Georgetown and Tudor Place: The Making of a Historic House wtihin a Historic NeighborhoodWhen visiting a historic home the average visitor will ask several questions - questions about the people who owned the home, about events which took place there, and about what it may have been like to live there in the past. But rarely do visitors ask questions about why this particular site was preserved, and not others. Often times this ques-tion seems inherent to visitors because of the site’s connec-tion to a historic person or event, such as Thomas Jeffer-son’s Monticello. But homes of this nature are not the only kind preserved, so we must look deeper to see what makes a building historic. The National Park Service’s National Register of His-toric Places uses use six parameters for determining what makes a building preservation worthy. These factors are age, rarity, uniqueness, connection to a well known person, connection to a historic event, or if the building is an out-standing example of a specific architectural type. This study examines Tudor Place, a historic home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC, which at the time of its completion would not have seemed to fit any of these characteristics. When it was built in the early 1800s, Tudor Place was one of many large estate homes with small farms in the neighborhood, lacking rarity or uniqueness. While it was the home of the wealthy Peter family, Tudor Place was never the home of a historic figure, and no historic event took place there. Despite its seemingly unexception-al quality upon its construction, less than 200 years later Tudor Place was officially made a historic site and house museum. This study will look at how and why this came to be in order to explore ideas about what makes historic buildings preservation worthy. Exploring Tudor Place’s path to preservation we can begin to unpack questions surrounding what is pre-served and why.

Tudor Place would be the home of the Peter family for six generations, with four owners over the course of one hun-dred sixty-seven years. Completed in 1816, Tudor Place was originally the home of Thomas and Martha Peter. Thomas was a wealthy tobacco merchant and Martha was the granddaughter of Martha Washington, step granddaughter of George Washington. Using $8,000 Martha inherited from George Washington’s will, the young couple purchased an eight and a half acre property, which made up an entire city block at Q between 31st and 32nd Streets NW, in the hills of Georgetown within Washington DC. The house was designed by Dr. William Thorton, the architect of the first US Capital building, in the neo-classi-cal style. Defined by symmetry and the inclusion of Greco-Roman design influences, the house’s most striking neo-classical feature is the temple portico, a circular temple-like porch at the back of the house. Dr. Thorton designed not only the Capital, but he also designed other homes for prominent Washingtonians. His most architecturally com-plex design can be found at Octagon House, two miles from Tudor Place. This home features an octagonal floor plan and is today a part of the American Architecture Foundation. Tudor Place was not even Dr. Thorton’s most exceptional creation in the District. When Martha passed away in 1854, the house was willed to her youngest daughter, Britannia Peter-Kennon.

Figure 2: These three images show how the Tudor Place property changed over time. No-tice the Minor rennovations to the structure and the land from 1816 to the present day.

Tudor Place was an extraordinarily valuable property, and to compensate her other siblings and their children, three acres from the northern end of the property were sold off at this time. This sale represents the first and last time that the property’s boundaries would be changed, and Tudor Place sits on these same five and a half acres within the city today. Living at Tudor Place from 1854 until her death in 1911 at the age of 96, Britannia owned the home during the Civil War. Many large, elite homes were converted into hospitals during the War. Washington’s location between Maryland and Virginia meant that Civil War battles were frequently waged close by and there was a constant influx of injured soldiers. Nearly 20,000 soldiers received medi-cal care in makeshift hospitals throughout the federal city. Britannia knew that should Tudor Place be taken over as a Union hospital that it would be very unlikely that she could afford to buy it back. So, despite her Confederate sym-pathies, she opened her home to Union officers and their wives as a boarding house. This was one of the shakiest times in Tudor Place’s history and is the only time that the family risked losing the estate. During Britannia’s ownership of the house, an ex-tended kitchen was added to the west wing and the home was equipped was gas powered lamps. When Britannia passed, the home was willed to her grandson, Armistead Peter Junior. It was during Armistead Peter Junior’s time that Tudor Place underwent the most renovations. Indoor plumbing and electricity were added to the house, and new state of the art appliances were added to the kitchen, such as a gas stove and a refrigerator. Despite these renova-tions, both under Britannia and Armistead Peter Junior, few substantial or structural changes were made to Tudor Place.

