Lawn mowing by mule team in Whitehaven Park, circa 1950 (Photo courtesy of Kathleen McCormick)
Kathleen McCormick writes: “I was born in Georgetown and we moved to 3826 W Street in 1940. Our townhouse backed up to the large field of grass. Every week or so city-employed men with teams of mules cut the grass. I was a horse-crazy kid of eight or ten years and would spend all day watching that team mow the field. Finally the driver realized I just wasn’t going to go away and at lunchtime he would let me groom the mules and even sit on their backs. That was the beginning of a lifelong association with horse and mules.”
Mike McKinley remembered that, in the 1940s, the large meadow in Whitehaven Park, south of the intersection of 39th and W Street, was called B.T. Woods, which the children he played with assumed stood for Big Trees. Actually, it is more likely that they stand for Bryantown, a long-forgotten neighborhood on the northwestern fringe of Georgetown, whose boys used to come up the hill to play there, decades before Burleith and Glover Park were developed.
(See also “Kelly” Brown: Gypsies in B.T. Woods)
In 1947, B.T. Field was the home field of the Whitehaven Sluggers. (Washington Post, May 27, 1947, p.12)