“3rd and T NE, but it covered quite a few acres.”
“Dear PoPville,
Most of these photos are from the early 1900s, certainly pre-WWI. The little book I have dates from about 1910, so I think the school opened around 1905 and closed just before WWI. My g-grandfather, the Rev. Flournoy Menefee, purchased the mansion (which I believe was a hotel at the time) and converted it to the Washington College for Ladies (see ad).
He had previously been the president of a woman’s college in Liberty, Missouri. My grandmother and her siblings grew up in the manor with chefs, servants, gardeners, and other employees.
I haven’t been able to get to the land records in DC to investigate, but somehow the house became a Catholic sanctuary after WWI, and I don’t know how the land was subsequently subdivided to become the neighborhood it is today. I’m sure it went through many steps to get to its present configuration.
Anyway, my family had a fairly constant presence in DC for years. My other g-grandfather, Victor Hugo Olmsted, was the Chief Statistician of the Dept. of Agriculture and ran the first-ever censuses in the Philippines and Cuba at the turn of the 20th century. My grandmother and her siblings performed at many social events during the 1930s and 40s, as reported in the Evening Star, and I can find many references to both the Menefee and Olmsted families in the press from that era. My father was proud of his DC roots and made sure we kids knew that it was our “home,” even though we were military brats and lived elsewhere for most of our formative years.”
