Capital Streetcars

by John DeFerrari

  Such a claim could hardly have been true, and it’s unclear how many people believed it, but the new trolley cars were nevertheless a great sensation. For several days, crowds formed along New York Avenue, not only to see the streetcars zipping along without horses but also to see the street lit up at night by the electric lights mounted on the iron poles in the center of the roadway.

  A scene from opening day of the Eckington & Soldiers’ Home Railway, 1888. Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

  Like Griswold in Anacostia, Truesdell soon set about expanding his new railway to serve a wider clientele. Extensions were first built on the northern ends of the lines, one heading north along North Capitol Street and the other extending from the Soldiers’ Home to the Catholic University of America, which had just been established in 1887, and the adjoining new village of Brookland, where developers Benjamin F. Leighton and Richard E. Pairo were busy laying out house lots. With luck, the new destinations would soon fill with streetcar riders.

  However, like Griswold, Truesdell eventually became frustrated with his railroad venture, both because of restrictions on how he could expand and disappointing patronage. He had always wanted to extend the line on its southern end farther into the downtown area, but that meant coming up with an alternate power source because of the ban on overhead trolleys inside the city. Truesdell was determined to find a propulsion technology that wouldn’t break the bank. He, like other railway directors, was convinced that underground electrical conduits were not economical.

  A circa 1890 photo of an experimental surface-contact electric streetcar on the Eckington & Soldiers Home line. Library of Congress.

  One alternative was to set electrical contacts right in the pavement between the tracks on the roadway, which was certainly a much less expensive approach than digging conduits. Each streetcar would get power momentarily from one of these contact plates as the car passed over, propelling it on to the next plate. The company experimented with such a system in late 1890 on a stretch of test track along North Capital Street north of Boundary Street. However, the “surface contact” system they tried was a bust. The contact plates in the street were supposed to be electrified only when a streetcar was directly over them, but there was no practical way to ensure that they did not stay charged when they were in the open. It was soon obvious that the railroad couldn’t deploy a system that might randomly electrocute people or horses stepping on the plates, and the experiment had to be abandoned.76

  When in late 1890 the company finally began building its downtown extension, it tried using battery-powered cars like the Metropolitan. The extension ran south from New York Avenue along Fifth Street Northwest and then turned east on G Street and ran all the way to the Treasury Department at Fifteenth Street, bringing the Eckington line into the heart of the downtown commercial district. With this southern extension in place, the company could offer a twenty-five-minute ride all the way from Brookland down to the Treasury Department, although it required a transfer at New York Avenue from a trolley-powered to a battery-powered car. For the new Southern extension, the company bought the latest Robinson electric cars, elegant carriages finished in mahogany with gold trim that had three sets of wheels intended to facilitate going around curves. “Keeping abreast of the time is a characteristic of Mr. George Truesdell, to whose untiring energy and enterprise so much of the success of the Eckington Railway is due,” the Washington Post raved.77

  Reality was considerably harsher. Pretty as they may have been, the Robinson cars still encountered the same problems that the Metropolitan line experienced. They were too pokey, and recharging the batteries was slow and expensive. In 1893, after just two years, the company gave up on storage batteries.

  Technical problems were not the only issues the Eckington & Soldiers’ Home Railway faced. Like the Anacostia & Potomac’s ghost line to Congressional Cemetery, the Eckington extension to Brookland was expensive to operate and didn’t attract many passengers. The company began reducing service, angering Brookland residents. Truesdell argued that he couldn’t run cars more frequently than every twenty minutes without losing money. The Brooklanders didn’t believe him. In a February 1892 letter to the Post, the secretary of the Brookland Citizens Association insisted, “We have endeavored for the past year to secure proper facilities from this company, all to no purpose. Cars have been run upon the hit-or-miss principle. No effort has been made to afford accommodations to the patrons of the line. The road is doing a good business, but fails in the very important respect of affording quick transit from city to suburbs.”78 The following year, Truesdell stepped down from the presidency of the railroad, perhaps disillusioned by the difficulties he had encountered.

  The railway soldiered on, its fight for overhead wires soon degenerating into a game of chicken with the Star and the D.C. commissioners. Exasperated that an overhead trolley system could not be installed to replace the failed battery cars, the railway converted its downtown extension to horsecars, ignoring the fact that horsecars were supposed to have been phased out by that time. More horsecar lines were added in 1894, all while that original overhead trolley line along New York Avenue and to the north continued to operate. The company’s directors figured that people would be so fed up with these outmoded cars that Congress would give in and allow them to install an overhead trolley system.

