George M. Lightfoot, a Howard University professor, entertained the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois in this house on Missouri AvenueNW, and his granddaughter Carol Lightfoot Walker lives there today.
Amid leafy streets lined with well-kept rowhouses in a small residential neighborhood off Georgia Avenue NW lies what might be the city’s most important Civil War site.
Brightwood, just south of Takoma Park and east of Rock Creek Park, is home to Fort Stevens, the site of the only Civil War battle fought within the District’s boundaries.
It was at Fort Stevens nearly 150 years ago that Union soldiers stopped Confederate troops from capturing Washington and attacking President Abraham Lincoln, who came under fire during the battle.
Fort Stevens, now maintained by the National Park Service, is one of many historical resources in Brightwood. Historians say the neighborhood is also the site of one of the city’s first black settlements, and it is home to a national cemetery where about 40 Union soldiers are buried.
Residents say Brightwood’s history is only part of what makes the neighborhood special.
“It was nice to move to a place with such a keen sense of history, that wasn’t just a bunch of brand-new houses,” said Karrye Braxton, a 40-plus owner of a management consulting firm who moved to Brightwood in 2003. “I grew up thinking it was important to live in a neighborhood with a real sense of community, and that’s definitely the case here.”
Brightwood first developed along the Seventh Street Turnpike, now Georgia Avenue, in the early 1800s, according to “Washington at Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital” by Kathryn S. Smith.
Some of the neighborhood’s earliest residents were free black people who owned houses and farms in Brightwood as early as the 1820s, according to “Battleground to Community: Brightwood Heritage Trail,” a historical guidebook written by Mary Konsoulis and produced by Cultural Tourism D.C.
Fort Stevens drew even more free black people to the neighborhood during and after the Civil War, and the fort was built on land owned by Elizabeth Thomas, a free black woman, according to Cultural Tourism D.C.’s guidebook.
After the war, Brightwood residents opened the Military Road School, one of the city’s first public schools for black children, in a small building near Fort Stevens, said Patricia A. Tyson, 69, a retired federal worker who attended the school as a child and is executive secretary of the Military Road School Preservation Trust.
The school moved to a stately brick building on Missouri Avenue in 1912, Tyson said, and the building serves as a Montessori school today.
“When the war ended, parents wanted their children to learn to read and write, and at the time, schools and churches were truly the heart of every black community,” Tyson said.
The neighborhood’s historical resources also include the George M. Lightfoot family residence, which for the past 82 years has been owned by descendants of Lightfoot, a Howard University professor of Latin who entertained high-profile black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois in the house, said Carol Lightfoot Walker, Lightfoot’s granddaughter.
Walker, who now lives in the house, said she believes it was built shortly after the Civil War.
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