Just to the east of 3321 P Street was the old Lutheran burying-ground. About the time of the Civil War it seems to have been abandoned and the records lost. And near here stands the Lutheran Church, the fourth building on this site, for this church dates back to 1769, when it was a little log building. According to tradition, Dr. Stephen Bloomer Balch preached his first sermon here when he came to be Pastor of the Presbyterians. A prized possession of this church is a very old German Bible printed in Tübingen in 1730. Another treasured possession is the bell, over a hundred years old, which, at one time, was purchased by a congregation in West Virginia, but after twenty-five years, was reclaimed and brought back by a faithful church Councilman and housed under a small stone structure of its own. It is believed to have been cast in Europe.
Crossing High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) and cutting down to Beall (O) Street, one comes to what used to be Hazel's stable—his initials, "W. C. H." are in the bricks up in the peak at the top of the building. Here the doctors kept their carriages, here "hacks" were hired when needed for parties or funerals, and here was kept for a month or so every fall and spring my little bay mare, Lady Leeton, and the red-wheeled runabout which was brought in from Hayes for my use.
I can see Mr. Hazel now in his buggy, he weighed about three hundred pounds and his side of the buggy almost touched the ground as he drove about town.
At 3131, at the home of his daughter, is where General Adolphus Greeley was living several years ago when a very interesting event took place one spring afternoon, in 1935. I was walking down 31st Street when I heard the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner." I wondered if I was hearing a radio but when I reached the corner of O Street I noticed a policeman and an Army sergeant chatting in the middle of the street and coming up O Street was Justice of the Supreme Court, Owen J. Roberts, bareheaded, with a lady, to whom he said, "They are probably saying, 'Some old geezer named Greeley'!" So I glanced west down O Street and there, drawn up along the southern sidewalk, was a company of U. S. Cavalry, red and white guidon of Company F from Fort Myer. Then I realized that it was the day of days for General Greeley. At last, on his ninety-first birthday, he was being decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor. It had been many a year since his fateful expedition to the Arctic in search for the North Pole.
Just across the street from here now lives Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and a little farther on, the old house up on a low terrace is where the Lancastrian School was opened in November 1811 under Robert Ould. In a few weeks there were 340 boys and girls under tuition, and in 1812 an appropriation was asked for an addition to accommodate 250 more scholars.
Christ Church
The Lancastrian School was sustained by private contributions and municipal aid for thirty-two years. The name came from Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker, who started this system in England of coeducational schools, free to those who could not pay. Lancaster had a school of one thousand pupils in Southwark, but disagreements arising with some of the authorities, he emigrated to America in 1818. He died in New York in 1838.
About 1840, Samuel McKenney, whose house adjoined this property on the south, bought it and gave it to his daughter who had gone to southern Maryland to live, and so she came back to Georgetown. Her descendants, the Osbournes, lived there until just a few years ago when the "cult" for old houses in Georgetown began. When a garden was made there recently, some of the old foundations of the schoolroom were uncovered.
Almost next door is the Linthicum Institute, which still conducts its night school for white boys, and above it is the hall where the old Georgetown Assemblies are still held. Here also Mrs. Shippen has her Dancing Classes, and here now my grandchildren are learning where I had my first lessons in the same art. The old hall looks just as it did in my day.