In addition to the Georgetown pied-à-terre he leased, Vanderwerken owned a large estate along the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, with a rambling farmhouse called Falls Grove located near the intersection of Glebe and Little Falls Roads. He had bought the property in about 1852 to use as a farm and pasture to raise horses, including both draft horses for pulling omnibuses and fine Thoroughbreds. With the onset of the war, Vanderwerken’s property, directly opposite the Chain Bridge, became strategically important. Having few options, Vanderwerken agreed to hand the property over to the army, which turned his farmhouse into a hospital and built two forts (Marcy and Ethan Allen) near the river. The Vanderwerkens spent the war living in Georgetown but returned to their Virginia estate after it was over. Vanderwerken then started up a profitable rock quarry business, cutting Potomac blue stone from his hillside property along the river and selling it in town for use in construction.
Meanwhile, in 1862, the newly chartered Washington & Georgetown streetcar line needed to get rolling quickly. Although Congress had dawdled for ten years on authorizing the railway, it now required the new company to put the first segment of its line between the Capitol and Georgetown into operation within sixty working days of incorporation—an astonishingly short timespan considering that a war was on and no cars, ties, rails or other materiel were on hand. There was certainly no time to lose.
Chapter 2
HORSES IN THE MUD
THE EARLY HORSE-DRAWN STREETCAR ERA, 1862–1888
In 1862, streetcars were finally coming to Washington, and not a minute too soon. The city was in the midst of an urban transformation unlike anything it had ever experienced. Much had changed since the first shots of the Civil War were fired a year earlier at Fort Sumter; public infrastructure and facilities that had been barely adequate in the past were now strained to the breaking point.
Newly conscripted troops from Northern states had swarmed the city. By late 1862, 125,000 Union troops were encamped in the D.C. area, most of them either on the other side of the Potomac or in the rural sections outside Washington City. Suddenly, housing, food, transportation and everything else was in short supply. Officers and their retinues commandeered fine houses in Georgetown. Many larger public buildings, such as churches and boardinghouses, were converted into temporary casualty wards until vast new hospital complexes could be built. Wagons serving as ambulances, blood sometimes dripping from their boards, clattered slowly into the city from the busy southwest waterfront, where the wounded were disgorged from ships and railroad cars. Meanwhile, endless lines of quartermaster wagons filled with army provisions rumbled through the unpaved streets, as did vast hordes of cattle and other livestock. As Commissioner B.B. French lamented, the overwhelming traffic quickly made a thorough mess of Pennsylvania Avenue and other major thoroughfares.
“THIS GREAT AND INAPPRECIABLE COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE”
Amid all of this chaos, the new streetcar tracks were to be installed and the system made operational in a hurry. Several days after President Lincoln signed the law establishing the Washington & Georgetown Railroad, its officers met in room 10 of the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue to get organized. So much had to be done, but luck seemed to be on the side of the fledgling railway. Financing proved easy to obtain, with savvy investors eager to get in on what seemed like a sure thing. In fact, the rooms at the National Hotel where stock in the new company was sold became a madhouse as New York and Philadelphia investors vied with one another for shares in the new venture. As the company’s treasurer later recalled, “There was such a rush and clamor of excited men, their hands filled with certificates of deposit, certified checks, and bank bills, pushing, yelling, and surging, each wanting to be the first one waited upon, that the mob overturned the tables across the room which we used as desks, and for a time all was confusion.”13
Miraculously, construction soon began. Rails were ordered and arrived in time for a crew of forty to begin laying them in early June 1862. Within two weeks, two hundred men were at work digging up cobblestones on Pennsylvania Avenue, laying rails and ties and resetting the stones, progressing at a rate of about a block and a half per day. By early July, the first stretch of track, from the Capitol to the State Department building on Fifteenth Street, was nearly done. “This great and inappreciable comfort and convenience, so long desired and so often defeated, has been…completed with great promptitude,” the National Intelligencer exulted. “The introduction of passenger railroads into this city of ‘magnificent distances’ may be regarded as forming an important epoch in the history of the city, second only to construction of the great Potomac aqueduct,14 and we sincerely congratulate our fellow-citizens, as well as Congress and the Government, on its success.”15
