Make Yourself at Home
Georgetown's Old Stone House Gives Visitors a Peek at Life More Than 200 Years Ago
Georgetown isn't all modern shops and restaurants: The Old Stone House dates to the 1700s.
(By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)
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You could easily walk right past it; it's a quaint, cozy structure smack in the middle of bustling Georgetown. The historic house is firmly rooted on M Street. Trendy stores and restaurants have sprung up around it.
However, to pass up a visit to the Old Stone House is to miss an opportunity to travel to Colonial times. National Park Service Ranger Ron Harvey says that the house provides a "wonderful window for people to step back into those earlier days." The front room of the house was constructed in 1765, and the rest of the house was built during the next several years.
"Other houses that have survived from this time period are the big manor homes: Mount Vernon, Montpelier and Monticello," Harvey says. "While these are certainly worthwhile places to view, the Old Stone House reflects middle-class living arrangements, so it's a lot more intimate." Many visitors, he says, can see themselves living there.
As you walk through the house, don't take the low ceilings as an indication that people were much shorter more than 200 years ago; the height chart in the kitchen reveals that two of America's Founding Fathers, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were more than six feet tall. Instead, ceilings were built low to save on heat.
In the kitchen, built in 1767, you can see cookware. The toaster, which has a long handle and slots on one end, shows that people back then had their own nifty gadgets. Pieces of bread went into the slots, and when one side was toasted, the toaster was given a little push so the other side faced the fire. Voilà!
Narrow staircases lead up to the bedrooms where, in addition to beds, you can see clothes and shoes that people might have worn. The children's bedroom has many things that help tell stories of what kids did for fun back then. Maybe they played dress-up with the giant straw hat, or drew funny pictures on the chalkboard, or played with dolls they made out of corn husks.
"Where's the bathroom?" is the question that Harvey says he gets asked most frequently. The house, he answers, was built before there was plumbing, and people used chamber pots and outhouses.
People have operated several businesses from the front room of the house since 1767, including a hat shop, a tailor shop, a locksmith shop and even a clocksmith shop; the beautiful grandfather clock in one of the upstairs rooms was actually made there! In 1953, when the federal government bought the house, a used-car dealership had its office there. In 1938, one type of used car sold for $69.
-- Nidhi Mohnot
