Holy Name College and the James Sherwood Farmhouse sit on 10-acres in the Brookland neighborhood. The two-story, wood-frame farmhouse was completed by farmer James Sherwood in 1886 within what had historically been “Cuckhold’s Delight,” a land patent dating to 1686. The Queen Anne style residence, with its corner tower, porch, and decorative wood shingling, is a remnant of the once rural area, when it was known as Washington County. Sherwood lived and worked at his farm, with his wife and five children, until at least 1910. During these years, James, along with his brother Jesse, were also involved in real estate, constructing many houses in the “Sherwood’s Addition to Brookland” subdivision. The land was purchased by the Franciscans’ Holy Name Province in 1920, but James Sherwood continued to live in Brookland (at another address) and eventually became a bank vice president.
Various Catholic monastic orders and institutions were attracted to the area around The Catholic University of America (1889), giving the area its nickname of “Little Rome.” This included the Franciscan Monastery, Marist College, St. Paul's College, St. Joseph’s Seminary, and Holy Redeemer College, amongst other institutions. Almost a decade after the land's purchase, Holy Name College was constructed by Turner Construction Company for the Franciscans between 1929 and 1930. The building was designed by Buffalo-based architect Chester Oakley in a Romanesque Revival style, with Art Deco detailing. The building is rectangular in shape, with a central cloister (or courtyard) and north and south wings extending from the east elevation. The main entrance pavilion is located on the west elevation.
Holy Name College included classrooms, a two-story chapel, a dining room and kitchen, laundry facilities, and dormitories for students and faculty. At the time of the college building's construction, the farmhouse was moved just to the south of the new building, where it was reoriented and renovated, and connected to the college building by a brick arcade. The farmhouse was converted into a convent for the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and later provided additional dormitory, meeting, office, and storage spaces.
In 1957, enrollment peaked at Holy Name College with 147 students, and then declined as the structure of Catholic theological education changed. In 1984, Howard University purchased the property and then made some alterations to the historic buildings, most notably infilling the enclosed cloister of the former Holy Name College building. The former Holy Name College building was rededicated as Benjamin E. Mays Hall in 1987. Mays was the first dean of Howard University’s School of Religion. From the mid-1980s until 2015, the buildings housed the university’s School of Divinity.
The former college building is connected to 14th Street NE by a long driveway and allée of trees, which terminates at the building’s entrance pavilion, located at the building’s northwest corner. This driveway also aligns with the building’s tower, at the northeast corner, which is capped by a bronze statue of Jesus Christ. The entrance pavilion includes arched doors and windows in the Romanesque Revival style. The building is clad in textured, polychromatic brick in contrasting bonds. The building’s west elevation is notable for its terra-cotta “Heroic Figures” that stand on brick buttresses. The southwest corner features another pavilion, called the Friar’s Entry (St. Francis Corner).
DC Inventory: October 30, 2025
National Register: January 8, 2026
]]>This cross-gabled Queen Anne frame house at 1256 Kearny Street NE was built for prosperous Irish immigrants James T. and Hannah Ward. The house was probably completed in 1893, and the couple remained there until selling the property in 1918 to bookkeeper William E. and Mary Berres Gordon. The next occupants, from 1922 to 1937, were an African American couple, Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885-1937) and Mary Powell Burrill (1881-1946). The women met a decade earlier, when both were teaching high school English. In 1918, they moved in together, establishing a domestic partnership that would continue until Slowe’s death.
Mary Burrill had been one of the first African American graduates of Emerson University and then taught at Armstrong Manual High School in DC. For four years, she directed the Washington Conservatory of Music’s School of Expression, where she taught elocution, public speaking, and drama. She did most of her teaching career at her alma mater, the M Street High School (which became Dunbar High School), until her retirement in 1944. There, she taught English, history, speech and drama, and directed plays and musical productions, influencing generations of young minds, several of whom became educators and writers. On her own time, she was a playwright, publishing two one-act plays, and she regularly attended Georgia Douglass Johnson’s “S Street Salon,” a weekly gathering of Black writers.
