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Show Jefferson's Name Is Kept on Street, Marking Past History of Georgetown A corner grocery store where peppermints pep-permints and gumdrops are sold from a glass case, an old canal whose taffic has long since vanished van-ished from the world, and a row of little houses straggling up hill beside be-side the canal such is the view from the place where Thomas Jefferson Jef-ferson lived in Georgetown during the Adams administration. Most of the streets in Georgetown have lost their old names and taken on numbers and letters as part of the city of Washington. But for some unknown reason this little street between be-tween M and K has escaped the change. But a few houses with curved doorways and wooden gates remind one of a quieter day when Jefferson and his friend, Henry Foxall, whose name has been given to a suburb west of Georgetown, met and played the violin together for hours in the evening. A few blocks west of Jefferson street on M lived another man who became well known in the early days of our country, Francis Scott Key. Key served three terms as district attorney and carried on a private law practice in the town. One day during the War of 1812, hearing that a connection of his family had been imprisoned by the British, he went to Baltimore to see what could be done about it. Key went aboard one of the British battleships in the harbor, only to be told that he could not return to land until morning. During the night the bombardment of Fort McHenry took place. It was then that Key wrote his poem which began: O, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's twi-light's last gleaming The next morning Key was allowed al-lowed to go ashore as he had been promised, and his poem, which later lat-er became our national anthem, was first given to the public when it was read aloud by the author at a meeting of the Georgetown glee club. Now a beautiful bridge which has been named for Francis Scott Key crosses the Potomac just a short distance from where he once lived. Here also came George Washington Washing-ton in the early days. He frequently frequent-ly traveled along M street and spent many hours in Georgetown, either for business or for pleasure. The last party Washington attended was a birthnight ball given in his honor at the Union tavern on M street in the evening of February 22, 1799. When it was finally decided that the new capital city of Washington should be located along the banks of the Potomac, Washington issued a proclamation to that effect from Georgetown, where he was then staying. It ended in this way: "Done at George Town, aforesaid, the thirtieth day of March, in the yer of our Lord 1791, and in the Independence In-dependence of the United States the fifteenth. "By the President, "GEORGE WASHINGTON. "THOMAS JEFFERSON, "Secretary of State." |
