Archive Record
Images
Metadata
Object ID |
2010.1063.02 |
Title |
Chevy Chase Historical Society Newsletter |
Object Name |
Newsletter |
Date |
Fall 2010 |
Creator |
Chevy Chase Historical Society |
Description |
Chevy Chase Historical Society Newsletter Fall 2010 "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" Is Fall Lecture Topic M.I.T. Professor Will Discuss, Sing the Ballad That Inspired Our Suburb's Name M.I.T literature professor Dr. Ruth Perry will speak on "The Ballad of Chevy Chase," the ancient "sung story" about a bloody battle on the England-Scotland border that gave our peaceful community its name, when she delivers the society's 2010 Fall Lecture on Sunday, November 21, at 4:00 p.m. The program, at the Chevy Chase Village Hall, 5906 Connecticut Avenue, will be free and open to the public. "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" is one of several re-tellings of a battle fought in a "chace," or hunting ground, in the Cheviot Hills on the borderland between England and Scotland, in 1388.The battle became part of English and Scottish folklore, first in the form of the Scottish ballad, "Battle of Otterbourne," and then in the English version, The Hunting of the Cheviot" or "Chevy Chase." Centuries later, in 1725, Lord Baltimore gave a 560 acre tract of land in the New World to Joseph E. Belt, a colonel in the king's Maryland militia. Colonel Belt named his land grant "Cheivy Chace." When 200 acres of that tract were purchased in the 1890s as the centerpiece of a planned streetcar suburb outside Washington, D.C., the developers borrowed the land grant's romantic name. The Chevy Chase Land Company and its streetcar suburb, Chevy Chase, were born. Local historians Elizabeth Jo Lampl and Kimberly Prothro Williams speculate that the name "Cheivy Chace" probably appealed to developer Francis G. Newlands' own Scottish ancestry. Another entrepreneur later riffed on the Chevy Chase name by calling his development on Connecticut Avenue "Otterbourne at Chevy Chase." Otterbourne's streets bore the battle related names of Melrose, Dalkeith, Douglas, and Percy, some of which survive today. Dr. Perry has lectured worldwide on 18th century English literature and culture, women's writing, and feminist theory.The author of eight books and numerous scholarly articles, she has begun work on a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an 18th century singer of traditional ballads. A folksinger herself, Dr. Perry will sing an abridged version of the 65 verse "Ballad of Chevy Chase" during her lecture. A short CCHS business meeting will precede the lecture. Light refreshments will be served. Questions may be directed to Mary Sheehan at (301) 652-5726. The Little Train That Isn't By William M. Offutt Someday we may be able to ride a light rail train, called "the Purple Line," from Bethesda to Silver Spring and beyond. If and when that day comes, we will have returned to where we were a hundred years ago when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad reached Bethesda and then chugged on south to Georgetown. That's progress! Usually called the Georgetown Branch of, the B&Q .Railroad, or the Georgetown Local, nicknamed the "Sweetie Line" for reasons unknown - and sometimes known as the "southern" branch of the Metropolitan Line that had run diagonally across the county from Takoma Park and through both Rockville and Gaithersburg to Point of Rocks since the 1870s - the single track railroad with its numerous sidings was always a freight only operation, except, of course, for those who hitched rides to Georgetown or to the Chevy Chase Lake Swimming Pool on Connecticut Avenue. In 2003, while researching his article for The Sentinel, the quarterly journal of the B&O Historical Society, historian Duane Carrell discovered that there had actually been six passenger runs during the branch's 93 year history. One in 1953 probably carried President Harry S. Truman into town for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Fred M. Vinson's funeral; another during the Korean War may have hauled troops from Fort Myer at night; and most of the others were excursions for railroad buffs, plus one birthday party special in Kenwood at First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's behest, and the Smithsonian Institution's historic "John Bull" outing in September 1981.The last once-a-week coal run to Georgetown took place in 1985, and the line was officially abandoned in 1988.1 Herbert Harwood, in his book Impossible Challenge, called the line "one of the most picturesque anywhere in the area" and "a backwoods railroad in the midst of a city." A bit more than 11 miles long, it included a high wooden trestle; a brick lined tunnel under the Washington Aqueduct; several bridges; and a three mile run between the C&O Canal and the Potomac River at Fletcher's Boathouse and then into Georgetown and down the middle of K Street.2 The line originally was planned to circumvent the Pennsylvania Railroad's monopoly on the existing Potomac bridge and to connect to recently acquired rail lines at Quantico, Virginia. A secondary purpose of the original plan was to carry freight to the docks in the capital. Work on the Georgetown Branch began in 1891 and reached two miles from the main line just north of Silver Spring to unfinished Connecticut Avenue and Chevy Chase Lake in 1892, crossing a 1,400 foot long trestle that stood 67 feet above Rock Creek in the process. It was by far the longest bridge in the B&O system. There it stopped for 15 years because of B&O financial problems, to the benefit of the Chevy Chase Land Company. Work resumed in 1908 when a large generating plant for the Capital Traction Company, a trolley car conglomerate, was planned for Georgetown. The train tracks were laid across the farmland that was soon to become the golf course of Columbia Country Club and then followed lake-feeding Colquin Creek through a deep cut into Bethesda and under the then-wooden bridge that carried the Georgetown-Frederick Turnpike and the single track of the trolley line to Rockville. Bethesda was then a fast growing village with a spreading industrial area known as Miller's Flats where several lumber yards, coal distributors, and other businesses soon flourished along with a small black community. The tracks curved down toward the District line, crossed old River Road, and tunneled under the Dalecarlia Resevoir and the Washington Aqueduct. They then ran along the C&O canal for a couple of miles and under an arch of the Aqueduct Bridge to join up with the mile or so of the Georgetown Barge, Dock, Elevator & Railway