An open field in Whitehaven Park is a reminder of a forgotten section of Georgetown called Bryantown.)
19th century newspapers occasionally carried articles that referred to a working-class section at the northern end of the city of Georgetown. “Affairs in Georgetown. Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever Prevalent in Bryantown Section. ––A number of diphtheria cases in the northwestern part of Georgetown are reported, and the residents of the neighborhood are somewhat alarmed, The disease is prevalent in the belt north of Q street and west of 32d street, including a large portion of the town known as ‘Bryantown,’ an old-established locality.”
(Evening Star, August 27, 1898, p. 3)
By the time that Edgar Farr Russell was writing A Short History of Burleith (1955), memory of Bryantown and its inhabitants had all but faded. Russell still knew the term, and connected it to the field in Whitehaven Park that he knew as B.T. Ball Ground, and adding that it was Bryantown’s “own” ball field. But by then the connection to Bryantown was already well on the way to being forgotten. “The area favored by many of the members is the field in back of the Glover Park development known as the “B. T. Woods.” Named for its “big trees,” the field has been used for baseball and football for a number of years.” And Francis McKinley, who grew up in Glover Park in the 1940s, recalled that Whitehaven Park was called B.T. Woods, and that the name signified “Big Trees.”
(“Group To Present Playground Plea––Glover Park Citizens Vote to Sponsor Petition,” Evening Star, October 22, 1938, p. 4)
That B.T. Woods could also mean the present-day Hillandale is suggested by news items concerning a band of gypsies who were reported to have pitched their camp on the outskirts of Georgetown. The encampment, described as being “near Western High School”, can be located with greater precision because it was remembered––by a child, born in 1904 at 3416 Reservoir Road––as having been north and west of the intersection of 39th and Reservoir Road. “We’d go out to what we called the “B.T.” woods where the big estate is now, which was right across from Georgetown Hospital, where the Archibald Estate [i.e. Anne Archbold’s Hillandale] is on this same location now. Every couple of years a big tribe of Gypsies in their wagons and horses and covered wagons would show up over night and they’d have big bonfires around with kettles of soup going.”
(“Gypsy Band Quits Georgetown For Warmer Clime––Hungarian Wanderers Suddenly Leave For Virginia”, Washington Times, November 2, 1911, p. 13; Oral History, Raymond R. Brown, 1969, Peabody Room, Georgetown Branch Library)
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Carlton Fletcher
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