The first two cars for the new railway arrived from the manufacturer on July 11. They were elegant pieces of craftsmanship intended to entice well-to-do riders who had no previous experience of public transportation. The Evening Star described them in detail:
The seats on the sides are covered with fine silk velvet, and the windows, which are stained and plain glass combined, are furnished with cherry sash and poplar blinds, beside handsome damask curtains. The top of the car is rounded, permitting persons to stand upright without inconvenience, and rods to which loops are attached, are run from end to end…. The car is handsomely painted, both inside and out, the prevailing color being white, while the outside is cream color and white, with a fine painting in the center, and the words “Washington and Georgetown R.R.” at the bottom. The wheels are of different colors, contrasting well with the body of the car, and giving it a picturesque appearance. Messrs. Murphy & Allison [of Philadelphia] are making most of the cars, but others are being built by other makers…. The cars were put on the track last night, and at 11 o’clock run up as far as Willard’s [Hotel], having on board a number of gentlemen, cheering loudly as they passed up and being greeted with cheers from the few persons on the street at that hour.16
Pennsylvania Avenue’s first streetcar tracks are seen here, circa 1868, with a car in the distance. Author’s collection.
July 29 marked the first day of public operation. The company had ten cars by then, all standard streetcars of the day: pulled by two horses with a driver standing on a platform in front and an enclosed passenger compartment designed to comfortably seat twenty. A conductor, usually stationed on the rear platform, collected fares. On opening day, the cars were packed at times with as many as forty eager passengers. The first car was “crowded almost to suffocation” and screeched to a halt at the curve from Pennsylvania Avenue on to Fifteenth Street “probably owing to the roughness of the rails,” according to the Evening Star. An extra horse was added, and the car kept rolling. The Star wrote admiringly that “[t]he cars in use are handsome and commodious, and the smoothness with which they glide along affords an agreeable change from the rough jolting over the pavements experienced in other modes of vehicular conveyance.” The Star’s enthusiastic reporter concluded with a wistful, “Farewell, old bus, you’re nigh played out,” little realizing that one hundred years later it would be the other way around, with buses dancing on the graves of the streetcars.17
Construction of the new line had been accomplished in less than two months despite a number of war-related delays. Lumber and iron both were sporadically in short supply, as were able-bodied laborers to lay the tracks. Higher-priority military loads continually interrupted railroad shipments of raw materials. One shipment of iron was delayed for nearly two weeks. Nevertheless, steady progress was made. In August, the new line was extended to Georgetown, where the former Vanderwerken stables were located and where a new frame headquarters building and depot were built alongside the stables. By early October, the complete line from Georgetown to the Navy Yard was in operation. The two north–south lines on Seventh and Fourteenth Streets entered service shortly thereafter, completing the entire system in less than six months.
As the lines were being built, passengers could transfer
to the old Vanderwerken omnibuses, which the new company kept running temporarily, to complete their trips on routes still under construction. In October, with all three lines nearly finished, the company’s directors donated twenty old omnibuses to the army for use as ambulances. They were much needed and apparently served that purpose well.
Praise for the new streetcars ran high as Washingtonians began shaping their daily routines around them. People from all walks of life took to the new form of transport. “I rode all the way from Georgetown. What a blessing & a comfort,” wrote Martha Custis Williams, the great-great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, who lived at Georgetown’s stately Tudor Place mansion.18
An early horse-drawn streetcar of the Metropolitan Railroad stops outside the east front of the Capitol in the late 1860s. Author’s collection.
