase Music Hall," because it hosted many performances in that period. The original 8,000 square foot structure underwent a major top to bottom renovation for its hundredth anniversary, including a sunny expansion in the back and an excavation of the basement. The south facing yard has been landscaped extensively and includes many new plantings, elaborate stonework, a large rebuilt garage and driveway, and a whimsical tree house attached to an enormous elm stump. The outstanding neighborhood restaurant La Ferme will cater the champagne supper at the gala. Pianist Colton Howard will provide musical entertainment, including performance of "The Chevy Chase Two Step" by W.G. Wilmarth and "The Chevy Chase" by Eubie Blake. An exhibit of historical interest will be featured. Invitations to the gala will be sent to CCHS members and others who have expressed interest in the society. Reservations are by mail only. For more information, please call Helen Secrest, (301) 652-4878. The Chevy Chase Historical Society willhold its annual meeting and Spring Lectureon April 24 at the newly renovatedChevy Chase Elementary School.See page 7 for details Little Forest by Paul Magid Residents of Chevy Chase, Maryland are familiar with the Newlands Street in their own neighborhood. They may not be aware that there is another Newlands Street in the District of Columbia at the site of what was, in the 1920s, a home ofEdith McAllister Newlands, widow of Francis G. Newlands, the original developer of Chevy Chase. The history: The headline in the Washington Business Journal read "District to sell off unused real estate." The lead paragraph of the article in the June 14 20, 1996 issue stated that District officials in Mayor Marion Barry's administration were planning to sell and lease "hundreds of pieces of unused, city owned real estate" to "scare up new revenue and spur economic development in D.C." Among examples of holdings offered, the article said, was a "nine acre piece of land at 5420 28`h Street, N.W. assessed at almost $3 million." It did not take Ann Renshaw, a long time resident and member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, long to recognize the piece of land referred to. A feisty, tenacious urban activist who knows how to grab an issue and shake it until her adversaries beg for compromise, Ms. Renshaw is very familiar with this 8.77 acre patch of woods known as Little Forest, a tiny enclave in the National Park system. For years, she and her Utah & Newlands Streetsneighbors have been strolling its trails and looking after its needs. This was their park and they were not about to sit still and let the District dispose of it as excess property. Commuters hurtling down Military Road, N.W. during rush hour, hands gripping steering wheels, eyes riveted on the cars in front of them, are unlikely to notice the small stretch of woods on a low bluff on the north side of the road between 28th and 30`h Streets, N.W. They are even less likely to see the small brown sign with the National Park Service logo and the words "Little Forest" in the high grass on the corner of 28`' Street, N.W. and Military Road, N.W. "Little Forest " Sign at Corner of Military Rd. & 28TH St. Until the late 1880s, this section of Washington was farmland. Farmers raised wheat and tobacco on the gentle hills surrounding the Military Road, a rutted lane connecting the string of forts built to protect the city during the Civil War. Little Forest, on land too steep and broken for cropping, was probably a wood lot on one of the farms. According to Eleanor Ford, a Chevy Chase historian, beginning in 1887, at about the same time that Congress was appropriating funds for the acquisition of Rock Creek Park, Francis G. Newlands and William Stewart, future partners in the soon to be founded Chevy Chase Land Company, began to buy many of these farms as part of an "accumulation of property for the building of Connecticut Avenue and an electric railway." Newlands and Stewart hoped that building the avenue and railway would stimulate the rapid growth of a high quality suburb they planned to create on tracts of land they were buying up on the District Montgomery County line. To avoid an escalation of land prices, Newlands used straw men like Stewart to buy a patchwork of parcels along what is the present day Military Road, N.W., that then were transferred to the company. The purchases included Little Forest. Eventually Newlands determined that this parcel was too far from the Connecticut Avenue route to be useful to his land company's development plans, so he acquired it from Stewart, together with several other parcels, and held it in his own name rather than turn it over to the company. Francis G. Newlands Newlands had early roots in Washington. His family moved to the city when he was a boy, and aside from a brief stint at Yale, he remained in the District until he was admitted to the bar in 1869 at age 21. He then promptly moved to San Francisco to hang out his shingle. In California, he acquired a fortune, not from the practice of law, although he was very successful at it, but from his marriage in 1874 to Clara Sharon, the daughter of California land and mining speculator, William Sharon. Clara died in 1882, leaving her husband a 34 year old widower with three young daughters. Then, in 1885, Clara's father died, making Newlands the trustee and 1 / 12`h owner of Sharon's enormous estate. The extent of this inheritance can be measured by the fact that only a modest portion of it made Newlands the second largest property owner in Nevada. Edith McAllister Newlands In 1887, the wealthy widower took a European vacation. At a dinner party in Paris, according to Mrs. Ford, who is not only an historian but a relative of the family, he met Edith McAllister, also from California. After their return from Europe on separate ships, they met again at a dinner party in New York, completely by coincidence according to Newlands, just before both of them boarded the same train for the five day trip to San Francisco. "She was a handsome lady, very much liked by the rest of the family," says Mrs. Ford. The leisurely train trip afforded the couple an opportunity to get to know one another better, and a year later they married. Edith Newlands Johnston While maintaining his legal residence in Nevada for political and legal purposes, Newlands spent much of his time shuttling back and forth between California and Washington, D.C., looking after the interests of the Sharon