Ghosts of Georgetown

INTRODUCTION

Still in the shaded hillside streets

A trace of old-time welcome greets

The passer-by who has a flair

For scenes of old,

No longer there

A buoyant Georgetown stands alone,

The Federal City having grown

Until their boundaries overlap;

So that, deleted from the map,

Through once the Federal City’s host,

Georgetown itself is now a ghost.

–William Tipton Tablott

Ghosts are inherently depressing, but that has little to do with death. Death can be tragic, it can be untimely and it can be rough on those who still live, but in and of itself it’s just the final stage of our life here on earth. Often, it’s just the end—no more lamentable than the final pitch at a baseball game or the last scene in a movie.

But there’s nothing final about ghosts. They continue to repeat themselves over and over, like some sort of eternal dentist’s waiting room. Even the fires of hell would break things up a bit. Ghosts of sea captains look out the same windows, and things that go bump in the night do it night after night. There’s no closure, and worse, no progress.

When William Tipton Tablott wrote the words above in 1927, he consigned Georgetown itself to that fate. The neighborhood had seen better days, and the best that could be hoped for was the preservation of the past. A laudable goal, of course, and I hope my chronicling of these tales furthers that in some small way, but it was still inherently backward-looking.

So, I’m pleased to say that Tablott was wrong, or at the very least, premature. Georgetown is not a ghost. It is alive, full of promise and activity. It can be exciting, interesting and even infuriating, but it is most certainly not dead. The stories told here are bridges to that past, and bridges work both ways. Go back in time, visit with these spirits and then come back and walk the living streets.

This is but the beginning of a conversation, not the final work on the subject. Georgetown, Washington’s oldest neighborhood, gives up its secrets slowly and only with much patience by the researcher. To all those spirits whose tales I have yet to find, I apologize. Rattle some floorboards or something, and I’ll get you on the next pass.

Georgetown at the end of the Civil War. Photo by William Smith Morris. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

And for those ghosts who would rather remain silent, tough. You’re our history, and you bear witness to what’s shaped us as a people and a nation. Shake it off—I’m telling your story, too.

PART I

THE HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS OF GEORGETOWN

Three rocks, spired and gloomy,

Gray as a stormy sky,

Sprang from the depth of the whirlpool,

Where the Indian sisters lie,

Ever at night they ring,

Like a sad cathedral bell,

Echoing far on the waters,

They sound the warning knell.

–unnamed ballad of the Three Sisters¹

Like many East Coast cities, the reason Georgetown exists in the first place is a geographical feature known as the fall line. Some 300,000 years ago, the area we know as Georgetown was the coastline of a much higher Atlantic Ocean. Today, it is where the coastal plane meets the rockier piedmont. This fascinating geological trivia aside, it means that Georgetown was the highest navigable point for oceangoing vessels, and it is why the town developed to allow tobacco farmers to ship their product for export.

In the Potomac, the increasingly shallow waters are marked by three islands known as the Three Sisters. This was as far as British explorer John Smith could sail during his 1608 expedition before leaving his boat to travel farther upriver. He noted in his diary, Having gone so high as we could with the bote, we met divers Salvages in Canowes, well loaden with the flesh of Beares, Deere and other beasts, whereof we had part, here we found mighty Rocks.²

Georgetown didn’t extend much farther than today’s R Street, marked as Gay Street on this 1799 map. Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division.

Like Smith, other voyagers also found the Three Sisters to be the limit of safe navigation, and a small trading post sprang up. By 1751, it had grown enough that the Province of Maryland authorized the creation of George Town, presumably named after King George II of England.

THREE SISTERS ISLANDS

While civic progress continued to be made, the portion of the river near the Three Sisters acquired an ominous reputation. The waters themselves are treacherous, sucking in swimmers and boaters even in present days. But cagey locals began to suspect something more, something beyond what mere fluid dynamics could explain.

On a hot Thursday morning in late May 1889, eighteen-year-old Samuel Graff left his downtown home to beat the heat on a fishing jaunt on the Potomac with three friends. They rented a boat from Johnson and Baker’s boathouse, just above the Aqueduct Bridge (a few hundred feet upstream of the current Key Bridge), and paddled out to the Three Sisters. The boys spent the morning fishing (history fails to record if they caught anything), but by midafternoon, the skies had darkened and they decided to continue their attempts from the shore.³

The Key Bridge, with the remnants of the old Aqueduct Bridge still there. Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, circa 1940.

They had but one boat; a skiff that could seat only two of them. Samuel volunteered to ferry the others, and the first two trips went without incident. Unfortunately, the wind picked up, and he was on his last trip with the third one when, by an unexpected, quick, treacherous movement of the boat it was so far careened as to throw Graff into the water, while his companion succeeded in retaining his seat.⁴

Samuel had the only paddle, and his friend could do nothing but watch helplessly as he slipped below the waters. His body was recovered below Alexandria, Virginia, three weeks later.⁵ All in all, a sad but hardly remarkable occurrence on the river.

