Capital Streetcars

by John DeFerrari

  Chapter 5

  GRID-IRONING THE CITY

  THE RISE OF STREETCAR SUBURBS, 1868–1899

  The Washington & Georgetown and the Metropolitan remained the city’s two largest street railways, but many other lines were chartered in the late nineteenth century. Building new streetcar lines, especially ones extending out of the core of the city into newly developing neighborhoods, was seen as the key to progress in the Gilded Age. In fact, investors at times were downright frantic to build new lines. Like the gold and silver deposits that were luring miners in the West, streetcar systems in Washington and other cities were seen as sure bets for outsized profits. Even if their day-to­day operations didn’t make any money, it was believed that the new lines would still enrich their owners by transforming worthless fields and forests into pricey suburban real estate.

  In 1892, a reporter for the Star marked down on a map of Washington the routes of all the street railways and extensions that were being proposed to Congress. “When he had finished the task, which is not a slight one, he found that nearly every street in the city would be supplied with a street railroad if all the bills became laws,” the newspaper reported. “A number of streets would have more than one railroad along some sections, so that altogether the city would be pretty well gridironed.”63

  Views were decidedly mixed as to whether this headlong development was a good thing. An 1890 Senate debate on the proliferation of streetcar lines captured the pros and cons as they were commonly perceived. Senator John James Ingalls (1833–1900) of Kansas, a champion of labor rights, saw streetcars as benefiting the common man:

  I have no doubt that they are built for profit; but the street railways of this and every other city are built for the poor. They are built for the laboring people…. I know of no reason why street railroads should not be constructed…. They relieve the congestion of the city. They increase the public health. They are great sanitizing agencies that enable people of small means to escape from the heat and from the crowd and from the inconvenience, the unsanitary condition of the city, into the country…

  Aside from health concerns, cities like Washington desperately needed to expand to better accommodate their burgeoning populations, and streetcar systems clearly facilitated that growth. But not everyone agreed that it was for the best. Senator Eugene Hale (1836–1918) of Maine objected to Senator Ingalls’s views:

  These roads are not built at the demand of the people. There has not been…any great rush and tide of public sentiment and petitions from the poor for these roads. Everybody knows why they are asked for.

  A syndicate…buys a large tract of land out in the country. It seeks to better its fortunes, to double and treble its money…. There is no movement on the part of the laborers or of the poor of the city to build the road, but this syndicate comes forward with its plans and ruthlessly takes possession of every avenue that the people of the District ought to have…. The truth is [the streetcar developers] are the lords of the manor here…. They are the men who have their way and we do not scrutinize them enough. Nobody does.64

  Against the backdrop of these conflicting attitudes, the city’s most prominent developers, many of them northerners aspiring to transform the sleepy southern capital, set out to build the District’s new streetcar suburbs. Their quests were often filled with frustration and disappointment.

  “THE CITIZENS OF UNIONTOWN AND EAST WASHINGTON ARE DELIGHTED”

  The story of the rise of Anacostia is one example. Anacostia began when several developers purchased a truck farm on the far shore of the Eastern Branch of the Potomac in 1854. The old farm was located directly across from the Navy Yard and was accessible via a bridge that crossed the river at that point. It was this same bridge that John Wilkes Booth would gallop across eleven years later, fleeing the scene of his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Here developers laid out streets and house lots in a community they dubbed Uniontown, which slowly attracted settlers through the 1850s and 1860s.

  As early as 1868, local businessmen led by prominent wood and coal merchant Leon William Guinand (1825–1880) petitioned the Metropolitan Railroad to extend its line across the Navy Yard Bridge to Uniontown. Guinand, a native of Switzerland who owned a wharf on the city side of the Eastern Branch, hoped to spur faster growth in the sluggishly developing Uniontown outpost. But with fewer than seventy families living there at the time, the Metropolitan was unwilling to invest in the proposed line. Undaunted, Guinand succeeded in 1872 in convincing Congress to charter an independent Anacostia & Potomac River Railway Company.

