Federal Office Building No. 6, now known as the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building, received its original moniker as one of fifteen new office buildings of the 1956 plan for…

Emerald Street NE, or Emerson Street prior to 1950, is a one-block-long "minor" residential street located between 13th and 14th and E and F Streets NE at the center of Square 1029 in east Capitol…

Although L’Enfant anticipated that this hill overlooking the Potomac would be used for defensive battlements, it was instead set aside for a national university that never materialized. The site…

Walter Washington (1915-2003) became the first African American mayor of a major American city, and the first mayor in DC since 1871 when President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the position in…

The oldest burial ground at Saint Elizabeths was created in 1856 on the wooded western slope of the West Campus. In most cases, funeral arrangements for patients who dies at Saint Elizabeths were…

St. Elizabeths Hospital strived for self-sufficiency. Leaders of the hospital wanted it to be able to provide for itself and made it their mission to develop a range of services on-campus to address…

Josephine Butler was born in 1920 to parents who were sharecroppers on a tobacco farm in the Brandywine area of Prince George’s County, Maryland. At age 14 she moved to D.C., lied about her age, and…

Born into slavery in Virginia, Elizabeth Hobbs learned to sew from her mother. She became so skilled that her owners hired her out to other families, pocketing the money she earned. By 1855 she’d…

When Katharine Meyer’s father, retired banker Eugene Meyer, bought the Washington Post out of bankruptcy in 1933, her future was sealed. While still in college, she worked at the paper during summers,…

Born into wealth in Memphis—her father, Robert Church, was the South’s first black millionaire—Mary Church had earned two degrees from Oberlin by 1888. She moved to Washington to teach at the M Street…