Lloyd Beall
A very handsome and imposing old gentleman, Mr. Joe Davis, who was a bachelor, lived here in the nineties. I remember him always, in his frock coat and high silk hat. This was where Mr. and Mrs. Fulton Lewis lived for many years and where their son, Fulton Lewis, junior, the noted radio commentator, grew up.
The house has been for several years the home of the Honorable and Mrs. Francis E. Biddle. He was the Attorney-General under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mrs. Biddle, whose pen name is Katharine Garrison Chapin, is an eminent poet.
Adjoining Tudor Place on the north live the Bealls, descendants of Lloyd Beall, who sold his patrimony in southern Maryland and converted the proceeds to equipping and sustaining his company during the Revolutionary War. He was adjutant on the staff of General Alexander Hamilton and was wounded at Germantown. Later he was captured by the British, but escaped by swimming the Santee River. The effect of this performance is shown by the water-logging on his commission which he carried in his pocket.
After being mustered out of the army he came to live in Georgetown, but just where his home was I cannot discover. He served as mayor of the town three times—in 1797, 1798 and 1799.
Upon the reorganization of the army he was reinstated, and died in command of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. The Bealls who live here are also descended from Francis Dodge and from William Marbury.
In the seventies Frederick L. Moore came in to Georgetown from the country and built his home next door, so as to be between his two friends, John Beall and Joseph H. Bradley. The Bradleys no longer own this house nor their ancestral estate which was Chevy Chase, where the club of that name now is. Abraham Bradley came with the government from Philadelphia, as Assistant Postmaster-General. He made his home in Washington City and then bought Chevy Chase as his country estate. He was living there in August, 1814, when the British came to Washington. It is said that several members of the cabinet took refuge with him there during those two or three dreadful days and brought with them valuable records. His old house was mostly destroyed by fire several years ago.
His grandson, Joseph Henry Bradley, built the house at number 1688 31st Street. At the time of Lincoln's assassination he was living out in the country near Georgetown. He bore a remarkable resemblance to John Wilkes Booth and on April 15, 1865, the night after the tragic event in Ford's Theater, he was driving home in his buggy along a lonely road when he was held up by policemen and arrested. When he protested, he was told that he was John Wilkes Booth and was taken to jail. He insisted he was not, but to no avail. After a good while he got in touch with friends who identified him and he was released and went home. His wife had thought that her colored servants had been behaving strangely all day, but though living not more than five miles from the scene of the great tragedy, she herself had no knowledge of it.
In later years Mr. Bradley and his father, Joseph Habersham Bradley, who practiced law together, served as counsel in the famous John Surratt trial.