Tabard Inn's Founder Sold It, Then Bought It Back at Auction

Marie Rogers sold her Dupont Circle inn in 1927, held the loan, and won it back for $2,000. The records show no sign it ever closed.

Show Notes

In August 1930, the Tabard Inn near Dupont Circle went up for auction. The high bidder was the woman who had started it, three years after she sold it.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2026/10/21/tabard-inn-history-1739-n-street/

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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On August thirteenth, nineteen thirty, the Tabard Inn went up for auction. The sale notice set it for three in the afternoon, out front, on N Street near Dupont Circle. The high bidder was Marie Rogers. The woman who started the Tabard in the first place. She paid a thousand dollars for each of its two houses. Three years earlier, she'd sold it. So how does the woman who opens an inn end up bidding on it at auction? And through all of that, did the place that calls itself the oldest continuously operating inn in Washington ever actually close? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. I've spent a lot of evenings at the Tabard over the years, so I didn't expect the deeds to surprise me. This one comes mostly from the land records. Deeds, surveyor's plats and census sheets, plus the old Evening Star. It draws on twenty-eight sources in all, and they're on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Today the Tabard is three rowhouses, side by side on N Street, built between eighteen eighty-seven and nineteen hundred. Marie Rogers started with just the middle one, seventeen thirty-nine. It came last, and the surveyor's books show exactly when. One April afternoon in nineteen hundred, a Marine colonel recorded the survey for the lot that became seventeen thirty-nine. The next afternoon, his neighbor recorded hers, and the property line between their two houses shifted. Before Marie Rogers ever saw it, an admiral, a congressman and a senator all lived there. People called it the Lippitt Mansion. Marie Rogers was born Marie Willoughby, in Florence, South Carolina. She married a geologist with the U S Geological Survey named Sherburne Rogers. In December of nineteen nineteen, he was leading an expedition in Colombia. The Evening Star put the news on its front page. It reported: The canoe was overturned in a swift current. The body has not yet been recovered, according to the latest accounts of the mishap. He was about thirty. Three years later, in nineteen twenty-two, his widow was back in Washington, buying seventeen thirty-nine N Street. She named it for the inn in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And the building's National Register nomination says the Tabard opened in nineteen twenty-four. The Evening Star had it open a year earlier. In January of nineteen twenty-three, a couple was already spending the winter at the Tabard Inn, and the society page was reporting luncheons there. By the spring of nineteen twenty-six, Mrs. Rogers was throwing a May Day party, with dancing in the ballroom and cards in the drawing rooms. And the very next year, she sold it.

The buyer, in March of nineteen twenty-seven, was a woman named Alice Graham Dennis. That same month, Dennis also bought the house next door. So now the inn had two houses. Dennis didn't pay cash. She owed Marie Rogers forty-one thousand five hundred dollars, paid off month by month. So Marie had sold her inn, and she was also the bank. The loan had two trustees, the people who could sell the property if the payments stopped. One of them was Marie's sister, Isla Willoughby. Then, in June of nineteen twenty-eight, Dennis handed the whole place to someone else. She leased both houses, and all the furniture, to a couple named the Puseys, for three years. Dennis and the Puseys would split the profits, and the Puseys agreed to buy the inn by nineteen thirty-one. So where was Marie Rogers while all this was going on? In April of nineteen thirty, a census taker found her in an apartment on Kalorama Road. Under occupation, there's one word. None. Four months after that census, the Tabard was up for auction.

Alice Graham Dennis had fallen behind. In early August of nineteen thirty, the trustees' sale notice ran in the Evening Star. It said the sale was requested by the holder of the loan, but it didn't say who that was. Neither does the deed. But the loan was made out to Marie Rogers, and nothing suggests she ever passed it on. In all likelihood, she called the sale herself. A thousand dollars a house sounds like a steal. But older mortgages stayed with the houses, and whoever won had to take them on, thirty thousand dollars on one house alone. And Marie got the furniture back too. So for two thousand dollars, and the debts, Marie Rogers had her inn back. Twice as big as the one she'd sold. But she wasn't going to run it alone.

In nineteen thirty-five, the third house joined the Tabard. The deed went to her sister Isla Willoughby, not to Marie. Isla owned it for the next forty years. By nineteen forty, the census shows how the sisters ran it. Marie managed the guest house, seventy hours a week, and lived in an apartment of her own. Isla managed the third house, where the youngest sister, Lillian, was head of the household. The lodgers included a government chemist, an editor, and a couple from New Zealand. Then came the war. Washington was jammed, and the Navy needed rooms for the women officers of the WAVES. One of them, Helen Gunter, wrote in a memoir that she and a fellow officer were the inn's first WAVE residents. That seems to have been the spring of nineteen forty-three. By that May, she wrote, there were seventy women officers living there. Mrs. Rogers looked after them. Gunter remembered her driving a few of the officers on a charity tour of the embassies, where they chatted with Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. In April of nineteen forty-four, the Evening Star's listings for servicemen included a WAVE officers' spring dance, Tabard Inn, nine o'clock tonight. And in nineteen fifty, the census found all three sisters in one household. Marie and Isla gave the same occupation. Owner, hotel. Lillian was the room clerk. So the Tabard had come through a sale, a lease, an auction and a war. Which brings us back to the question. Did it ever close?

In May of nineteen sixty, the Evening Star ran a feature on the block. It said the Tabard has been continuously in business since it opened some thirty years ago. That would put the opening around nineteen thirty. It had really been open since at least nineteen twenty-three. And the Star skipped the part where the owner sold it. But on the part that matters, the Star had it right. Through the sale, the lease and the auction, nothing in the records shows the Tabard closing. One story the inn picked up along the way doesn't survive the records at all. Edward Everett Hale is supposed to have written The Man Without a Country in the attic. Hale published it in eighteen sixty-three. The oldest of the three houses went up twenty-four years later. Marie Rogers died in nineteen seventy. According to the nomination, a developer from California then wanted to tear the three houses down for an office building, and the neighbors on the block stopped it in court. In October of nineteen seventy-five, the houses were sold to a partnership. According to the nomination, it was Fritzi and Edward Cohen's. They hired Nora Pouillon as one of the two women running the restaurant, and she went on to open Restaurant Nora. And since twenty eighteen, the inn's employees have owned a majority of it. When we made this, in October of twenty twenty-six, the Tabard was still taking guests at seventeen thirty-nine N Street. I've spent a fair amount of time there myself. I had a job interview in the lounge once, and my wife and I have had a lot of dates there, usually by the fire. All of that happened in the house Marie Rogers bought back at auction, for a thousand dollars.

And that's how Marie Rogers bought her own inn back. If you're enjoying these, make sure you're subscribed, and a rating wherever you listen goes a long way. Thanks for listening. The plats, the auction notice and the old photos are on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. Most of this city's stories are sitting in records like these, waiting for someone to read them. This has been Ghosts of DC.