Category: DC History

Preparing for Washington DC History Conference- Black Homeowners of Truxton Circle

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at the 2024 DC History Conference and I’ll be talking about the Black Homeowners of Truxton Circle.

So if you are available Saturday, April 6th at 10:15 at the Neighborhood History and Housing panel, come see me. Ask some questions.

You can register now for the April conference, and take a look at the program here.

So in order to get ready for the conference I’m going to slightly ignore the blog for a bit. Also I have some personal things I need to deal with. Even once the conference is done, there will still be some personal things that will need to be dealt with, maintained? So I’m thinking of a schedule of one researched post a week with a few Memory Lane posts. I’d like to get around to actually getting something published outside of the InShaw blog about Truxton Circle and that’s going to take some focus and time, in addition to some of those personal things I’ve been ignoring.

Fact of life- people move

and not just during earthquakes.

People move. If you do genealogy you’ll find that people move around, which is a pain in the butt locating people. The Help comes from a line of lumberjacks, who ran around the northern  US border following trees, and they had a common last name. So it is a guess which state they were in for any given census. My people in NC, though staying in the same two counties, moved around those counties, a lot. So that comes in mind when people say gentrification moves people out of their homes. Life moves people out of their homes. Americans are movers with fantasies that they are stable.

Most people move. A few stay, but in time they move too. In the arguments over gentrification the one family that has been in the same house for 30 years, but easily forgotten are all the other people on the street who stayed for 1 -5 years and moved. Some a few blocks over, some completely out of the neighborhood. Moving people are a bit of a problem for me with the census project as I look at the city directories, which you can find on-line in Google Books: Boyd’s directory of the District of Columbia, 1892 and Boyd’s directory of the District of Columbia, 1903. I can’t speak to the accuracy of these sources as I don’t know how the data was collected, but it’s the best source out there, short of hopping in a time machine. In my own house there were one set of people in 1892, then in the 1900 Census 11 people, then in the 1903 directory one person, all with different names. Considering that many people were renters, there really wasn’t anything tying them to one house, thus freeing them to move.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on July 16, 2010 8:28 AM.

Scraps of DC History- RLA

If I ever, ever, which looks like not at all on my current path, write a history of urban renewal from the neighborhood perspective in Washington, DC I will have to include the District of Columbia Redevelopment Agency (RLA). According to the US Government Organization Manual the RLA was:

Created by act of Aug 2, 1946 (60 Stat. 790), to provide for replanning, rebuilding, and rehabilitation of slum and blighted areas in the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act of Dec 24, 1973 (87 Stat. 774), established the agency as an instrumentality of the District of Columbia government, effective July 1, 1974

A post war agency to deal with slums turned into something that helped with the destruction of SW. Which who knows, may have needed destroying in parts, but not to the extent it did with the SW Urban renewal in the 50s and 60s.