  The Evening Star editors were doubly upset about this turn of events. Not only were horsecars back, but the Eckington company had also missed a July 1, 1895 deadline for taking down the poles and overhead wires on New York Avenue, which the newspaper referred to as “obnoxious obstructions.” After the Star redoubled its public complaints, the company tried a new tack. The overhead wire system on New York Avenue was removed, and that portion of the Eckington line began running…yes, more horsecars! As the Washington Post commented, the switch to horses

  will mean a considerable increase in the expense to the company, which already has its stables full of horses that are not in condition for use, and it will give the residents on the line a poorer service. But the company is taking a rather grim satisfaction in the matter, as they are already losing money on their horse service, and they think that the additional loss will be a sort of investment as an object lesson to the public on the benefit of rapid transit, trolley or otherwise.79

  As it turned out, the public was the one giving the lesson. “Eckington is at present a very much disgusted community,” the Post reported.80 Customers stayed away from the balky, outmoded horsecar service, which they found insulting. Ridership plummeted as rapidly as expenses soared.81 A year later, the overextended company was bankrupt, and the courts soon appointed former vice-president William Kesley Schoepf (1864–1927), an experienced streetcar engineer, as its receiver.

  Schoepf oversaw a last desperate effort to make the Eckington line viable, short of installing an underground conduit system. In early 1896, the company hosted the demonstration of a streetcar powered by compressed air, which it gambled would be both publicly acceptable and economically viable. The compressed air system used the pressure of air from canisters stored underneath the passenger seats to push pistons that turned the car’s wheels. The compressed air was heated with steam to increase its force as it moved out of the canisters.

  With no money for an initial investment in the new system, Schoepf managed to convince the Hoadley-Knight Company to send a car at no charge to Washington for trial runs on the Eckington line. Joseph H. Hoadley, president of the company, was on hand for the first run in March 1897 and was very effusive about his new contraption: “We are perfectly satisfied with all our tests, and are amazed at the possibilities they have opened up. As surely as electricity is taking the place of horses and men, the air motor will take the place of electricity in all but lighting—may be it will do that.”82

  Hoadley’s enthusiasm was misplaced. The public did not care for the compressed air cars, finding them smoky, dusty and smelly. The cars also tended to be slow on uphill grades. The compressed
air experiment, on which the hopes of the company had been pinned, was soon abandoned.

  At this point, the bankrupt line had already been purchased by the same syndicate of investors that took over the Anacostia & Potomac Railway, a group led by financier Oscar T. Crosby (1861–1947). In 1898, the Crosby syndicate also gained control of most of the other street railway lines in the District with the exception of the Capital Traction Company and was operating them under one holding company, called the Washington Traction and Electric Company. In compliance with the Congressional edict, the new conglomerate began installing underground electrical conduit systems on the portions of the former Eckington line that were within the downtown area. The struggle to find an alternative propulsion system had failed.

  Born in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, Oscar T. Crosby was another key figure in the long line of moguls that shaped public transportation in the nation’s capital. Crosby had graduated from West Point to join the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1880s, at a time when electrical power was on the cusp of widespread adoption. Learning the ins and outs of electrical power while in the corps, he resigned in 1887 to join in building the nascent industry. He served for a time as general manager of the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company, which had built the first practical trolley system in Richmond. With the financial backing of New York investors, Crosby in 1896 became the first president of the local Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCo), which built a large power plant on the Virginia side of the Potomac River at Chain Bridge. Once the source of electric power for the D.C. area was under their control, Crosby and his partners set their sights on acquiring their most important potential customers, the street railway companies, and converting them all to electric power.

  WHIZZING ACROSS THE DISTRICT

  Since the late 1880s, streetcar lines had been radiating out along all the major roads connecting downtown Washington with the rest of the District and suburban Maryland. In 1888, the same year the Eckington line was established, the Brightwood Railway was chartered as an extension of the Metropolitan’s Seventh Street line, carrying it out Seventh Street Extended (now Georgia Avenue) to the historic Brightwood community on the D.C. border, which had seen the only fighting of the Civil War to reach the District when Confederates tried unsuccessfully to attack Fort Stevens in 1864. After experimenting with an exotic patented pneumatic propulsion system, the Brightwood Railway converted to overhead electric trolleys. It eventually was absorbed into Oscar Crosby’s conglomerate.

  Also in 1888, the Georgetown & Tenallytown Railway was formed to build a streetcar line along what is now Wisconsin Avenue from Georgetown to the small suburban village of Tenallytown (the name was changed to Tenleytown in 1922). Georgetown had never been considered part of Washington City, and thus the new line could safely adopt an overhead trolley system without having to face the ire of the Evening Star. When the line opened in April 1890, a ceremonial first run carrying company officials was met with much celebration. “It was just a little past 3 o’clock when the excursionists entered the beautifully painted coaches at M and Thirty-second streets and were sent whizzing over the new line,” the Washington Post reported. “Hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along the street to witness the inauguration, and from the windows ladies waved their handkerchiefs as the electric cars went speeding along.”

  A Brightwood Railway car on Georgia Avenue near Florida Avenue, early 1890s. National Capital Trolley Museum.