Likewise, Lucy Slowe’s career is one of remarkable achievements. She was second in her class at the Baltimore Colored High School, and its first female graduate to enroll at Howard University, where she graduated as valedictorian. While at Howard, she was one of the nine founding members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the first sorority for African American women. Slowe began teaching English at her alma mater, the Baltimore Colored High School, and during summers earned her Master of Arts at Columbia University. After obtaining the degree, she moved to Washington to teach at Armstrong. Impressed with her abilities, the school board tasked her with planning DC’s first junior high school for African Americans in Shaw. She served as its principal.
In 1922, Slowe accepted the position of Dean of Women at Howard University, the first African American woman to hold such an office and teaching simultaneously. Broadening her view beyond Howard, she founded and served as president of the National Association of University Women, then established the Association of Advisors to Women in Colored Schools and the Association of Deans of Women and Advisors to Girls in Negro Schools, and finally, assisted civic leader Mary McLeod Bethune in the creation of the National Council of Negro Women, where she served as the secretary. She was also active in the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Over the 15 years of their occupancy on Kearny Street, Lucy Slowe and Mary Burrill hosted parties and intellectual gatherings attended by female Howard students and prominent writers and artists, including Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. According to Robert Malesky, “That Kearny Street home became a refuge for Howard’s female students, and Slowe regularly hosted get-togethers there to talk, counsel and encourage her young charges, often meeting beneath the trees in her back yard or gathered around an open fire in the living room. The women also received many other guests there, mostly educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune, but also politicians and activists from around the country.”
When Slowe passed away in 1937, condolences were sent to Burrill. The Chair of the Howard University Board of Trustees wrote a letter, to which Burrill replied, “Howard University had in its midst in the person of Lucy D. Slowe a great woman but its President and Board of Trustees could not see it.” Burrill donated Slowe’s papers to Morgan State University, instead of Howard University. In 1966, Morgan State then donated them to Howard. Just prior to her death, Slowe’s will listed Burrill as a joint tenant of the Kearny Street house (along with Slowe), and as the owner of most of the house’s furniture. About one month later, the will was amended, with Burrill now listed as a tenant in common, making her a shareholder (along with Slowe). When Slowe died in October 1937, Slowe’s share passed to Nellie Slowe Hawkes, her sister. In 1938, Hawkes transferred her half-ownership of the house to Burrill. In 1941, Burrill sold the house and in 1944 moved to New York City, where she passed away in 1946.
DC Inventory: April 30, 2020
National Register: October 5, 2020
National Historic Landmark: December 13, 2024
This is a stop on the DC's LGBTQ+ History Tour. For more information about DC's LGBTQ History, please see the Historic Context Statement for Washington’s LGBTQ Resources.
]]>Built between 1894 and 1895 by Richard E. Crump, the Evans-Tibbs House was the home of Lillian Evans-Tibbs (1890-1967) from 1904 until her death. Evans-Tibbs became the one of the first internationally acclaimed African American opera singers under the stage name Madame Evanti. During the 1920s, she became the first African American to perform with an organized European opera company. In the 1930s, she performed at the White House for Eleanor Roosevelt and served as a Goodwill Ambassador to South America. In 1942, she helped found the Negro National Opera Company. This two-story brick rowhouse, designed by architect R.E. Crump, was built in 1894; Madame Evanti added decorative iron railings with stylized harps or lyres in a 1932 remodeling.
DC Inventory: March 20, 1985
National Register: September 8, 1987
]]>Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Oberlin College during the 1880s and taught in Ohio and Washington, DC. Following the completion of her graduate degree, Mary Church traveled and studied languages abroad. In 1890, she returned to DC, where she taught at M Street High School. In October 1891, she married fellow teacher Robert H. Terrell (1857-1925). He was an attorney and the second African American to serve as a justice of the peace in Washington, DC.