Company tracks that had been operating with horses since 1889. The first Georgetown Line train ran all the way into Georgetown on June 23, 1910. The tracks there were extended across Rock Creek a few years later to carry building materials for the Lincoln Memorial. Because there was no way to turn around, most postwar diesels went into the city backwards with a caboose rigged to signal the crossings, although the steam engines had usually done the opposite in the early days and then backed out of Georgetown.3 In addition to carrying coal to Georgetown for the electric generating facility and later the government heating plant, in the early years the line was hauling tons of building materials into burgeoning Bethesda. It carried fuel for home heating to several dealers including E.G. Keys and T.W. Perry, and "Famous Reading Anthracite" for William King & Sons; served the incinerator of the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission; brought thousands of cases of beer to the warehouse of the Montgomery County Department of Liquor Control; hauled lime and bulk concrete for the local batch plants, including Maloney's on Arlington Road (which outlived the railroad by six years);and delivered hopper cars filled with cinders from Cumberland to the sprawling Bethesda Cinder Block and Supply operation on River Road. It also brought most of the Indiana limestone used to build the Washington National Cathedral to a siding near the Chevy Chase Lake Swimming Pool. Later, tank cars carried chlorine water to the water filtration facility at Dalecarlia and heating oil to many Bethesda distributors. Most of the freight cars came out of Georgetown and Bethesda empty, but there were occasional shipments of flour from Georgetown as well as sand and gravel from the docks.4 Despite repeated warnings from anxious parents and attempts by both the railroad and town fathers to fence off an "attractive nuisance," generations of Bethesda children played along the tracks and under the bridges. Some people hopped the freight for rides to school or to go fishing. Dozens of youngsters hiked the tracks to go swimming at the Chevy Chase Lake Swimming Pool and dared each other to venture out on the wooden trestle over Rock Creek, a structure that succumbed to Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972. Students walking south to Leland Junior High School or north to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School created narrow footpaths that crossed the right-of-way in a number of places. The trainmen in the slow moving freights almost always waved back to children along the tracks and sometimes even blew their horns or whistles.5 In a 1981 interview with a reporter from The Washington Post, Irving Miller, then-owner of Talbert's Ice and Beverage, remembered when the crew would leave the train "smack in the middle of River Road" and come to the store for coffee. He said he often rode the freight to school, sometimes sitting near the potbellied stove in the caboose and hopping off in Georgetown near the rendering plant that" used to stink like hell."6 In the middle of Bethesda, near the intersection of Bethesda Avenue and now-abandoned Reed Street, across from the present Barnes & Noble book store, the B&O built a small section house and a red brick freight station, and laid down a long siding and a series of spurs to serve a number of concerns. These included the lumberyards, Griffith Consumers, Columbia Specialty, and other fuel oil distributors, giant Briggs Clarifier (whose buildings became Hot Shoppes' offices and warehouse), Capital Frito, and the concrete plants that received hopper cars of dry cement mix. During WWII the spurs also served the big warehouse of Wild Bill Donovan's U.S. Office of Strategic Services and several secret war industries. The freight depot survived as a vegetarian organic food restaurant and later as a night club, but the other small railroad building disappeared under the big parking lot across from Barnes & Noble. The B&O and later CSX crews that operated what they called the "Sweetie Line" got to know many people and a few dogs along the way, and even got used to annoying the golfers on the Columbia County Club links. A newspaper reported that when the daughter of a Sumner resident was getting married in her back yard, the mother of the bride waved down the train one day and asked the engineer not to come though during the early afternoon ceremony. He agreed, and that Saturday walked down the tracks and when the celebrating began, fired up his engine and came roaring by, horn sounding and bell clanging with white streamers flying from the cab.9 Trains ran daily through the 1950's and into the 60s as diesel electrics replaced the steam engines and the first air rights buildings went up in Bethesda. When WDCA Channel 20 built its studios just off River Road, its management somehow convinced the B&O not to sound the horn where crossing signals had been erected. Changes in Georgetown as well as in the suburbs led to the railroad's decline and operations dropped to three times a week in the 1970s and finally just to weekly service in the 80s. At the end the only customer was the U.S. General Services Administration's power plant. The last train ran in June 1985. The B&O abandoned the line and Montgomery County purchased the Maryland section. Beginning in 1990, the U.S. National Park Service and Montgomery County created the popular Capital Crescent Trail on the rail bed, where today area residents enjoy walking, running, rollerblading, and bicycling along the way from Silver Spring to Georgetown.10 B&O The Sentinel, Vol. 25 no. 1,Duane Carrell,2001,"A Wraith in the Backyard." Impossible Challenge, Herbert H. Harwood, Jr., Bernard Roberts, 1979; History of the Georgetown Branch, Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail, n.d. Bethesda: A Social History, William M. Offutt, 1995, "Innovation Game";Carrell, ob.cit. The Washington Post, Edward G. Wells, Jr., April 26, 1981, "Carrying Coals to K Street"; Carrell and Offutt, ob. cit. The rebuilt trestle over Rock Creek was reopened as part of the Capital Crescent Trail in 2003. Wells, ob.cit. The Washington Post, Oct. 10, 1960, Allen L. Dessoff, "B&O Georgetown Local Has Run for 100 Years." The Washington Post, May 16,1947 and Nov. 5,1949. Carrell and Wells, ob.cit. 10 History of the Georgetown Branch, ob. cit.; A Trail Profile and History, Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail website, www.cctrail.org. Other Articles: CCHS Plans History-Go-Round Visit to Hillwood Museum CCHS "Out and About" Chevy Chase Voices |