  One of the Anacostia & Potomac line’s biggest promoters, and one of the most successful developers of the Anacostia community in general, was not Guinand but a northerner who came to town in 1874. Henry Adams Griswold (1847–1909), born to a prominent family in Wethersfield, Connecticut, had worked as a lawyer with his brothers in Chicago after the Civil War. When he moved to Washington, it was initially to help handle the business affairs of his recently widowed sister. He settled in Anacostia, purchasing one of its oldest houses, situated on a generous tract of land overlooking the city. According to a posthumous tribute, Griswold was “reserved in his nature, but warm-hearted and deeply attached to those to whom he was allied by ties of kinship.” At the same time, he had a “delicate physical organization and an extremely sensitive spirit.”65 Although he would be credited with helping build Anacostia into a thriving and prosperous suburb, Griswold also engaged in bitter struggles over the development of the streetcar line.

  When Griswold came to Anacostia, no work had yet been done on the proposed streetcar line because little money had been raised to pay for it. Griswold helped inject new energy into the project, both by investing in the project himself and by bringing in other investors, allowing construction to finally begin in October 1875. The railroad began operations in July 1876 with Guinand as its first president. When Guinand died in September 1880, Griswold took charge.

  It took time to build the company’s operations. Initially, the A&P’s two small cars made a short run from what is now V Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue Southeast, in the heart of Anacostia, across the Navy Yard Bridge to Seventh and M Streets Southeast, near the main gate of the Navy Yard. The line was certainly popular with Anacostians, who were thrilled to no longer have to walk the length of the bridge to get into the city. “The citizens of Uniontown and East Washington are delighted and patronize the road so well as to exceed the expectations of the company,” the Evening Star claimed at the time.66 Several more cars were soon added, and within a year, the line had been extended west along M Street to the Southwest waterfront, where passengers could connect with the north–south Washington & Georgetown line.

  A horsecar of the Anacostia & Potomac Railway is seen at the foot of Asylum Hill in this 1890 photo. Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

  With the streetcars bringing more people to Anacostia, Griswold in 1879 subdivided his large real estate holdings and began selling house lots in what was called Griswold’s Addition, adjacent to the original Uniontown development. When he took over the presidency of the A&P the following year, he was also its principal owner. He pushed for extensions of the line into downtown Washington, including extending the waterfront end of the line north into the heart of downtown. After years of wrangling with Congress, the proposed extensions were approved, and in January 1891, Griswold took the reins of the first car to travel from Anacostia to the Center Market on Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the Baltimore & Potomac train station on the Mall along the way. An additional branch on Capitol Hill that led east to Congressional Cemetery and the Washington Asylum was also added in 1891.67 By 1893, the railway had fifty-two cars, 230 horses and eight and a half miles of track carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers annually.68

  A map of the route of the Anacostia & Potomac Railway. Matthew B. Gilmore.

  By the 1880s, Griswold had become a successful attorney and real estate developer in addition to heading the growing A&P railroad.
He even served as Anacostia’s postmaster for a time. Residents came to refer to him as the town’s “mayor.” But much of his success turned out to be more fragile than it appeared. The A&P’s expansion had been hinged on the assumption that patronage would grow substantially, allowing development loans to be repaid and profits to be earned. That did not happen, at least not as rapidly as Griswold had planned. As Anacostia continued to grow at a measured pace, ridership rose slowly.