Figure 1: Tudor Place as it appears today.

Armistead Peter III, the final owner of Tudor Place, took control of the property in 1960. By this point in time Tudor Place was extraordinarily out of date; lacking central heating, central air, modern electrical outlets, and other amenities which would have been standard for the 1960’s. Tudor Place had become increasingly difficult to live in and up keep, and Armistead Peter III knew that it was unlikely that another generation of the Peter family could live in the house. With this in mind in 1969 he wrote and personally paid to publish a book on Tudor Place, titled “Tudor Place: Designed by Dr. William Thornton and Built Between 1805 and 1816 for Thomas And Martha Peter.” While it lacked a catchy title, Armistead III hoped that it would catch the attention of local preservationists who would be interested in preserving Tudor Place. His hopes were realized upon his death, when in 1983 Tudor Place was taken over by the National Park Service and converted into a museum. Though the history of the Peter family and their time at Tudor Place is interesting, ultimately it lacks any connec-tion to national history. And Tudor Place’s design was not exceptional at the time of its construction. Yet it was indeed preserved as a historic landmark. Because if lacked inher-ent significance, we must move beyond the house itself and the family who lived within it to explore how and why Tudor Place came to be preserved. We will now see how Tudor Place’s neighborhood, Georgetown, changed from 1816 to 1983 to see why Tudor Place may have become preservation worthy.

Figure 4: Picture of the industrial Georgetown Waterfront from the 1920’s.

Georgetown has a long history. Georgetown was founded as a tobacco trading port by Scottish settlers in colonial Mary-land, until eventually becoming incorporated as a neigh-borhood within Washington DC when the capital city was founded in 1791. In 1820, Georgetown had a population of 7,360, many of whom lived on elite estates similar to Tudor Place. Georgetown was a prominent trading port, expanding expo-nentially during the 1850’s with the opening of the Chesa-peake and Ohio (C&O) Canal. This Canal linked the inte-rior of the country to trading along the Potomac River, and was a prosperous addition to the Georgetown community. Georgetown was hit with two major blows which changed the character of the neighborhood. First, the outbreak of the Civil War meant that many Georgetown residents lost their home to hospitals, as discussed above. But because Georgetown was a tobacco port before the war, many resi-dents made their money through tobacco. These George-town locals lost their homes and fortunes at this time be-cause of the disruption in the tobacco trade. To add insult to injury in the 1870’s the C&O Canal was made obsolete because of the expansion of the railroad, and trading in Georgetown declined.

Q St NW

Figure 5: Map to the Left is a map from 1903. Map Below is a map from 1927. Both show the same area between Q and R and 31st and 32nd Streets NW.

This time saw a major change in the neighborhood. A large African American community between Wisconsin and 31st Streets made up of small, two story wood and brick row homes, known as “alley houses” flourished. In 1900, 3,500 alley houses existed in 250 alleys with 19,000 resi-dents across the city. Ninety percent of these residents were black. Those neo-classical estates which had been lost dur-ing the Civil War were divided into smaller plots and Victori-an homes were built in their place. In the 1890’s four-hun-dred new homes were built in Georgetown in the Victorian style. By the early 20th century, Georgetown had become home to such undesirable industries as power production, storage, and meat packing. The 1920 zoning ordinance for Washington classifies Georgetown as an industrial neigh-borhood. The number of apartment buildings and row homes rises sharply at this time as well. Following World War One there was a building boom in Georgetown of low income, tenement, and boarding houses. As you can see from the maps in figure 5, between 1903 and 1927 four new apartment buildings sprang up in the four block radius around Tudor Place alone. The Peters and Tudor Place were quickly becoming the exception within the neighborhood.

