The history of Georgetown: Washington's oldest neighborhood

Before there was a Washington, there was Georgetown

Most American cities grow outward from a center. Georgetown grew inward, absorbed by a capital that rose up around it. Founded in 1751, the town predates the District of Columbia by roughly four decades, and that seniority shapes everything about it - the street grid that doesn't quite match the rest of DC, the stubborn local identity, the argument about the Metro that still hasn't fully died down.

The Maryland colonial assembly established Georgetown on the banks of the Potomac that year, naming it after either King George II or one of the two local landowners named George - nobody has ever settled the question definitively. What's certain is why the location made sense: the fall line of the Potomac, where the river drops in elevation and becomes impassable by large vessels, made it a natural stopping point for trade. Ships could come upriver from the Chesapeake, load up, and head back out to Atlantic markets.

Tobacco money and the making of a port town

For much of the 18th century, Georgetown ran on tobacco. Planters from the Maryland and Virginia interior hauled hogsheads of leaf down to the waterfront, where merchants inspected, graded, and exported the crop to British buyers. Warehouses lined the riverbank. The town's wealthiest residents built Federal-style mansions on the heights above the water - many of which still stand on N Street and Prospect Street today.

Georgetown incorporated as a town in 1789, the same year the U.S. Constitution took effect. It had its own mayor, its own market, and a commercial life centered almost entirely on the river trade. When Pierre Charles L'Enfant began laying out the new federal city to the east, Georgetown didn't fold itself into the plan. It stayed separate, legally independent, with its own government and its own sense of purpose.

That independence lasted until 1871, when Congress abolished Georgetown's charter and folded it into the newly consolidated District of Columbia. The town lost its legal autonomy. It never quite lost its personality.

The C&O Canal and what it was actually for

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal begins - or ends, depending on how you look at it - in Georgetown. Construction started in 1828, the same day ground broke on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which turned out to be an omen. The canal was meant to connect the Potomac tidewater to the Ohio River valley, opening up interior trade and giving Georgetown renewed commercial importance as a transit hub.

It never reached the Ohio River. The canal made it as far as Cumberland, Maryland, about 184 miles inland, before financial troubles and the railroads made further extension pointless. What the C&O did do for roughly 75 years was move coal, lumber, and agricultural goods by mule-drawn boat down to Georgetown's wharves. At its peak the canal carried real commercial weight - this was working infrastructure, not scenery.

Floods damaged the canal repeatedly. The great flood of 1889 nearly finished it. A final catastrophic flood in 1924 shut it down for good. By then the railroads had already won, and Georgetown's role as a commercial port was over.

The canal sat derelict for decades. A long campaign by Justice William O. Douglas, who led a famous towpath hike in 1954 to protest a proposed parkway along the route, helped turn public opinion toward preservation. Congress established the C&O Canal National Historical Park in 1971. Today the towpath runs the full 184 miles to Cumberland and is one of the most-used recreational trails in the mid-Atlantic region.

Georgetown University and the hill above the river

Georgetown University opened in 1789, making it the oldest Jesuit university in the United States. Bishop John Carroll founded it on the high ground above the Potomac, and its original building - now called Old North - still anchors the west end of the campus. The school's early student body was small and the finances were precarious; Carroll spent years fundraiting to keep it solvent.

The university grew steadily through the 19th century, adding professional schools in law and medicine. Healy Hall, the Gothic Revival building that now defines the campus skyline, went up in the 1870s and 1880s. Patrick Healy, the university's president at the time and the first African American to lead a major American university, drove the project. His name is on the building.

The university and the neighborhood have always had a complicated relationship. Students bring energy and spending power to M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. They also bring noise and congestion to the residential streets. Town-gown tension in Georgetown is old enough to be practically a civic tradition.

Why Georgetown has no Metro stop

This question comes up constantly, and the answer involves a mix of geography and politics, with the politics probably outweighing the geography.

When Metro was being planned in the 1960s, Georgetown's established residents - many of them wealthy, property-owning, and politically organized - largely opposed bringing the system through the neighborhood. The concerns were real enough: tunneling under Georgetown's hilly terrain and its dense historic streetscape posed genuine engineering challenges. Construction would have been disruptive. A station, some argued, would bring too much foot traffic into a neighborhood that valued its quiet.

The Blue and Orange lines bypassed Georgetown entirely. Foggy Bottom/GWU station, a 15-minute walk from the eastern edge of the neighborhood, remains the closest stop.

Whether Georgetown's residents made the right call depends on what you value. The neighborhood stayed quieter and more architecturally intact than it might otherwise have been. It also became one of the most car-dependent and traffic-choked corners of DC. On weekend evenings, the gridlock on M Street can be extraordinary.

Georgetown in the 20th century: decline and transformation

By the early 20th century Georgetown had slipped considerably from its commercial peak. The waterfront was industrial and rundown. Many of the old Federal and Victorian houses were subdivided or in poor repair. The neighborhood had a substantial working-class and African American population that had lived there since before the Civil War.

That changed dramatically after World War II. Federal workers, diplomats, and political families began buying up and renovating the old rowhouses. Property values climbed. The original residents were pushed out through a combination of rising rents and, later, formal urban renewal policies that were neither gentle nor equitable. Georgetown became expensive and predominantly white in a span of a couple of decades - a process that played out in similar ways across American cities during the postwar years but hit Georgetown with particular speed.

The Kennedy administration years gave Georgetown a cultural cachet that stuck. The Kennedys lived on N Street before moving to the White House. A certain idea of Georgetown - the dinner party, the red brick facade, the well-connected host - calcified into Washington mythology.

What Georgetown looks like now

The neighborhood today covers about a square mile between the Potomac and the edge of the Glover Park and Burleith neighborhoods to the north. M Street and Wisconsin Avenue remain the commercial spines, lined with retail, restaurants, and bars. The residential streets behind them are quiet and closely held; Georgetown has some of the highest real estate prices in the District.

The waterfront got a genuine makeover in the early 2010s, when Georgetown Waterfront Park opened on the riverbank below the canal. The park connects to the Capital Crescent Trail, which runs northeast toward Bethesda.

The canal towpath in Georgetown itself is lined with restaurants and shops that occupy the old stone lockhouses and warehouses. Lock 4, right at the Georgetown end of the canal, still has its original stone walls.