Three Sisters Bridge: Congress Ordered It, Courts Stopped It

Three rocks in the Potomac, a drowning legend that kept changing, and a freeway bridge Congress ordered built no matter what any court said.

Show Notes

Just upriver from Key Bridge sit three little rocks called the Three Sisters. Since at least the 1890s, people have said they moan before someone drowns. In 1968, Congress ordered a freeway bridge built right on top of them, no matter what any court decided. Construction actually started.

This episode draws on two posts. The legend: https://ghostsofdc.org/2013/10/04/three-sisters-legend/

The bridge fight: https://ghostsofdc.org/2015/04/13/never-built-three-sisters-bridge-across-potomac/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.

The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.

Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.

Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.

Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.

Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

Just upriver from Key Bridge, there are three little rocks sticking out of the Potomac. They're called the Three Sisters. And since at least the eighteen nineties, people have said that right before someone drowns on the river, those rocks moan. In nineteen sixty-eight, Congress passed a law ordering a freeway bridge built right on top of them. No matter what any court decided. And construction actually started. So why are they still just three rocks? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. Since twenty twelve, I've been chasing the stories behind places people pass every day without a second look. This one comes from two posts on the site, built on about twenty sources, from an eighteen ninety-six book of American legends to the federal court rulings in the bridge fight. You'll find them on both posts at Ghosts of D C dot org.

The oldest version of the story we found in print is from eighteen ninety-six, in a book of American legends. There's no curse in it. Three sisters go out for a row on a gusty day. Their boat hits one of the rocks. All three drown. After that, the book says, people living along the shore believed the sisters moan before every death on the river. And it tells a story to back that up. One night in May of eighteen eighty-nine, the moaning drifted in just as the clock in Georgetown struck midnight. At noon the next day, a young rower came down the river in a racing shell. Near the rocks, his boat got caught in an eddy and flipped. He drowned. In nineteen hundred, four years after that book, the Washington Post told the story completely differently, as one of the Indian legends still remembered by the old settlers along the river. In the Post's version, the three are daughters of a chief, slipping away one dark night to join another tribe, and a medicine man follows along the shore, calling out that their hour of death has come. They're caught in a whirlpool and drown. And by morning, three rocks have risen out of the water. And the moan is a bell now. Here's the Post. Just before a drowning occurs on the river they are believed to emit a sound like the slow chiming of a bell, which is supposed to be a warning call. Same rocks. Brand new backstory. And the curse you hear about today, where a chief maroons his daughters on the rocks and they curse the crossing? We couldn't find it in print anywhere near nineteen hundred. Meanwhile, somebody actually owned those rocks.

In October of nineteen oh seven, the Post had news about the Three Sisters. They were up for auction. Here's how it put it. The Three Sisters will soon be sold under the auctioneer's hammer. They were part of the estate of the late John Moore, and the Post said they'd been granted to him by a land patent in the reign of King George. A land patent was an original grant of land from the government. So if the Post had it right, the Moores held these rocks from before the Revolution. That same story told the legend one more way. The sisters, it said, drowned just twenty-five years earlier. So now there are three different answers to when it happened. The auction was set for later that month. Then, in December of nineteen fifty-one, more than forty years later, the Evening Star reported that John Moore's heirs still had the islands. The federal government was buying them for twelve hundred dollars. For years, the Star said, people had been out there sunbathing, fishing and picnicking, as trespassers. Twelve hundred dollars, and the islands would become part of a park. Before the decade was out, the plan was a freeway bridge right on top of them.