  The A&P’s Congressional Cemetery branch, known as the “ghost line,” turned out not to be profitable at all. Griswold curtailed service, and in return complaints piled up about the small, dirty cars and the limited remaining service. “The ghost line, which runs from 11th and G streets to the work house, is a disgrace. And there is not a person who has ever used it that will not agree with me,” one disgruntled passenger wrote to the Evening Star in 1892. “These cars run at any time—I mean this car, for the company is operating at present but one car—and visitors to the Washington Asylum and the Congressional cemetery have to wait in all sorts of weather for this one poorly equipped car to make the long round trip, which usually takes from half to three-quarters of an hour and sometimes more.”69 Superstitious people claimed that empty cars operated at night without passengers or drivers.70 By 1896, service had stopped altogether on the ghost line, and the tracks were soon overgrown with weeds and filled with dirt.71

  While Griswold shrugged off the complaints, service declined throughout his system. The spacious two-horse cars with drivers and conductors that originally plied the A&P were replaced with smaller bobtail cars, even after such cars were banned within Washington city. Anacostians felt that they were being treated as second-class citizens. Griswold, like other suburban streetcar company executives, insisted that he couldn’t make money if he had to pay the wages of both drivers and conductors.

  By 1895, the remaining poorly paid drivers and conductors had had enough. They went on strike in July, insisting that their wages be increased from $1.25 per day to $1.50. Service on the A&P was shut down as the strike dragged on. Anacostia residents had to walk into town or ride hastily arranged coach service. Merchants worried that their businesses would be ruined. Then, after insisting for almost three weeks that he couldn’t afford the higher wages, Griswold suddenly changed his mind and agreed to the workers’ demands. When his decision was announced at a large union meeting, “there was a wild explosion of enthusiasm, and the audience cheered till the gas lamps winked responsively.”72

  But the workers’ problems weren’t over. After only a few more months, Griswold announced that he could not afford to pay the higher wages after all. He presented an ultimatum to the union: either the wages would have to be reduced or service would be cut back. When the workers balked, Griswold locked them out of their jobs. He hired scab drivers to operate the A&P’s cars at the lower wages. Some of the angry locked-out workers resorted to jumping on the backs of the A&P’s cars as they came across the Navy Yard Bridge and forcing them to derail, terrifying the passengers. Many Anacostia residents sympathized with the workers and joined in a boycott of Griswold’s streetcars. Patronage plummeted, and the A&P’s financial woes worsened.

  Of course, as a horse-powered line, the A&P was woefully outmoded in 1895 anyway. Many observers assumed that Griswold was pocketing profits from the railway and refusing to modernize it merely to avoid making the necessary capital investment. The likely truth is that the company simply had no reserves to fund a conversion. Meanwhile, competitors saw an opportunity. In 1896, Arthur E. Randle (1859–1929), a real estate developer who had purchased a large old farm on a hill overlooking Anacostia, succeeded in winning a Congressional charter for a new streetcar company, called the Capital Electric Railway, to offer electric trolley service over the same Anacostia route that the A&P traveled. In 1897, the new electrified route was extended up the hill to Randle’s development, called Congress Heights, a trek that would have been impossible for the A&P’s horsecars.

  By the following year, the A&P was bankrupt and in receivership. Griswold resigned as president, and soon the company was sold to a large syndicate that was buying up many of the District’s formerly independent streetcar companies. Ironically, the Capitol Railway within a few years would default on the bonds used to fund its construction, and the railway would be sold in 1900 to the syndicate-controlled A&P. Like the other lines swallowed up by the syndicate, the parts of the A&P and the Capitol Railway that stayed in service were eventually unified and converted to underground electrical conduit power.73

  The quiet, sensitive Griswold went into retirement at his Mount View estate in Anacostia. He suffered from “nervousness and insomnia,” according to the Evening Star, and it finally caught up to him in March 1909. One day, while his wife was out shopping, he retired to an attic that had not been used in years and shot himself in the chest with a shotgun. He died instantly.

  Griswold left his wife and sons an estate worth about $20,000. The newspapers wrote piously of his great success in promoting and expanding Anacostia, but it’s unclear how burdened Griswold may have been by the ultimate failure of the Anacostia & Potomac Railway to turn a clear profit. It had been the centerpiece of his efforts to build up Anacostia, but it had never been a financial success.

