Author: Prince Of Petworth

Bladensburg feels as though it’s full of pawnshops, laundromats, and ghosts. A pre-industrial victim of environmental change, what was once one of the busiest ports on the East Coast has been scraped away, replaced by warehouses and light industry – metal fencing, transmission shops, the kind of businesses where guys show up at 7AM and have a smoke in the parking lot, before they go in to stock plumbing supplies or pull a tranny (a phrase that has a very different meaning for me than it had when I lived on 11th and Mass).

But the ghosts are there. Patsy Cline on a mural. The sailors and marines that fell under the command of Commodore Barney (think Barney Circle), who’d burned his fleet and – with a largely African American force – tried to keep the British out of Washington, after the first line of militia had fled in the face of hardened veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The ones who couldn’t walk away from the famed dueling grounds, like Stephen Decatur and Francis Scott Key’s son, Daniel, and the almost 50 others who fell there. And the World War One veterans honored by a cross whose grace is only amplified by the grey traffic circle and grim buildings it’s set against. Courage, indeed.

The Fort Lincoln Cemetery claims to have the most impressive publicly-owned mausoleum in the world, and it is indeed impressive, looming just above the remnants of the Civil War fort and hillside where Barney’s men fought the Brits. And, at the edge of the cemetery: the dueling grounds. Walking through the grounds at dawn, in the mist and the dew and the flowers, you can almost get a feel for the top hats and greatcoats and seconds and pistols, brilliant mornings ending badly. The traffic of Bladensburg Road disappears and you begin to wonder what it was like, rubbing that flintlock, nervously checking your shot and powder, glancing across the lawn to try and divine who’d still be alive come noon. It’s sandwiched in between a subdivision and the graveyard, and looks and feels exactly like a dueling ground should. Continues after the jump. (more…)