Found at the library: One woman’s remembrance of growing up in 1920s Petworth
/Semmes Motor Co. Petworth Hdwre. Co. truck, [1926] (Library of Congress)
by Cesse Ip
Out of curiosity, I recently started digging around the DC Library Archives for stuff about the Petworth neighborhood and came across a small book published in 1995: “Growing Up in Petworth in Washington DC 1919-1950.” Written by Margaret MacGill at the age of 76, she recalls the story of her family and childhood in her family house at 528 Taylor St NW. She writes in the book that the home’s location “must have seemed like the end of the world to be moving that far out from downtown.”
In the memoir, Ms. MacGill recounts details of her Petworth rowhome that her family bought by September 1919. The house layout is familiar to many of us with rowhomes in DC: “Two stories and basement with a front and back porch and many steps down to a long back yard.”
The first floor consisted of “a hallway which ran directly back to the kitchen from the front door, a living and dining room off to the right.” The upstairs consisted of one bath and three bedrooms.
Petworth map, with the house MacGill grew up in highlighted.
MacGill writes about the small details of areas houses that often are lost during the ubiquitous rowhouse flips.
She remembers how the green shutters on her house could be pulled together and fastened, and were made with tilted slats so that in the summer a breeze could still blow through while keeping the sun out. Inside the home, the transoms above each bedroom door helped with ventilation, which still exist in some Petworth rowhouses. A pocket door between the sitting and dining room often got stuck on the track.
The book features some pictures of the time, along with some old maps – back when Petworth and Brightwood were first being developed and some of the street names were different, (e.g., Longfellow used to be called Flint Street.)
The book also offers some details about the neighborhood, like the streetcar line, (only a block and a half from her house) which took her downtown to go to Center Market at 7th and Pennsylvania Ave NW. The Piggly Wiggly on the 800 block of Upshur Street, a drug store at 7th and Upshur, the York Theater at Georgia and New Hampshire, and the shoemaker at 808 Upshur Street (which closed just a few years ago).
MacGill attended Petworth Grade School at 8th and Shepherd Streets, which is now an MPD building and Boys and Girls Club, and where Petworth resident and historian Linda Crichelow White later attended grade school in the 1950s.
Similar to our current poured-in-place surfaces at many DPR playgrounds, MacGill recounts the dangerous black cinder playground surface which she claims she still carried slivers in her knees and elbows. Ms. MacGill attended Macfarland Junior High School, and then graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1936.
Petworth rowhouses in the 1920s — where’s the trees?
(Theodor Horydczak Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Sprinkled into the book are also negative signs of the times that Ms. MacGill grew up in.
Her genealogy is a mixture of English, Dutch and Irish, implying that she is white. What at first reads as a sweet remembrance of 1920s Petworth gets some blatant tones of racism intertwined in her story. She tells of the log cabin where her mother was born outside of Herndon, Virginia, and later writes of their surprise that when they went back to visit it in the early 50s, a “black family was living there.” She goes on talking about her family’s Southern, Confederate pride.
More egregiously, she writes of how her family “obtained a black girl” to help around the house when she was 12. It is interesting that she went to the same schools at Mrs. Crichelow White, who told me earlier this year that by the time she attended Petworth Elementary School only 20 years after Ms. MacGill, there was maybe only white student in her entire class.
More innocuous signs of the times are also included, like getting the “usual childhood diseases” like measles, mumps and chicken pox, the 29-inch snowfall known as the “Knickerbocker Storm,” and her ice box refrigerator. She writes about the milk delivery trucks and the junk man and the knife sharpening man who both would go through the alleys, calling out their wares.
She also writes about familiar things to us today, like playing with the neighborhood kids, and playing under the shaded back porch of her house.
While certainly idealized with time and memory, and sometimes subtly and other times blatantly racist in her remembrances, this short 52-page memoir is also an interesting time capsule view of one person’s life in 1920s Petworth.
If you are interested in reading this book, you can check it out from the DC Library. It’s not available as an ebook, but the library does own a scanned copy that you could inquire about if you’d like to maintain distancing for health reasons.
