Farm Roads to City Streets: Northwest DC in 1878
@chriswhong
Make your own map →#30DayMapChallenge · Day 9: Urban/Rural
In 1878, almost everything west of Rock Creek in the District of Columbia was countryside. Georgetown, shaded pink, was the only real town: a tight grid of streets, churches and wharves along the Potomac and the C&O Canal. Beyond it was farmland. There were scattered houses, mills, streams, and the names of landowners with the size of their farms in acres: T. Rosenbush, 50 a., Jacob H. Kengla, 30 a., "Tunlaw Farm." Tenallytown was a small crossroads hamlet with a post office, a hotel and a few churches.
The roads joining these places were country roads, and many are still here. Rockville Road is now Wisconsin Avenue, and Conduit Road is MacArthur Boulevard. River Road, Foxhall Road and Loughboro Road keep their names. Turn the basemap on and off and you can see how the city filled in the land between them, while keeping the old lines.
The urban-rural divide: look for the pink strip reaching up the Rockville Road from Georgetown. That's the city starting to stretch along the main road out of town, decades before streetcar suburbs covered the farms.
Source: G.M. Hopkins, Part of Second District, District of Columbia (1878), Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Image processing by Claude (Anthropic): the scan was lined up to modern coordinates using 14 control points that still exist today, matched to OpenStreetMap. The margins, title box and river shading were trimmed off, and the paper background was made transparent so the 1878 ink and color sit directly on the modern map. Expect the old features to be off by about 50 m on average, mostly because of how the map was surveyed and drawn in 1878.