My methodology of collecting the data is to note the stats of the head of household, and a bit of head’s spouse then make note of how many people in the house are 16 and over and how many are 15 and below. So I only noticed this when I was gathering the numbers of those 16 and over.
In 1900 at 414 Richardson Court, Julia Williams, a single black woman aged 30 lived with her 3 sisters, her 7 year old son, a boarder and her grandmother. Her grandmother, Hester Jackson, a widow was 101 years old when the census was taken. Mrs. Jackson was listed as being born in 1799 in Virginia. Which a good guess tells me she was very likely to have been born a slave, and worked as a slave. I had to meditate on that for a moment.
The other pauses for thought were the other households on Richardson Court, now Richardson Place. Those houses are small. I’m seeing households of 7 or more people, sometimes with more than one household in a Richardson house.
Category: Truxton History
Squares 519 & 520
More from the 1870ish to 1880ish DC tax assessment maps. These I believe are on microfilm at the MLK library’s Washingtonia Div.
Note the large plots. In 1880 square 519 was home to a florist’s greenhouse. Remember this was the edge of town.
On this site in 1850, nothing happened
You know I should make better research notes. Or I should leave bibliographic info with the photocopies…. bad librarian. Bad. Anyway, off the top of my head this map is a scanned copy, of photocopy, of a negative copy, of a map that is of the city circa 1850ish. And if I looked hard enough and if it is cataloged by the Library of Congress, I could find the bibliographic info I should have to say who drew the map and so forth. It’s pre-Civil War.
The two light lines are Boundary (Florida) and New York. The squiggly line is a creek. The square numbers are the same square numbers we have today and if you notice…. not a lot of structures. On the negative copy it is easier to see marsh or not-dry-land.
With that in mind I would not even dare call this area, that later became the TC a neighborhood. Heck, I don’t even know if I could call it a community.
Also check out this view of the map.
UPDATE: Better map 
.
Updated 12/21/23 for bad image links
Square 507 circa 1880 map
This I found at the MLK Library’s Washingtonia Division on microfilm, from the tax rolls, or tax survey, whatever. There was another frame with assessments that said what had a structure on it or if it were brick or a framed structure, but I was too cheap to make a copy. Cheap, or in a hurry or the copy part of the microfilm reader was screwed up. Any of those is possible.
Come and listen to the world’s most boring history paper
I’m presenting my paper at the Wash DC Historical Studies conference this Saturday. I’ve read my paper and the middle portion is boring. Dullsville. I’m working on making an exciting speech, based on the boring paper.
Why boring? I have a lot of so-in-so lived next door to so-in-so who was black/white/ Irish. Going individually, house to house is more exciting when mapping it out and seeing the neighborhood as a whole. The Truxton Circle of 1880 was a sparsely populated area. I say this because there were blocks with no one on them, or sections of blocks that are empty. This changes by the 20th century, but the 1900s+ aren’t covered in this paper. Gonna have to wait a few more years for the 20th century.
I’ll probably post the paper and all the images that don’t want to print on the &^%! printer, after the conference, on the web. If anyone with any editing skills wants to read it, e-mail me and tell me what kind of editing you do.