Service in those early days was often praised as efficient and comfortable. In July 1863, the National Intelligencer commented on the Seventh Street line, which had opened nine months earlier:
We cannot help admiring the regularity with which the cars on this road now run. There is no detention to passengers whatsoever. The energy manifested by the gentlemanly conductors meets the approbation of everyone who rides them. We cannot help speaking of the politeness of Conductor Steptoe T. Tune. His obliging manners and amiability give him the praise of all who chance in his car.19
Once fully operational, the Washington & Georgetown Railroad scheduled cars to arrive at five-minute intervals (known as the “headway”) and charged a five-cent fare with a free transfer between routes. The company had a total of seventy cars and 490 horses, the horses wearing bells tied to their harnesses to alert pedestrians that a car was coming.20 The railway’s original routes would remain the core of the city’s streetcar network throughout its one-hundred-year history and are still echoed in bus routes that operate today.
“CONSIDERABLE HARD FEELING WAS EXPRESSED”
There would be many more street railway companies founded in the District of Columbia—dozens of them through the rest of the nineteenth century. The second company to get its start was the Metropolitan Railroad, chartered in 1864, just two years after the Washington & Georgetown. It began public service in early 1865, running along F Street downtown, which was soon to become the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. While the Washington & Georgetown’s line wrapped around the south of the Capitol grounds on its way to the Navy Yard, the Metropolitan line zigzagged across several blocks just to the north and then ran along East Capitol Street, serving the residents of Capitol Hill. On its western end, the line jogged two blocks up Fourteenth Street from F Street to H Street, where it traversed the fashionable residential area north of Lafayette Square on its way to Seventeenth Street. Like the Washington & Georgetown line, the Metropolitan initially featured luxurious cars to appeal to an upscale clientele. Company records show that for a pair of cars costing $1,300 apiece, the company paid an extra $16 per car for “silver-plated handles.”21
Not everyone was pleased with the city’s proliferating streetcar lines and the way they commandeered sections of the roadway for their exclusive use. A major flashpoint for the rivalry between streetcars and private coaches was a stretch of New Jersey Avenue in front of the B&O railroad station near the Capitol, where hacks and private omnibuses would stop to pick up high-paying travelers from out of town. The new streetcar lines threatened to disrupt this loading zone by laying tracks in front of the station’s entrance. According to newspaper accounts, the Washington & Georgetown line had originally put down track here but had been compelled to take it up again after strident protests by hack and omnibus drivers.
Two Metropolitan streetcars wait at the end of the line on Seventeenth Street by the old Navy Department building in the early 1870s. Author’s collection.
The Metropolitan line reopened these wounds in 1864 by laying track in the same spot. As recounted in the Evening Star:
[T]he company laid the track during the night, last night, putting a large force of workmen on the ground, with fires to light them in their operations, and this morning at daylight lo and behold, the track in front of the railroad station was nearly down! Considerable hard feeling was expressed on the part of the hackmen and hotel porters this morning, who think that this is an encroachment upon their rights.22
Tempers flared in January 1865 when John Byrne, an omnibus driver from Willard’s Hotel, parked his coach over the tracks at the depot. A.C. Richards, superintendent of the metropolitan police, was already on the scene at the time because street railway officials had called him to witness the problems they were having. Richards identified himself as the superintendent of police and directed Byrne to move his omnibus. According to the Star, Byrne “replied, with an oath, that he did not care who he was; that he would go when he was ready.” The officer tried to lead the horses on Byrne’s team away, but Byrne wheeled them around, keeping them on the tracks. An approaching streetcar then collided with Byrne’s coach, and a general mêlée ensued with more swearing, a few punches thrown and the butt end of a whip used as a cudgel. Byrne finally was taken into custody.
An uneasy truce was eventually reached, with precise zones established for hacks and omnibuses on the one hand and streetcars on the other. This time there was no turning back the clock, as streetcars quickly became an established part of the city’s infrastructure.
