Dumbarton House History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places Smithsonian Magazine

Table Of Content

• Give Today to Support Historic Preservation in Washington, DC.
• Dolley Madison
• The Hidden Figures of Dumbarton House: Slavery and Servitude within the Nourse family Household
• New exhibit shows how redlining affected DC and beyond, and what we can do about it today
• Explore This Park
• Since 1932, Dumbarton House has operated as a museum, modeling life in Georgetown in the early Federal period.
• The daily opening times of Dumbarton House in Los Angeles

After stripping the fanlight, they discovered that the wood bore singe marks signaling that it may have been in a fire. Staff were aware that the roofline had been changed at some point, though the reason was unknown until this moment. Removing the collections wasn’t a simple matter of packing them up in boxes and forwarding them to a temporary location.

Give Today to Support Historic Preservation in Washington, DC.

Information was drawn from Nourse family correspondence and Joseph Nourse's account books. Join us in our mission to promote historic preservation, educate the public on early American history, and enhance the cultural life of our nation’s capital. Museum displays will be integrated throughout the building, featuring key objects from the council’s museum, archive, and local history collections that tell stories of Dumbarton. Meghan White is a historic preservationist and a former assistant editor for Preservation magazine.

Tag Archives: Dumbarton Oaks Garden - KidFriendly DC

Tag Archives: Dumbarton Oaks Garden.

Posted: Mon, 03 May 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Dolley Madison

This is one of a much smaller number of Federal great-houses, laid out in careful Palladian symmetry with wings on each side of a stately central block. At first glance, the building might seem little different from the brick Georgian mansions of the 18th century, but it was actually markedly new and stylish in 1800. The Flemish-bond brick walls no longer seem as heavy and squat as on many Georgian mansions (the James River plantations in Virginia come to mind), and the interior is no longer dim. Making DCIn 1790, Congress established a new location for the United States capital along the banks of the Potomac with the passage of the Residence Act.

The Hidden Figures of Dumbarton House: Slavery and Servitude within the Nourse family Household

It had been established in 1747 as a tobacco inspection site, being located at the highest navigable spot on the Potomac River. Maryland farmers, who grew highly-prized “sweet-scented” tobacco, rolled great hogsheads of it down to the wharf at Georgetown to be exported to Scotland. Visitors to Dumbarton House return in time to when Joseph Nourse, first Register of the U.S.

Alleyways of DC Walking Tour

Closely connected to the first years of the American Republic, the house has stood on the heights of Georgetown for over two centuries. The Capitol and President’s Mansion were under construction, and a scattering of other buildings, none very remarkable, demonstrated the desire that a town grow here. “The building, which has been vacant for a number of years, is central to the High Street and its refurbishment will breathe new life into the town centre, right in the heart of our community.

We therefore recommend you to always check the opening hours with Dumbarton House before your visit and see if it might be needed to reserve a time slot. A new wall was installed to serve as a moisture barrier between the collection storage and the pipes seen beyond the door. The $1.4 million project that necessitates Dumbarton’s closure for nearly six months—spanning the end of 2016 to April 2017—is a total overhaul of the site’s HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) system. It runs through the 1915 and 1991 portions of the site, where Dumbarton's collection of over 3,000 objects are stored.

Explore This Park

The current Dumbarton Library building will be transformed into a community collections store and archive, open to the public. The property, with its landmark arch windows, has lay vacant for several years and will undergo a meticulous restoration of the existing structure while preserving its historic elements. The redevelopment of Dumbarton’s oldest building into a library and museum has taken a major step forward as work began on the site. Our Visitor Center explores more than two centuries of Dumbarton House History. Visitors walk through a timeline that details the building of the home, its past occupants, and its early twentieth century restoration by the NSCDA.

Since 1932, Dumbarton House has operated as a museum, modeling life in Georgetown in the early Federal period.