estate and providing services to his clients. An extremely energetic man, he somehow found the time in the midst of his other endeavors to use some of his wealth and a great deal of borrowed money-a total of at least $3 million-to accumulate his Washington and Chevy Chase holdings. His ties to the city were strengthened when he was elected to represent Nevada in the House of Representatives and later the Senate, eventually serving a total of 22 years in Congress. When he died in 1917, among his legacies were numerous parcels of Washington land, including Little Forest. The latter was divided into shares, a third going to his widow, Edith McAllister Newlands, and the remaining two thirds to Edith and Janet Newlands Johnston, his two surviving daughters by his first wife, Clara. (The sisters had married two Johnston brothers.) Janet Newlands Johnston A comparison of maps of the area shows that sometime between 1925 and 1931 Mrs. Newlands built a house at the east end of the property that she used as a country residence-perhaps a quiet place to retreat to when her social life at her primary home downtown became too hectic. Today a white, wood frame house with a stone chimney stands behind a high chain link fence in approximately the same location. Some neighborhood residents think it was hers. But, says Mrs. Ford, "I was told by Senator Newlands' granddaughter that [hers] was torn down." A surviving family member who actually saw the place says that it was built of stone, rather than wood. She recalls that the stonework was similar to that of the present chimney. Whether or not the present house is the one that the widow Newlands built, the remainder of the land-Little Forest, today separated from the white house by a short stretch of 28`h Street, N.W. built in the 1940s-formed its grounds, a wooded and private parkland. When Mrs. Newlands died in 1939 at the age of 79, her will directed her executors to set aside "three acres of my forest lands in the District of Columbia, designated by me as `Little Forest," as a memorial to her husband. She further ordered that the land be transferred to the District of Columbia to be used as a park, with the proviso that if it were not kept as a memorial to her husband, it would revert to her heirs. In June 1942, the trustees of her estate conveyed the acreage to the District in compliance with her instructions. At the same time, Edith and Janet Newlands Johnston also conveyed their 5.7 acre portion of the parcel to the District under the identical conditions. In December 1 948, the District transfer red the land to the National Park Service under the same conditions: that it be used as a park in memory of Senator Newlands, and that if it were not, it would revert to the heirs. So it remains today. The land now bears only faint signs of its former life as the grounds of a country home. It is accessible from both its east and west ends. On the west, a ravine parallels 30th Street, N.W. It is possible to climb up its slope on one of two paths worn by visitors over the years. Exposed tree roots make a natural staircase up the steep sides of the hills. Access to this trail is marked by a wooden pedestal containing a poem to Little Forest mounted under Plexiglas. It appeared without fanfare one morning a couple of years ago, a spontaneous offering from the son of one of the Forest's patrons, Kit Paddack. Regular users, mostly dog walkers, usually enter the Forest on it eastern side, from 28th Street, N.W., across the road from where Mrs. Newlands built her country retreat. Here, by a brown plastic trash bin set on a concrete slab and a flat rock on whicF. teenagers have scrawled a few mildly obscene comments, a narrow path can be seen meandering through the underbrush. Ii is still bordered in places with white quartz and is strewn witl pieces of broken slate, probably the remnants of a more formal walkway. About a hundred feet down the path, a collection o`~ small stone monoliths appears out of the surrounding leaf mold At first glance they appear to signal the presence of Druids in the wood. Closer inspection suggests, somewhat less romantically-that they were actually cement supports for a picnic table anc two benches, possibly built by the National Park Service in a short lived burst of interest in improving its newly acquired property. The path divides beyond the monoliths and divides again arseveral points, crisscrossed by smaller trails, some man math and others worn by the families of deer that often inhabit the Forest at night, vacating it for the less accessible reaches of Rock Creek Park during the day. The main path dips and rises again circling the highest point in the Forest, an ivy and periwinkle covered hillock framed at its base by stone slabs, before descending at last into the ravine at 30th Street, N.W. Non-native flora abound in this small area, further evidence of Little Forest's domesticated past. Park Service naturalist Su( Salmon points out examples: the English ivy that covers the ground and swarms up the sides of some of the larger trees, the multi floral rose bushes once used as root stock for thei ornamental cousins, and a few remaining rhododendron. Shy _. adds the bush honeysuckle, and the odd bedraggled hemlock and cedar, to the list. The presence of tulip poplar trees, tall witl straight trunks, and a number of silver beeches, are clea__ "indications that the area has been disturbed," she says. In National Park Service parlance, this means it was once cut over probably during the Civil War, when much of this area wa cleared for defense, firewood, and building material. Beech and tulip poplar are among the first hardwood trees to grow back-Most of the other vegetation, including red and white oak dogwood, black cherry, mountain laurel, and even the American holly, is native to the area. Little Forest has been a playground over the years for several generations of neighborhood children. They built forts on the-hillsides, hid their Playboy magazines in tree hollows, and playe( hide and seek in the underbrush. The Forest was also a haunt for students from nearby St. Johns School who roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over campfires they made in a small clearing no far from the monoliths, and drank their beer and smoked their pot, leaving teenage artificats for others to find. A homeless man once lived in the Forest until a neighbor, fearing for the children, somehow had him removed from the scene. 28th Street Entrance |