Streetcar routes, each originally chartered as a separate company, were gradually extended along major thoroughfares across the city. Two early companies built extensions of the Metropolitan’s lines. The Connecticut Avenue & Park Railway, chartered in 1868, ran up Connecticut Avenue from the end of the Metropolitan line to Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue); it was folded into the Metropolitan in 1874. The Union Railroad began at Dupont Circle and ran west along P Street to Fayette Street (Thirty-fifth Street Northwest) in Georgetown, looping back east along O Street. It was absorbed into the Metropolitan line less than a year after starting in 1872.
A Metropolitan streetcar turns onto present-day Wisconsin Avenue from O Street, circa 1893. Library of Congress.
Another important line that stayed independent of the two big streetcar companies was the Columbia Railway, founded in 1870. Beginning at Fifteenth Street and New York Avenue Northwest, where it met the Washington & Georgetown’s main line, the Columbia headed northeast along New York Avenue to Mount Vernon Square, shifted southeast along Massachusetts Avenue to H Street and then ran straight out H Street Northeast to Benning Road. It would remain a profitable independent line for nearly three decades.
The last major early street railway in Washington was the awkwardly named Capitol, North O Street & South Washington Railway, incorporated in 1875. Its route consisted of a loop around the commercial downtown area, starting at the Capitol, traveling north mostly on Fourth Street Northwest to O Street, west along O to Eleventh Street and back downtown on Eleventh Street. From there it made its way across the Mall to Southwest and then circled back to the Capitol via Maryland Avenue Southwest. It was appropriately renamed the Belt Railway in 1893.
“WHAT A TIME THEY DID HAVE WITH THE MUD”
If you had plenty of time and the car wasn’t too crowded, the gentleness of the horsecar ride could be charming. “There was something soothing, rustic, somniferous, and characteristic in the tinkling of bells attached to the harness of the car horses, as they lazily jogged along the quiet streets,” one old-timer recalled in 1906.23 Yet as modern and luxurious as they may have seemed at the time, the city’s first streetcars were quite primitive.
Quick construction times sometimes masked poor workmanship in the laying of the rails. Sweltering summer heat could cause improperly laid rails to buckle up from their moorings, as they did in July 1868, when bows in the rails appeared that were several inches high and several feet long. “On the Metropolitan track, near the Patent Office, are a couple of places of this character only a few yards apart, one of which has bulged so high as to admit a man’s body between it and the road sills,�
�� the Star reported.24 Encountering problems such as this, horsecar drivers might order their passengers to disembark and then try driving their cars off the rails and around the obstacle. Of course, this assumes the adjacent roadway was strong enough to support the load.
It often wasn’t. Mud was a severe problem, especially during the winter. The Evening Star noted in December 1864 that the new Metropolitan line on F Street was nearing completion “[n]otwithstanding the very disagreeable weather and the great depth of mud.”25 Anna Sherman, a young girl living with her family in a boardinghouse at Fourteenth and K Streets Northwest, later recounted the treacherous impact of the mud. The eldest daughter of a Connecticut man who had moved to Washington to serve as a U.S. Treasury clerk, Sherman witnessed the birth of the city’s streetcars:
Fourteenth Street was now to have a horse-car road, the first built in Washington. It was not to go very far uptown but was to pass beyond where we were. This was an added entertainment. When the tracks were all down and they finally got the cars on, what a time they did have with the mud. The horses would flounder in it, and the men who were at work would beat them with picks and shovels, and the drivers with the whips, then the cars would get jerked off the track, and it would almost make us cry (I don’t know but that we did sometimes) to see the poor beasts. It would seem as if they were expected to do more than horse flesh could do, and finally the men would have to get crow-bars and logs to pry the cars up on to the tracks again. The men would have to do this without the horses’ help, and the passengers would all have to get out and find their way to the sidewalk on planks and great pieces of stone, stuck in the mud at long intervals, to wait for the car to get righted. At last the Company paved the road between the tracks and then there was not all this excitement about a short-ride in a horse car.26
Capital Streetcars Page 3
