by Ann Kessler
Throughout DC are several streets that run only a few blocks at a time. They don’t fit in the grid of numbered and alphabetical street names, and they’re not the avenues named for the states. These are remnants of roads that were here before the city grew into the District of Columbia boundaries.
One of these is Grant Road. Once a long, winding country road, it now exists only in unconnected segments:
- the hilly road entering Rock Creek Park at the intersection of Davenport Street and Broad Branch Road;
- the 3000 to 3200 blocks that start at the southwest corner of 30th and Davenport Streets and emerge behind 4701 Connecticut Avenue;
- a stub parallel to Nebraska Avenue between the 3700 blocks of Cumberland and Davenport Streets;
- a longer segment east of Nebraska and across from Jackson-Reed High School (the 4500 block);
- and the 4400 block, between Nebraska south of Albemarle and Wisconsin Avenue.
The Grant Road segments today.
Grant Road’s westernmost point. The mural is painted on Tenleytown’s oldest commercial building.
The story of these blocks, and why this country road still exists in our neighborhood, begins in Tenleytown.
Grant Road’s country lane origins can be dated to 1859, if not before. During the Civil War, the road grew in significance as it became a military route between the village of Tennallytown (now Tenleytown) and the forts to the east. Named New Cut Road at first, a post-Civil War 1867 map by DC surveyor B.D. Carpenter referred to it as “Road from Turnpike to Broad Branch,” though it didn’t go all the way through to Broad Branch Road. (“Turnpike” refers to Rockville Road, which would later become Wisconsin Avenue.)
An 1870 map by the same mapmaker gave it the “Grant Road” name, and by then, it had been extended to Broad Branch.
The general assumption is that Grant Road was named for a Civil War general who would become president: Ulysses S. Grant, as the General in Chief of the U.S. Army, toured Washington’s defense perimeter in March 1864. After the Civil War, Grant Road became one of the main east-west roads of rural Washington, also known as “Washington County.”
The roads, and their names, changed as the population rapidly grew and the area became less rural. Whereas the Carpenter maps of 1867 and 1870 showed Grant Road intersecting with Chappels Road (named after a prominent local family), an 1884 map by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows Grant Road splintering into two spurs near what is now Murch Elementary.
The northern spur, previously called Chappels Road, was now labeled Grant Road. The southern spur, previously called Grant Road, was now given the name Military Road. Both spurs ended at Broad Branch Road.
For the area’s residents, the changes were confusing. To deal with the mix of Grant and Military Roads, they frequently called the now-former segment of Grant Road “Grant Military Road.” “Military or Grant Rd.” is the name given for this street in the 1920 Census. A nearby school for African American students, built in 1866, eventually went by both names: “Old Military Road School” and “Grant Road Colored.”.
To further complicate the situation, Washington County now had two unconnected Military Roads: this spur of Grant Road, and a road northeast of Broad Branch leading to Georgia Avenue.
The Evening Star newspaper described the two sections of Military Road in an 1896 article for local “wheelmen” seeking places to ride their bicycles:
The Military road… is divided into two sections, one part running from the 7th street road to the Rock Creek Ford road, a distance of two miles, while the second half runs from the Rock Creek Ford road to the Grant road, a distance of a mile. This is all that remains of a celebrated road. It was made in the early part of the late war, hence its name, and virtually girded that part of the city, running from Brightwood straight through under one name to the Tenleytown road and then northward to the River road and western over the Murdock or Lodge road.
In 1912, an organization for automobile drivers, the Automobile Club of Washington held its First Annual Sociability Run. It had the same trouble as the earlier “wheelmen” had, in describing the two sections of Military Road: “At Tenleytown the motoring party will proceed out the Grant Military road crossing Connecticut avenue extended and Broad Branch roads, and head straight for Military road via Beach drive, turning to the right over Military road in the direction of Brightwood.”
Eventually the naming of Grant Road/Military Road/Grant Military Road became a moot point. A new and straighter street, Davenport, was cut through to Forest Hills in the late 1920s. Since Grant Road was a wandering road, the sections of it that fit in the grid pattern were renamed Davenport Street. The blocks that didn’t fit were folded into other streets (such as Ellicott Terrace), kept as an unconnected segment of Grant Road, or demolished and erased from the grid entirely.
Eventually, most residents along Grant Road found themselves living at new addresses. In Forest Hills, Dr. Charles Richardson, and later his widow Amy, lived at 2901 Grant Road through the 1920s and into the 1930s, according to Boyd’s city directories of the period. In the 1950s, their house’s address changed to the 2900 block of Ellicott Terrace. Charles and Jeannette Tedrow, their neighbors on the next block, saw their address change from 3039 Grant Road in the 1925 edition of Boyd’s Directory to 3039 Davenport Street in the 1931 edition. (According to Jeannette Tedrow’s January 25th, 1949 Washington Post obituary, 3039 is reputed to have been used as a headquarters during the Civil War.)
In Tenleytown, the 4400 and 4500 blocks of Grant Road were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The street’s 12 houses and one commercial structure represent what remains of old rural Washington County.
Likewise, Forest Hills’ three blocks of Grant Road are a remnant of a great thoroughfare of the 19th century. It was a vital part of Civil War Washington and helped lead to the further development and growth of our area.
Today we live in a city. But in the 1800s, the neighborhood was sparsely-populated farmland, generally considered a rural suburb of Washington City. As one ponders the changes to our area that time has wrought, one can try to imagine how winding Grant Road represents a very current link to our past.
This is a Forest Hills Connection rerun. Ann Kessler’s original article ran in October 2017. Kessler thanked Anne Rollins in the acknowledgments for her help and direction.
Michael Chorost says
It’s fun to see this kind of hyperlocal history. I walk Grant Road all the time, and reading articles like this gives me a deeper sense of how the things I see intersect with national history. It’s good to have a sense of the “deep time” of one’s own immediate surroundings. Thanks for writing this.
Green Eyeshades says
I love Grant Road! These antique maps are also a real treat.
But Grant Road, Belt Road, Gates Road and the other “farmland” roads up here in Ward 3 are a hoot.
I don’t think I visited the Connection very often six years ago (2017), and I don’t remember seeing this Anne Kessler column before. So thanks for re-posting this.