A bridge at this spot wasn't a new idea. Pierre L'Enfant floated a crossing here in seventeen ninety-one. But in nineteen fifty-nine, the District and Virginia highway officials agreed that the next bridge up the Potomac should go at the Three Sisters. In nineteen sixty-one, it made the front page of the Post. Work would start the next year, and the bridge and its freeway would be done by nineteen sixty-six, for twenty-eight and a half million dollars. The bridge would have eight lanes. More than any other bridge across the Potomac. Georgetown, Foxhall and the Palisades fought it for years. And by nineteen sixty-six, a coalition of civic associations had sued to stop it. Then the fight moved to Congress. William Natcher, a congressman from Kentucky, chaired the House subcommittee that controlled the District's money. That included the city's share of a brand new subway. He was blunt about it. He said he couldn't recommend money for a rapid transit system, in his words, if the freeway system in our city is halted. No bridge, no Metro. In nineteen sixty-eight, another congressman, an Illinois Democrat who ran the House roads subcommittee, went further. A new highway law ordered the District to start work on the bridge within thirty days. Here's how the law put it. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, or any court decision or administrative action to the contrary. In other words, build it no matter what a judge says. President Johnson signed it that August. The thirty days came and went. By January of nineteen sixty-nine, the bridge had been taken out of the Interstate plan altogether. It looked like the final nail in the coffin. Then Richard Nixon took office. And Natcher froze the subway money.

On August ninth, nineteen sixty-nine, the city's appointed council gave in. Six to two, it voted to follow the highway law. Everybody read that as a vote for the bridge. It was ugly. The next morning's Post headline read, Fists Fly at Voting on Roads. Chairs went over, someone threw an ashtray at the council chairman, and fourteen protesters were arrested. After the vote, President Nixon called that same chairman to thank the council. Four days later, the bridge was back in the Interstate plan. Natcher released the subway money in late September. And in October, construction started. On October tenth, students from Georgetown, George Washington and American University paddled canoes and rowboats out to the Three Sisters. They unfurled a sign that said, Stop the Bridge, and planned to spend the night. Within a couple of days, about a hundred people of all ages were out on the islands. Five days after the canoe landing, hundreds more showed up at the construction site, chanting, Stop the bridge, free D C. Police arrested a hundred and forty-one of them, mostly students. One of the student leaders, Matt Andrea, tied the bridge to the war. The Post quoted him on the immoral war in Vietnam, and on what he called the war here against the poor of the inner city. He meant the whole freeway plan, which he said threatened to displace twenty-five thousand people. Then, early on Sunday morning, November second, somebody firebombed the contractor's trailers. Here's the Post the next morning. Two construction trailers at the site of the controversial Three Sisters Bridge were destroyed by fire yesterday. Two days later was election day. Opponents set up their own unofficial ballot boxes outside the polls. Nearly ten thousand people voted against the bridge and its freeways. Fewer than two thousand voted for it. None of it stopped the work. That December, Metro broke ground. The subway money was flowing again because the bridge was going up. So if the protests couldn't stop this bridge, what could?

The lawsuit those civic associations filed back in nineteen sixty-six was still grinding along. And in August of nineteen seventy, a federal judge ruled that the bridge couldn't go forward until the city held a new hearing on its design. Work stopped on August twenty-seventh. By then there were two pier holes drilled into the riverbed, and a steel frame standing in the water. Fourteen months later, in October of nineteen seventy-one, a federal appeals court went further. It said the federal approval of the bridge would be invalid if it rested, even in part, on what the court called the pressures emanating from Representative Natcher. Translation: Natcher's squeeze on the subway could sink the bridge. That December, the full House went around Natcher and voted to release the Metro money anyway. In March of nineteen seventy-two, the Supreme Court declined to hear the government's appeal. Then the river weighed in. That June, Hurricane Agnes flooded the Potomac. The steel frame got snagged by driftwood and swept downstream. The pier holes filled with rock and silt. In nineteen seventy-seven, the city finally let the bridge go, and its federal money went to Metro instead. Congress never formally took back its order to build it. And the Three Sisters are still just three rocks in the river.

So that's the Three Sisters. A legend that kept changing, and a bridge Congress ordered, that the courts stopped and a hurricane finished off. Thanks for sticking with this one all the way to the end. If you want the next story the minute it's out, follow Ghosts of DC wherever you listen. And a quick rating helps other people find the show. Both posts are at Ghosts of D C dot org, along with the old renderings of the bridge that never got built. This has been Ghosts of DC.