Kathleen McCormick: B.T. Field

 

Photo circa 1950, 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  Bryan Town, 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 Francis McKinley: Remembering Glover Park in the Forties, and Bryantown.)

 

 

(Washington Post, May 27, 1947, p.12)

B.T. Field was the home field of the Whitehaven Sluggers.  (Washington Post, May 27, 1947, p.12)

 

 

 

________________________________________________________

Carlton Fletcher

 The citation and acknowledgement of my research is greatly appreciated.

All rights reserved.

 

 Questions and corrections may be directed to

carlton@gloverparkhistory.com

 

The support of the Advisory Neighborhood Council (3B) is gratefully acknowledged.