Hains Point Was River Bottom Until the Army Pumped It Up

Hains Point was Potomac mud until an Army engineer pumped it into land. Then came the name, the Speedway, segregated golf and the floods.

Show Notes

Every bit of Hains Point was river bottom or mud flat until 1882, when an Army engineer named Peter Hains started pumping the Potomac's mud into new land. The point got his name while he was still alive, and the river has been trying to take it back ever since.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2022/04/08/why-is-it-named-hains-point/

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.

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

Picture yourself at the very tip of Hains Point, where the Potomac meets the Washington Channel. Water on three sides. Runners going by on the loop. Now look down. Every bit of ground under your feet was river bottom or mud flat when an Army engineer named Peter Hains showed up in eighteen eighty-two. He made all of it out of mud, pumped up from the Potomac. And the place got his name while he was still alive. So how do you build a park out of a river? And what does the river do about it? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. If you've ever run, biked or driven that loop, this one's about the ground you were on. It's built on nineteen sources, from an eighteen ninety-nine Supreme Court decision to a twenty twenty-six news report. Every one of them is listed on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

For most of the eighteen hundreds, the Potomac below Georgetown was a mess. The river spread out over a shallow bed of mud, and the city's sewage settled right into it. Mud flats crept toward the White House. What finally got Congress moving was a flood. In February of eighteen eighty-one, ice jammed against the piers of the old Long Bridge and dammed the river. Within hours, about two hundred fifty acres of the city were under water. Most of it south of Pennsylvania Avenue. So Congress ordered a fix. In the summer of eighteen eighty-two, it put up four hundred thousand dollars, and put Major Peter Hains of the Army Corps of Engineers in charge.

Here's how you build land out of a river. You dredge the bottom from boats. At first, workers loaded the muck into rail cars that rolled out over the flats on wooden trestles and dumped it. Then in eighteen eighty-four, the contractors brought in a hydraulic dredge. It sucked mud off the river bottom and sprayed it over the flats as slurry. Cheaper, and a lot faster. Hains ran the job until eighteen ninety-one. The men after him kept pumping for another twenty years. The last load of fill went onto East Potomac Park in August of nineteen eleven. And then came the question nobody had settled. What do you do with brand-new land, right next to downtown? Well, some engineers wanted to sell it off for development, the way Boston built its Back Bay. A Washington banker pushed for a park instead, and he won. In eighteen ninety-seven, Congress set it aside, for the recreation and pleasure of the people. Then there was the question of who owned it. Plenty of people claimed a piece of the old riverbed, so Congress told the Attorney General to sue every one of them. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in eighteen ninety-nine that the land belonged to the United States.

In September of nineteen seventeen, the Evening Star ran a summary of the annual report from the Army engineer in charge of the city's parks. Near the bottom was this. It is again suggested that the tidal basin in West Potomac park be named Twining Lake, and that the extreme southern point of East Potomac park be named Hains Point. Notice the word again. It had been suggested before. And this time, half of it stuck. Twining Lake never caught on. You still call it the Tidal Basin. Hains Point did. And the man it was named for had quite a career. When Hains died, the Washington Post's headline said he fired the signal gun that started the Battle of Bull Run. He built lighthouses. He helped choose the route for the Panama Canal. And when the country entered World War One, he was back on active duty in his late seventies. The Evening Star said he was believed to be the oldest officer in the service. He died in November of nineteen twenty-one. Two days later, the Star told readers how to get to Hains Point to watch the cruiser Olympia come up the river, carrying the Unknown Soldier.

There's one more part of the family story, and it's a hard one. In August of nineteen oh eight, the general's son, an Army captain named Peter Hains Junior, shot and killed a man at a yacht club in Queens, a man he believed had been involved with his wife. His brother held back the crowd with a revolver. Then the captain sent his father a telegram. Have shot Annis. Come to Flushing police station. Peter. The brother was acquitted. The captain was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to at least eight years. The governor of New York pardoned him in nineteen eleven.

Back at the point, the park filled in. The first thing they built was a road around the edge. Everybody called it the Speedway. Some people called it the Breezeway. Today it's Ohio Drive. During World War One, the park filled up with barracks. After the war, part of it turned into a camp for tourists driving in from out of town, with cabins, tents and hot showers. The Girl Scouts served tea at the point. They got a proper tea house in nineteen twenty-four. It later became the Hains Point Inn, then the Cherry Blossom Inn. It flooded too often to save, and the Park Service tore it down. And then there's the golf course. The first nine holes opened in July of nineteen twenty. A round cost a quarter. The next spring, President Harding showed up unannounced, paid his quarter and played. But it was whites only. Black golfers were sent to a course built on a former dump along Kingman Lake. In July of nineteen forty-one, forty Black golfers were turned away from the field house at East Potomac. Six days later, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes ordered every federally owned golf course desegregated.

Now, about that river. Hains Point is made ground, barely above the water, and the Potomac comes back for it. In March of nineteen thirty-six, an Evening Star reporter flew over the flooded valley and wrote it down. Hains Point is no longer to be seen. One building stands out solitary. The East Potomac golf course is a morass of yellow ponds and puddles. And the ground sinks, too. Decades later, the park's National Register paperwork noted the recurrent dumping of dredged mud onto Hains Point, because of constant settling. In other words, they had to keep feeding it.

And for almost thirty years, the point had a giant. In nineteen eighty, a seventy-foot aluminum figure called The Awakening went up there, a man clawing his way out of the ground. It was only supposed to be on loan. It stayed until two thousand eight, when a developer who'd bought it for seven hundred twenty-five thousand dollars had it dug up and trucked to National Harbor. So the next time you're out on that loop, three and a half miles, clockwise, go all the way to the tip. Look downriver. Everything under your feet used to be the Potomac.

That's Hains Point, the park that used to be a river. Thank you for listening. Really. If this one was worth your time, give Ghosts of DC a rating, or a like, wherever you're hearing it. That's how other people find the show. The old maps and photos, including a nineteen twenty-two shot of the point from the air, are on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. And there's plenty more of this city still out there to dig up. This has been Ghosts of DC.