  The Georgetown & Tenallytown line, which connected two previously well-established communities, was one suburban project that paid handsome rewards to its owners. The line’s first president, retired brigadier general Richard C. Drum (1825–1909), was among a group of investors whose real estate holdings in upper Northwest appreciated nicely. “President Drum has a farm near Tennallytown for which he paid $187,” the Post observed. “Since then he has refused forty times that amount.”83

  Founded in 1892, the Washington and Great Falls Electric Railway was one of the District’s best-loved lines. The route ran from Prospect Street in Georgetown along the heights of the Potomac to Glen Echo and Cabin John in Maryland and was built specifically to bring visitors to those two resorts. It took several years to lay out the railway’s exact route through the riverside hills and to settle disputes with angry farmers whose land it crossed, but in the end it made for one of the most scenic lines in the region. The railway opened late in 1895, offering riders spectacular views as they crossed trestles spanning deep ravines on their way to what was then the Chautauqua camp at Glen Echo or to Cabin John’s resort hotel farther north.

  A trolley on High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) in Georgetown, headed for Tenallytown, circa 1900. Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

  Two brothers from Philadelphia, Edmund and Edwin Baltzley, had planned Glen Echo to be an exclusive haven for Washingtonians wealthy enough to afford summer cottages there. Disappointed with the results, the Baltzley brothers sold their property in about 1903 to the streetcar company, which redeveloped the site into an amusement park that became a great success and remained popular until the 1960s.

  THE ROCK CREEK RAILWAY

  One of the longest and perhaps most ambitious of the many streetcar extensions that were built in the 1880s and 1890s was the Rock Creek Railway, a line that ran for seven and a half miles from Eighteenth and U Streets Northwest up a newly extended Connecticut Avenue to the fledgling community of Chevy Chase, just past the border with Maryland. The new community, the streetcar line and the extended road were all elements of Francis G. Newlands’s grand vision for turning a vast wooded wilderness into an elite suburban residential enclave.

  Born in Mississippi, Newlands (1848–1917) moved to Washington with his family during the Civil War, when his stepfather began working as a clerk for the Treasury Department. Young Newlands studied law and was admitted to the bar in the District but decided to seek greater opportunities in San Francisco, where he moved in 1870. As a successful lawyer there, he met and became closely associated with William Sharon and William Ralston, two wealthy tycoons who had made a fortune from Nevada silver mining. Newlands married Sharon’s daughter in 1874 and gained control of much of her inheritance when Sharon died in 1885. Visiting Washington in 1887 to handle the affairs of the Sharon estate, the future U.S. senator from Nevada met D.C. real estate speculator Colonel George Augustus Armes (1844–1919), who gave him the idea to acquire and develop a vast stretch of land in the upper Northwest section of the city.

  Francis G. Newlands, circa 1910. Library of Congress.

  Newlands was never one to think small. Beginning in 1887, he had his agents discreetly buy up real estate all along the streetcar route that he was secretly planning. With deep pockets from the Sharon estate, Newlands spent more than $1 million to buy 1,712 acres of property. The following year, a charter for the Rock Creek Railway was approved by Congress, and in 1890, Newlands gained control of the company. That same year, he founded the Chevy Chase Land Company to own all of the land he had purchased and to develop the Chevy Chase community at the end of the line, conveniently located in Maryland, where its well-to-do residents would be able to vote.

  A map of the route of the Rock Creek Railway. Matthew B. Gilmore.

  Newlands’s close ally, Senator William M. Stewart (1827–1909) of Nevada, invested $300,000 in the Chevy Chase venture and helped shepherd a favorable charter for the Rock Creek Railway through Congress, despite grumbling and resentment from members who weren’t in on the deal. When the bill came up for consideration in the House of Representatives, David B. Henderson (1840–1906), an inveterate supporter of the common man, led a two-hour debate on it, at one point sarcastically suggesting that it be called “a bill to boom real estate in the District of Columbia.” Henderson worried that the new line would cater primarily to the wealthy: “He didn’t want to see the poor and the needy discriminated against, and especially he did not want to have the colored brother discriminated against. He knew that the Woodley Lane and Rock Cr
eek district was a region where nabobs were going to flourish in the future, and he for one did not want to encourage their growth by legislation.”84

  Henderson’s objections were well founded. Newlands’s vision for his development was emphatically as an elite enclave, which meant that only whites were likely to live there. Newlands was infamous for advocating an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to disenfranchise African Americans. But most Washingtonians at the time supported his efforts because his plans contributed substantially to the city’s development and prosperity. The Rock Creek Railway accordingly received its Congressional charter on very favorable terms. Other important investors joined the project as well, including George Truesdell, who was appointed to its board of directors, and Samuel W. Woodward (1848–1917), co-founder of the Woodward & Lothrop department store company.

  Construction of the new road and streetcar line required a massive investment. At more than $1.5 million, the cost of grading, bridges, interest and taxes was higher than the cost of all the land that had been acquired along its route.85 The planned road ran across rugged forested hills, requiring many deep cuts into hillsides and voluminous fills of the valleys in between. Two large and expensive bridges were needed, one over the wide and deep valley of the Rock Creek, which had previously cut off upper Northwest from the rest of the city, and the other over the Klingle Valley, which runs just south of present-day Cleveland Park. The steel girder bridges, which eventually were replaced with more substantial stone structures, were each more than five hundred feet long and more than one hundred feet tall. Newlands hired engineer William Schoepf—who would move on to manage the failing Eckington & Soldiers’ Home line—to oversee construction. Work was largely completed in 1892.