How Washington Got DC's Land in Three Days

The White House lawn was a farm, and its owner was "the obstinate Mr. Burns." Washington got the capital's land without buying most of it.

Show Notes

In March 1791, George Washington met two feuding camps of landowners at a Georgetown tavern. Three days later he had the land for a capital, and he hadn't bought most of it.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2012/03/02/d-c-is-composed-of-land-from-19-original-owners/

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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How Washington Got DC's Land in Three Days
Ghosts of DC

Stand on the South Lawn of the White House and look toward the Ellipse. In seventeen ninety-one, you'd be standing on a farm. And the man who owned it did not want to give it up.

George Washington had a word for him. Obstinate.

Washington needed that farm, and thousands of acres around it, for a brand-new capital. What he had was a tavern in Georgetown and two groups of landowners who didn't trust each other.

It took him three days.

And he didn't buy most of the land. So how do you get a whole capital city without paying for it?

Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. Since twenty twelve, I've been bringing this city's buried stories back to the surface, and this one sits underneath all the others.

It comes from eighteen sources, from George Washington's own letters of seventeen ninety-one to a twenty twenty-one history of Lafayette Park. They're all on the post at ghostsofdc.org.

Congress had put the new capital on the Potomac. Getting the land was Washington's problem. And he started quietly.

Check this out. In February of seventeen ninety-one, he asked two Georgetown men to buy up some lots for the government, in a way that, in his words, may not excite suspicions of their being on behalf of the public.

The President of the United States, buying land on the quiet.

He had his eye on one farm in particular. David Burnes's. He hoped to get it cheap. And if Burnes held out for more? Washington told his agents to pay it, rather than not get the land.

He really wanted that farm.

At the end of March, he rode into Georgetown himself and took a room at Suter's tavern. Nobody knows exactly where Suter's stood, by the way. The corner that usually gets the credit, Thirty-first and K, wasn't even occupied until around eighteen ten.

Waiting for him were the landowners, in two camps. One held land near Georgetown. The other held land to the southeast, around a town called Carrollsburg that existed only on paper. Each side wanted the new government buildings on its own land.

And both assumed the whole city would fit on a few hundred acres.

The next morning, Washington rode out over the ground in a thick mist. That evening, he called them all in.

So picture the room. Six o'clock, at Washington's lodgings. The Georgetown men on one side, the Carrollsburg men on the other. Each of them there to win.

Washington had already sized them up. Here's his diary from that day.

Finding the interests of the Landholders about George town and those about Carrollsburgh much at varience and that their fears and jealousies of each were counteracting the public purposes, I requested them to meet me at Six oclock this afternoon at my lodgings. Translation: you're all getting in the way.

So he tells them to stop fighting over which side gets the city, and make a common cause of it. Then he tells them how big it's going to be.

Not a few hundred acres. Big enough to take in both camps. Thousands of acres.

Now, what would you do? You walked in hoping the government would land next to your farm. Now he wants your farm, your rival's farm, and everything in between.

And here's how he pays for it. Mostly, he doesn't. The streets? You give those up for free. The land for public buildings, he'll pay for.

Everything else gets cut into building lots, and you split them with the government. Half for them. Half for you. He isn't buying your farm. He's making you his partner.

And it was a good bet. Half the lots in a capital city looked worth a lot more than a whole farm in rural Maryland.

They signed the next day. In Washington's words, they'd figured out that by fighting over the shadow, they might lose the substance.

The day after that, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson. It opens with about as close to a victory lap as his letters get. And it has the best line in this whole story.

Even the obstinate Mr. Burns has come into the measure.

So Burnes had signed. Which raises a question. What does a stubborn farmer do once he's agreed to hand over his farm?

First, he spelled it B U R N E S. Washington never did. His family had farmed that land for about a hundred years. Tobacco, orchards, the family house.

It took in the ground under today's White House, the South Lawn and the Ellipse.

That June, he signed the deed. The price written on it? Five shillings.

For the ground under the White House. The real payment, of course, was the lots.

The deed even spelled out how his lots would be divided if nobody could agree. Here's how it put it.

It shall on that event be determined by lot whether the said David Burns shall begin with the lot of the lowest number laid out on his said lands or the following number. A coin flip, more or less, for the future of downtown.

Then there's the story everyone loves. Washington supposedly went to Burnes's cottage to win him over, and Burnes told him off. Something like, what would you have been if you had not married the rich Widow Custis?

Great line. Historians call it a legend. It only turns up in later local histories, and it changes every time it's told.

What's documented is stubborn enough. Burnes kept farming, which the deal allowed, and reportedly fenced off land in the path of Pennsylvania Avenue to protect his crops.

Imagine that. A fence across Pennsylvania Avenue. He sold his lots slowly, held out for good prices, and died in seventeen ninety-nine.

His little cottage hung on for almost another hundred years, until eighteen ninety-four. The Pan American Union building stands there now.

Burnes was the stubborn one. The biggest landowner had a different problem. A street ran right through his new house.

Daniel Carroll of Duddington owned more of the new city than anyone. Most of what became the Mall, and all of the ground under the Capitol. And that hill came with a strange bit of history. More than a century before anyone planned a capital there, a tract on or beside it was called Rome.

It ran to an inlet called Tiber.

In seventeen ninety-one, Carroll started building himself a new house. One problem. It sat in one of the streets planned by Major L'Enfant, the man laying out the city.

That November, L'Enfant sent workmen to tear it down.

Carroll went to court and got an injunction. Too late. The house was already partly down. And Washington hadn't even heard. He'd just offered Carroll a compromise: tear it down and rebuild it the next spring at no cost to him, or finish it and live in it for six years.

When he did hear, he was not amused. He wrote that L'Enfant had no such authority from me.

A few months later, L'Enfant was out.

Meanwhile, the whole deal rested on one bet. That people would want to buy lots in the new city.

Back in October of seventeen ninety-one, the first lots went up for sale. By then the city even had a name. Here's how the sale went.

Thirty-five lots sold. And four of them were bought by the commissioners themselves, to keep the prices from sliding.

The government's own commissioners, bidding on the government's own lots. One of them blamed the weather. They closed the sale early, on the third day.

So the big payday the landowners signed up for came slowly. The city grew in fits and starts, and the government itself didn't arrive until eighteen hundred.

But go back to that lawn. The Capitol sits on Daniel Carroll's land. And the obstinate Mr. Burns's farm?

It's the President's backyard.

That's the story of the land under Washington, D.C.. Thanks for spending a few minutes with us. There are a lot more stories like this one at ghostsofdc.org.

We do this to bring back the lost and untold stories of Washington. This has been Ghosts of DC.