Brookland & It's Civil War Forts

These little tidbits of history are only a drop in the vast pool of stories packed into Brookland the book, by John Feeley and Rosie Dempsey. See the full companion article to these bits by Anna Brinley on Brookland Avenue. 

1. Ann Queen Brooks’s family owned land stretching all the way to the town of Bladensburg, Maryland, and gave the land to her husband Colonel Jehiel Brooks, who founded Brookland. Their home, now called Brooks Mansion, still stands next to the Brookland Metro Station.  Another of the Brookland estates was Anderson Cottage, a favorite summer retreat of five U.S. presidents in the years before Camp David and Cape Cod became popular.  President Buchanan was a committee member of Rock Creek Episcopal Church’s parish whose historic structure sits on the far side of North Capital Street from Brookland and will celebrate its 300th anniversary in 2012.  Congregants abandoned this parish during the war because of its Confederate sympathies—sympathies shared by the slave-owning Brooks family.

2. Fort elevations:

Fort Bunker Hill:  226 ft. 
Fort Totten:  318 ft.
Fort Slemmer: 233 ft.
Fort Slocum: 220 ft. 

3. “North of the city there are a few infantry pickets on the road in from of Forts Stevens, Totten, Slocum, and Bunker Hill; but they are weak and could only give alarm by firing musketry which is unreliable” The new forts depended on the sturdiness and flexibility of soil to support their own guns and cannons, and to absorb anticipated projectile attacks.

4. Co-author John Feeley is a deacon at St. Anthony’s where he was baptized, confirmed, grew up in, and was married to Helen D. Young, to whom he dedicated the book.

5. The forts brought wartime activity to Washington County’s estates and farmlands —32 miles of new roads were constructed throughout for transportation of goods and improved communication between the 68 forts.  Some military roads were maintained after the war, drawing the Brooks and their neighbors further into the sphere of the city of Washington, which would later consolidate with Brookland to become the District of Columbia that we know today. 

6. Brookland co-author Rosie Dempsey is a 25-year resident of Brookland whose family roots in the neighborhood go back to the 1940s. She dedicated the book to her mother Marianne Kerins Dempsey, who lived on the 1000 block of Perry Street in Brookland when she met Rosie’s father Bill Dempsey, at the time a graduate student at CUA. Since the Brookland’s release in September 2011, Rosie has been interviewed for both a short piece on Brookland for WAMU radio’s Metro Connection here, and in the Washington Post’s Metro Section column on Brookland: “A fond look back through Brookland’s history”

7. A young Thomas Diggs:

8. Carrie Harrison was among the small but growing number of activist women in the early 1900s—she was a Republican, a suffragette and worked as a professional botanist with the Department of the Interior and the National Museum, a precursor to the Smithsonian Institution. More information about Ms. Harrison in Brookland. Ms. Harrison built the Spanish villa at 1331 Newton Street, based on houses she saw in Spain, where she lived and did her work. Residual vegetation from her scientific endeavors remains. As recalled by a contemporary Brookland resident now deceased, Presidents Taft and Hoover were both guests in her home. 

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