Mary Church Terrell is a figure of national historic significance. She was the president of the National Association of Colored Women and, later, a member of the National American Suffrage Association. In 1895 she became the first Black woman in America to be appointed to a school board. Terrell served two terms on the DC School Board, from 1895 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911. Her terms were defined by work towards quality education, fair hiring practices, and more adequate appropriations for schools. It was during this period that Mary Church Terrell lived in the 1892 house.
She also led the successful fight to integrate DC restaurants. After she and her colleagues were refused service at Thompson Restaurant, she filed a lawsuit against the eatery. While waiting for the case to move forward, she engaged in boycotts and sit-ins targeting other segregated restaurants in the city. Her lawsuit resulted in a 1953 Supreme Court decision that found the practice of segregating DC’s eating places to be unconstitutional.
In their time living in DC, the Terrells’ purchase of their home was instrumental in integrating LeDroit Park. Today, the house is a National Historic Landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a contributing structure to the LeDroit Park Historic District.
Despite sporadic attempts at restoration, the Terrell House remained vacant and in a deteriorated state. In 1999, it was listed on DC Preservation League's Most Endangered Places list. In 2023, Howard University, with assistance from the National Park Service, completed a rehabilitation project, which included the restoration of exterior and interior architectural features. The project was funded in-part by the Historic Preservation Fund's African American Civil Rights Grant Program. The restored home will house visiting Howard University scholars.
DC Inventory: May 21, 1975
National Register: May 15, 1975
National Historic Landmark: May 15, 1975
Within LeDroit Park Historic District
This site is included in the Women's Suffrage in Washington DC tour for its role as the home of suffragist leader Mary Church Terrell, president of the National Association of Colored Women.
]]>Perhaps no Southwest resident is more emblematic of the dream of social and economic ascension than James C. Dent. Born into slavery in 1855, Dent grew up a farm laborer in the tobacco country of southern Maryland. He eventually made his way to southwest DC as a laborer, mostly employed in a lime kiln, and married a Virginia seamstress. In 1885, his wife Mary and several parishioners founded the Mount Moriah Baptists Church. Several months after it opened, the first pastor stepped down, and in May of 1886 Dent took his place and proceeded to take the church to prominence within Washington's black religious community, overseeing its transition into several newer and nicer buildings and serving as pastor for over 22 years.
Dent's residence in the Southwest neighborhood of Buzzard Point, in addition to representing the nearly vanishing pre-urban renewal neighborhood, is also emblematic of the rise of the black middle class after Emancipation.
DC Inventory: July 22, 2010
National Register: November 2, 2010
]]>The Demonet Building sits on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and M Street, and has been a witness of the social and environmental changes on the Avenue since its construction during the late-19th Century. It is believed that the architect of the building was a man named John Sherman, Jr., who did not work professionally as an architect, but was known to design and sell his own buildings as a successful real estate agent.
When the Demonet Building was completed, Connecticut Avenue was best known for its sophisticated mansions, elegant town houses, and well-off residents. True to that reputation, the building was sold to a dentist named W. Warrington Evans in 1882, and remained his home and office until 1901. It was then, at the turn of the century, that the Avenue’s culture began moving in another direction, as small businesses began purchasing homes and converting them into their places of work.
In 1904, a man named Jules Demonet repurposed the building for his family’s confectionary business, which his parents had established in 1848. The business, originally run by his parents John Charles and Ida on Pennsylvania Avenue, had been popular among many patrons and was even visited by General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. The shop remained successful in its new home on Connecticut Avenue.
As large scale office buildings move onto the Avenue, the Demonet Building remains an eye-catching window into the 19th Century.