Dating back to the 1700s, Wright's Chance is a Colonial period plantation house. Meanwhile, lower Georgetown, along the waterfront, had become a rather seedy industrial zone. Massive amounts of silt had filled the harbor, making it nearly useless as a shipping port. Once seafaring trade had diminished, business activity shifted to the assorted mills and factories lining the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal.

A Romantic Dumbarton House Wedding With a Blue and Gray Color Palette - Washingtonian

A Romantic Dumbarton House Wedding With a Blue and Gray Color Palette.

Posted: Wed, 08 Jan 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Power in PreservationThe Power in Preservation exhibit is a celebration of the role that women have historically played in the broad field of preservation. You will learn a little about the origins of the historic preservation movement in the United States and some of the earliest historic preservation organizations. Discover the preservation work done over the years here at Dumbarton House and meet Mrs. Henrietta Fairfax Morris Bonsal, a key, but mysterious figure from the museum’s history. Dumbarton House Museum’s collection of more than 1,000 pieces includes furniture, paintings, textiles, silver, and ceramics primarily from the Federal period, 1789 to 1825. In addition, the museum houses a manuscript and document collection including journals, account books, and letters that together document nearly 300 years of Nourse family life.

The system was last updated in 1991, but continuous problems with the chillers and a lack of adequate humidity controls led the staff at Dumbarton to consider a new system. In the Civil War years and afterwards, the house was known as Rittenhouse Place. Though the house itself seems to have changed very little, Georgetown changed all around it. The wheat and rye produced on the estate could be easily carried a short distance down the hill to Rock Creek, where it could be ground into flour at Lyons’ Mill.

Widowed when she was only 29, Britannia struggled to raise her only child Martha. When money was scarce, she rented out Tudor Place and eventually charged Union soldiers for lodging during the Civil War. Despite her financial struggles, Britannia was able to keep Tudor Place and many of the artifacts passed down from her great-grandparents. The team at Dumbarton House allows couples to bring in outside vendors of their choice to service the big day, so long as they are licensed in the state of Washington DC. To assist couples in making their decision, a list of trusted and preferred vendors can be provided. To-be-weds can celebrate any and all of their wedding-related events in this magnificent venue, with space for engagement parties, wedding showers, rehearsal dinners, and more.

Dumbarton House is a Federal style house located in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was completed around 1800. Its first occupant was Joseph Nourse, the first Register of the Treasury. Dumbarton House, a federal period historic house museum, stands on approximately an acre of gardens on the northern edge of Georgetown, District of Columbia. In addition to meeting its administrative needs, the NSCDA wanted to illustrate domestic life in Georgetown in the early federal period. To achieve this, its two principal floors were opened to the public as a house museum in 1932, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Washington. The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America promotes appreciation for the people, places and events that led to the formation and development of our country.

It's amazing to me that this unusual find has been covered up for so long. Dumbarton House, located on Q Street in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., has been closed to the public only three times. The first was in World War II, when the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America turned over their headquarters to the war effort. The war brought many unruly (and largely unwelcome) Union soldiers who seemed to have little respect for local residents, many of whom sympathized with the South. Troops camped at the Lyons Mill complex on Rock Creek, for example, would occasionally take potshots at the stained glass windows of the chapel in Oak Hill Cemetery, just to the north of Rittenhouse Place. To the south was an encampment of former slaves who had fled across the Potomac from the plantations of Virginia.

Meade Palmer designed the East Garden, and in 2010, Georgetown landscape architect Guy Williams of DCA Landscape Architects, Inc., created and supervised the installation of an herb garden within the East Garden. Today, Dumbarton House offers both guided and self-guided tours, as well as concerts, lectures, special exhibitions, and other cultural events. It also has a large ballroom opening onto a walled terrace, providing a site that can be rented for weddings or other events. Immerse yourself into early-American history, centuries-old gardens, and historic preservation by digging deeper into what we’re learning at Dumbarton House. In fact, the only window that was entirely original is the fanlight in the front gable of the house. When staff members removed it, they discovered it was being held together essentially by its paint.