  OBNOXIOUS OBSTRUCTIONS

  The history of Eckington, a community located along the east side of North Capitol Street above Florida Avenue, makes for an interesting comparison. Eckington was perhaps the first “true” streetcar suburb in the District in the sense that it was designed from the start as a streetcar destination. It originally had been one of a scattering of nineteenth-century country estates that dotted the hills overlooking Washington City. On a tract of 112 acres, Joseph Gales Jr. (1786–1860), publisher of the National Intelligencer newspaper and one of the city’s early mayors, built in 1815 a country house, which he named Eckington after his birthplace in England. For most of the nineteenth century, the only development to mar the rolling, forested hills surrounding the Gales mansion was the laying of the Baltimore & Ohio’s Metropolitan Branch railroad line, which cut through the eastern portion of the tract in 1873.

  Real estate investor Colonel George Truesdell (1842–1921) bought the Eckington tract in 1887 with the idea of building a modern bedroom suburb on it. Originally from Fairmount, New York, Truesdell had fought with the Twelfth New York Volunteers during the Civil War and was badly wounded at the Battle of Gaines Mill, Virginia. He was confined as a prisoner for a time in the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, but was released and later became paymaster of the army, rising to the brevet rank of lieutenant colonel. Imbued with military discipline and ambition, Truesdell always used his military title. He moved to Washington in 1872 to buy and sell real estate and spent fifteen years building up his practice before making his move in Eckington.

  Truesdell laid out his new subdivision as an idyllic suburban community with large house lots, stunning views of the city and desirable modern amenities—including paved streets, stone sidewalks and electric streetlights—that more established District neighborhoods still didn’t have. In 1890, the Washington Post called Eckington “Washington’s prettiest suburban addition” and marveled how in just three years it had grown out of “a virgin forest.” “It is almost like a glimpse of fairyland to witness the illumination of Eckington by electricity every evening, the brilliant spectacle being heightened by the appearance of the streets and approaches, a transformation indeed having been accomplished.”74

  An undated photograph of George Truesdell. Library of Congress.

  A map of the route of the Eckington & Soldiers Home Railway. Matthew B. Gilmore.

  In 1888, Truesdell obtained a Congressional charter for the Eckington & Soldiers’ Home Railway, planned specifically to serve his pretty new suburb. The line would include an electric station to power the railway as well as the brilliant streetlights that made Eckington so attractive at night. It was an ideal arrangement.

  The railway’s ori
ginal route started downtown at Mount Vernon Square, at the intersection of Seventh Street (the main commercial corridor of the day) and New York Avenue. It ran northeast from there along New York Avenue, quickly leaving the commercial downtown behind, until it reached Third Street Northeast, where the B&O railroad had a small one-room station. From there it turned north along Third Street, passing through the heart of Truesdell’s new Eckington development, and continued into the countryside along Fourth Street until it finally ended at the southern entrance to the Soldiers’ Home grounds, a popular spot for Sunday outings.

  As the first electric streetcar line in the District, the Eckington railway stirred a firestorm of controversy by using overhead wires to deliver electric power. The controversy undoubtedly was frustrating for Truesdell. After the successful inauguration of Richmond’s trolley system early in 1888, it was universally understood that trolleys were the cheapest and most efficient way to power mass transit systems. Trolley systems were already being planned and built in cities all over the country. From a technical perspective, it was difficult to fault Truesdell for insisting that the Eckington line use this latest and most economical form of propulsion.

  The new railway, constructed by the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, a predecessor of General Electric, opened in October 1888. It began with just three electric trolley cars. Poles were installed in the center of the roadway to carry the overhead wires. An engineer from the Thomson-Houston Company reassured a Washington Post reporter that the system’s high-voltage electricity posed no safety hazards:

  There is no possible danger to any one, unless he was tall enough to take the place of the car. In other words, if a man would touch the overhead wire with his feet on the rail he would receive a slight shock. It would not, under any circumstances, be fatal or even dangerous.75