Seven years later, the tale (somewhat altered) was expounded on by American writer and folklorist Charles M. Skinner in the fifth volume of his nine-volume work Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. In his tale The Moaning Sisters, Skinner related that the night before a human life is to be yielded…this low wailing comes from the rocks, and when, on a night in May, 1889, the sound floated shoreward, just as the clock in Georgetown struck twelve, good people who were awake sighed and uttered a prayer for the one whose doom was so near at hand.⁶

So who was this moaning that presaged death on the Potomac? Skinner attributed it to a tradition more than one hundred years old:

[A] boat in which three sisters had gone for a row was swung against one of these rocks. The day was gusty and the boat was upset. All three of the girls were drowned. Either the sisters remain about this perilous spot or the rocks have prescience; at least, those who live near them on the shore hold one view or the other, for they declare that before every death on the river the sisters moan, the sound being heard above the lapping of the waves. It is different from any other sound in nature.⁷

Skinner left unsaid who the three sisters were, except that they had gone for a row, implying at least that they were not native to the land (canoes are paddled). But the consensus among others was that the stories were even older—that they were early native Americans who once lived here. A Washington Post article in 1907 tells the tale:

Three maidens, it is said, of the Anacostan tribe, were loved by three Powhattan braves, and it was arranged that the girls would, on a certain night, embark in canoes, cross the river, and become the wives of the enemy of their tribe. Legend says they were three sisters and daughters of the chief. The medicine man of their tribe found out the secret of their conspiracy, and followed them along the shore. The girls were decked in their best garments, ornamented with many shells and feathers, which hampered their paddling. A fierce wind was blowing down the Potomac, and a store was threatening as they started. They paddled some distance up the Maryland shore to a point agreed upon for the crossing, and as the canoes glided along the hair of the maidens floated far behind in the wind.

Just as they turned the canoes toward the Virginia shore the medicine man called a warning to them and declared that if they did not return the hour of their death had come. The maidens, in fright, pulled strongly at the paddles and reached midstream. But curious lights played about the canoes, and spiritual voices seemed to shout their doom. Thoroughly frightened at the unusual display of lightning and thunders, which they attributed to the supernatural power of the medicine man, the three sisters plunged into the waters of the river and were drowned. The following day, according to the legend, the three great rocks, now called the Three Sisters projected up from the bottom of the river, marking the spots where the girls one after the other plunged to their death. ⁸

The three Indian princesses fleeing their tribe in pursuit of true love would become the standard tale, being told and retold down the years.

The Three Sisters were again in the news in the 1960s and ’70s. There had been proposals for a bridge at the site going back to the initial plans for the city drawn up by Pierre L’Enfant, but the project had never progressed.⁹ The increasing suburbanization of the Washington region after World War II added a new impetus for the idea, and in 1957, legislation was introduced in Congress requiring the District of Columbia to build a bridge as part of an Inner Loop freeway system. Representative William Natcher of Kentucky even went so far as to block funding of the Metro system for several years until he was decisively defeated in a 1971 vote.¹⁰ The bridge was tremendously unpopular with D.C. residents, as it would require demolishing city neighborhoods to build freeways.

A few footings and piers had been started but were left abandoned when they were swept away in June 1972 by Hurricane Agnes. John Alexander, in the bible of Washington ghost books Ghosts: Washington’s Most Famous Ghost Stories, saw the failure of the bridge as evidence of the curse of the Three Sisters, but it was hardly a curse that caused 85 percent of the city of Washington to vote against completing the bridge.¹¹ That said, if ever you hear the slow chiming of a cathedral bell across the waters, you may wish to stay off the river that day.¹²

THE DRUMMER BOY OF LITTLE FALLS

The mysterious moaning is not the last spirit an intrepid traveler comes across as he continues upriver. Once the river passes Georgetown, there is a strip of land between it and the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Canal. In earlier times, it was used for watering cattle on the way to the Georgetown market and was known as the haunt of a headless horseman who stampedes the cattle browsing along the river riding at breakneck speed over the rough and broken bowlders along the Potomac and rides where it would be death for a mortal horseman to venture in broad daylight.¹³

Fortunes were made and lost by the ships from Georgetown. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Farther up, as you approach the Maryland border with the District of Columbia, the river becomes increasingly rocky. This stretch is known as Little Falls, differentiating it from Great Falls fourteen miles farther upstream. Here, the river is spanned by Chain Bridge, which is named for the third of the eight bridges on that site, a chain suspension bridge