Figure 3: Map of Wash-ington DC, 1855 from the David Rumsey online historical map collection.

Figure 6: This may shows the historic distric of Georgetown outlines in a green dashed line. The area outlined in the blue solid line is the tradition-ally African American neighborhood which was pushed out through zon-ing changes in the 1930’s. The orange rectangle represents Tudor Place. In 1816 the property was made up of an entire city block, but in 1854 three acres from the northern end of the property were sold. The black dotted line shows the location of the current property line.

However throughout the 1920’s the Preservation Movement had been gaining strength. Based largely around the restoration of elite homes and those homes connected to our colonial or early federal history, the Preservation Move-ment’s beginnings were ideal for the restoration of not just Tudor Place, but Georgetown. Its roots as an elite pastoral retreat, near a prominent early port, as well as its current state of decay brought Georgetown to the foreground of preservation concerns. In 1938 the C&O Canal was made a historic site, in 1949 Georgetown was declared a historic district, and in 1950 the Old Georgetown Act requiring all building plans be approved by city legislation is passed by Congress. These measures effectively ensured that those historic sites which still stood would remain preserved and raised local property values. By the mid-1930’s these ordi-nances effectively removed the African American community from Georgetown, and the neighborhood became increas-ingly popular amongst Smithsonian and governmental workers. As you can see from Figure 6, Tudor Place sits squarely within the borders of Georgetown’s historic dis-trict. This location helped to ensure Tudor Place was pre-served. But the real reason for Tudor Place’s preservation appears to be its relationship to the neighborhood at large. When it was built neither the Peter’s, nor their home were particularly exceptional. But because the Peter family was able to keep their home through the Civil War, George-town’s economic depression in the 1870’s with the decline in canal shipping, the revamp of the neighborhood to the Victorian style, and the rise in low income, industrial hous-ing in the area, their home became exceptional. They chose to renovate their home minimally, both inside and out, and because of this the home became an unique find. So, when determining what should be preserved it is not the building itself which makes is intrinsically preservation worthy, but rather its relationship to the region more broadly.

CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY:The University of Virginia, “Whitman’s Drum Taps and Washington’s Civil War Hospitals” Site, Accessed 28 November 2010. < http://xroads.virginia.edu/>

Armistead Peter, Tudor Place: designed by Dr. William Thornton and built between 1805 and 1816 for Thomas and Martha Peter;: Described by their descendant Armistead Peter, 3rd, the present owner (Washing-ton DC: Georgetown University Press, 1969).

Kathleen M Lesko, Valerie Babb, and Carroll R Gibbs, Black George-town Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Found-ing of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present (Georgetown Univer-sity Press, 1999).

James b Lynch, THE CUSTIS CHRONICLES: The Virginia Generations (Camden Maine: Picton Press, 1997).James Borchert, “Alley Landscapes of Washington DC” within Com-mon Places: Reading In American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

Talia Masconi, “The History of Georgetown” (Lecture, Washington DC Historical Society, Washington DC, 2009).

Elizabeth A. Lyons and Richard C. Cloues, “The Culture and Historical Mosaic and the Concept of Significance” pp 37-48, within Preservation of What for Whom: A Critical Look at Historical Significance, edited by Michael A. Tomlan (Ithaca, NY: The National Council for Preservation Education, 1998).

Carroll Van West “Assessing Significance and Integrity in the National Register Process: Questions of Race, Class, and Gender” pp 109-116, within Preservation of What for Whom: A Critical Look at Historical Sig-nificance, edited by Michael A. Tomlan (Ithaca, NY: The National Coun-cil for Preservation Education, 1998).

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Historic District

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¯Government of theDistrict of ColumbiaAdrian M. Fenty, Mayor

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GeorgetownHistoric District

This map was created for planningpurposes from a variety of sources.It is neither a survey nor a legal document.Information provided by other agenciesshould be verified with them where appropriate.O

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