Chapter X
Gay (N) Street—East to Rock Creek
ACROSS High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) along Gay (N) Street on the northwest corner of Congress (31st) is the Baptist Church which has just celebrated its 75th anniversary. It was originally a small frame building, up on a bank. The present building was erected in 1890.
On the southwest corner of Gay (N) and Congress (31st) Streets stood, not so very many years ago, an attractive old white house with long porches, tiers of them, across the back overlooking a garden. I think the present building is what it was converted into in the period that did the best to rob Georgetown of all its charm.
Here, in 1795, Dr. James Heighe Blake built his home. He was a very eminent citizen, a member of the first vestry of Saint John's Church, one of the very first to advocate schools of the Lancastrian system and a reformatory, and the very first person to suggest a health officer for the City of Washington. He moved over to the city and became its third mayor from 1813 to 1817. His daughter, Glorvina, married William A. Gordon, senior, of whom I have already spoken.
Here, at one time, lived Judge Walter Cox, grandson of Colonel John Cox. His wife was a daughter of Judge Dunlop. Still later, the school of Miss Jennie and Miss Lucy Stephenson was here, which was well attended in the seventies and eighties. In the spring of 1875, a romantic elopement took place. A young girl of sixteen, an orphan, who was said to be "an heiress," went off to Baltimore very early one morning with the son of a minister who taught Latin in the school.
When the pupils came that morning, they sensed the excitement and gathered in groups in the gallery. Eventually, the news leaked out and the chief topic was that the young lady took no baggage, not even a nightgown, in her flight.