DC Inventory: November 23, 1979
]]>Saint Phillip’s Baptist Church has stood on the corner of North Capitol and K streets NE since its dedication in 1892. With its deep red brick façade, brownstone trim, and pitched gable roof, the Church is reminiscent of Queen Anne style architecture, and was designed by architect Appleton P. Clark Jr. Saint Phillips Baptist Church was established by a group of individuals from the African-American community living on St. Phillip’s Hill (around the area north of MacArthur Boulevard, NW). Before this Church was built, the community had prayer meetings that moved from house to house, took place in a local school, and later on, in a smaller church that was built by the congregation. Before being the Saint Phillip’s Baptist Church, the building was home to three previous Protestant groups. The first group, the North Capitol Street Methodist Episcopal Church, originally constructed the building. The church was then sold to its second group, the Full Gospel Assembly of God, in 1927. Following them was the Bethel Pentacostal Assembly of God, who purchased it in 1938, and they would be the last group in the building before it was sold to the Saint Philip’s Baptist Church in 1948. Before purchasing the building, Saint Phillip’s Baptist Church had moved from St. Phillip’s hill to Florida Avenue, NW in 1941. Their original home on St. Phillip’s hill developed into a wealthy, white residential area that forced out many people from the original communities living there, including the Church. This site is significant because it tells an important story about the ways in which race and wealth have influenced residential patterns in Washington, DC.
DC Inventory: June 27, 1974
]]>The Hilleary Burrows House is a 2-1/2 story Queen Anne style dwelling, situated in a prominent location next to Fort Bayard Park. The house dates to 1897 and was designed by H. Galloway Ten Eyck, a prominent architect from Newark, New Jersey, who published two editions of residential designs. As one of the original structures in American University Park, Burrows House is an exemplar of the middle-class residences erected in the metropolitan Washington suburbs in the mid 1890s. This house is also considered the only documented example of a Victorian pattern book house in the city.
The house was built for Tenleytown resident Hilleary T. Burrows, a member of Tenleytown's long-established Burrows family. Burrows was one of the first to buy a lot and build a house in the newly laid American University Park subdivision. The subdivision of American University Park coincided with the passage of the District of Columbia’s 1897 Permanent Highway Plan, which laid the framework for streets beyond the L’Enfant Plan, and is indicative of the suburbanization of rural land outside the city.
DC Inventory: August 23, 2001
National Register: June 27, 2011
]]>The Samuel M. Bryan House was built in 1885 and designed by architect W. Bruce Gray. Samuel M. Bryan worked in various capacities, starting at age 15 when he served as a drummer boy in the Union Army during the Civil War. From there, he went on to work at the Treasury Department, the Post Office Department, the Universal Postal Congress on behalf of Japan, and then eventually he became the President of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, a position in which he served until 1889.
After this time, Bryan moved out of Washington but it is unknown where he went or when he died. In 1895, the house was sold to Washington philanthropist, Bessie J. Kibbey. She added a third story to the existing back of the building in 1904.
The Church of the Saviour bought the house in 1950 and added a one story addition to the rear while also adding partitions on the third floor among other changes to convert the building from a residence to a church and offices. The solid, dark building dominates nearby structures. There is no superfluous ornamentation to distract from the strong influence of the tower, entrance portal and building height. Romanesque in detail, individual and linear elements are defined by boldly articulated materials and shapes. The interior, though more decorative, is related in style to the exterior. The single greatest elements are the central living halls and galleried stair. Similar details used throughout unify the chambers.
DC Inventory: February 22, 1972 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
Within the Massachusetts Avenue Historic District and the Dupont Circle Historic District
]]>Built from 1881 to 1882 and designed by architect John Fraser, this house was the residence of James G. Blaine until 1883. Blaine served as Secretary of State under Presidents Garfield and Harrison and later became the first President of the Pan-American Congress. Blaine was the Republican presidential nominee in 1884. He had previously served as Speaker of the US House and as a US Senator from Maine.
The house is the only surviving example of the large mansions, built during the late 1800s, that once surrounded Dupont Circle. After Blaine, the house's other notable owner was inventor and entrepreneur George Westinghouse, who bought the home in 1901 and resided there until his death in 1914.
DC Inventory: November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
Within Dupont Circle and Massachusetts Avenue Historic Districts
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