Main Points
- The port of Georgetown in the 19th century was a busy commercial center in the District of Columbia with good jobs.
- John Harris, who was the eldest of the Pointers’ great-grandsons, worked as a laborer and lived with his family in a primarily Black neighborhood called Herring Hill.
- John’s son Louis lived in the same neighborhood and made a good living as a clerk in a post office, eventually buying his own house
- John’s younger brother Lewis settled in Georgetown in a neighborhood called Brinetown and became a driver in the busy port
- The youngest brother, Lorenzo, became a sexton at a Georgetown church.
The Port of Georgetown
John Harris, the eldest son of George Pointer’s granddaughter Mary Ann, moved to the port of Georgetown after he returned from the Civil War. In a few years, he was joined by two of his younger brothers, Lorenzo and Lewis. The men and their families lived near one another for almost two decades and were part of the transforming changes to the port at the end of the 19th century.
In the 18th century Georgetown was one of the major ports in the Mid-Atlantic American colonies because of its deep-water harbor; in the 19th century it became the terminus of the newly constructed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. By the 1830s as many as three thousand large ships a year docked there to transport freight to other eastern ports and to Europe. After the Civil War the town became the District’s commercial center, providing many jobs for Black people. By 1870 Black residents made up almost a third of the town’s population.1
John Harris and Family
In 1871 Congress combined the administrations of Washington City, Washington County and Georgetown; the U.S. president appointed a governor, and the District’s population lost any elective representation. The first and only governor, “Boss” Shepherd, made many physical improvements to Washington, DC but he also mismanaged the finances, and bankrupted the District. Although he created many jobs for Black workers like John Harris, he was fired, leaving behind an improved city, especially in Georgetown.2
John Harris’s family lived in a primarily Black neighborhood called Herring Hill, which was near Rock Creek on the eastern side of Georgetown. Their only son, Louis, spent the summer of 1880 at his grandparents’ farm five miles north, probably helping with farm work when school was out. In the late 1880s two of Louis’s sisters died, perhaps from cholera, smallpox, or another of the diseases that swept through Georgetown from the many ships that docked there. The girls were buried in Mount Zion, one of the oldest cemeteries in the District.3
In 1890 Louis passed the civil service exam to become a clerk in a District post office. In his first year he was one of only 28 Black clerks; his salary was good, but the lockers and cafeteria were segregated. His wife Mary Estella was working at the US Treasury Department cutting paper dollar bills when some Black women were dismissed without reason and replaced by white workers. An investigation documented the injustice, but no change was made and by 1894 Mary Estella was no longer at Treasury.4
Louis and Mary Estella lived in Herring Hill near his parents before his father, John Harris, died in the mid-90s. Eventually, Louis and his wife bought their own home in Herring Hill, and his mother moved in with them. Louis worked for the postal service for more than forty years and became part of Georgetown’s Black middle class.5
Lorenzo Harris in Georgetown
After the Civil War the youngest of the Harris brothers arrived in Georgetown as a teenager to work for a well-to-do white family. Unlike his older brothers who had never had the opportunity to go to school, Lorenzo had attended the Reconstruction school built near the Dry Meadows farm. His literacy made all the difference in his long career; in 1882 Lorenzo was hired by St. John’s Episcopal Church in Georgetown to serve as the church sexton. He married a woman named Celia and they settled in a house near the church in an older stable neighborhood not threatened by development. In 1892 the head priest left St. John’s to become rector of the Episcopal cathedral of Buffalo, NY, and Lorenzo went too and became the cathedral’s sexton.
Lewis Harris in Georgetown
Lewis Harris was the third Harris brother to move to Georgetown with his wife and son in the mid-1870s and settled in a primarily Black neighborhood called Brinetown, not far from Georgetown College. He worked as a cart driver when the town’s commerce was thriving.6 But Georgetown was beginning to change.
In the 1880s white neighborhoods in Georgetown grew as did the demand for white schools. In 1889 the local government purchased land in Brinetown to build an all-white high school, which is today Duke Ellington school. This forced the primarily Black residents, including Lewis Harris’s family, to move. Development caused the family to move several times over the next few years. But before Lorenzo moved to Buffalo, he arranged with his landlord to rent his apartment to Lewis’s family, and they remained there for the rest of their lives.7
By the 1890s the prosperity of Georgetown slowed as the port silted over and fewer ships could dock. Moreover, the C&O Canal, which transported goods to the port, often flooded and eventually was eclipsed by the railroads. As economic hardship grew, Georgetown began to be increasingly segregated. Civil rights laws enacted during Reconstruction outlawed discrimination, but these laws (later known as “lost laws”) remained on the books but were not observed, and discrimination grew as people of different races interacted less. As white government workers moved into Georgetown, Black residents were often forced to move and many left.8 The town that had allowed three of the Harris sons to thrive in the 19th century become a very different place in the 20th.9
Did you know…?
- Georgetown was a busy deep-water port until it began silting over in the 1890s.
- In 1870 almost one third of Georgetown’s population was Black.
- Development brought more white people into Georgetown and the building of the all-white Western High School forced the Black residents to move.
- District civil rights laws dating to the Reconstruction era were not observed in Georgetown but remained on the books until the turn of the century.
Questions for Students
- How important was family in the lives of the Harris men who lived in Georgetown?
- What were the main changes in Georgetown between the post-Civil War era and the 1920s?
- How did the life of the Harris children raised on a family farm in rural Washington County before the Civil War affect their lives as adults in a busy, changing port?
- Why would Lorenzo Harris want to leave the District to go far from where his family lived?
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Endnotes
- Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green, Between Freedom and Equality, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021, pp. 107-108
- Torrey and Green, 110
- Torrey and Green, 111
- Torrey and Green, 112-113
- Torrey and Green, 113
- Torrey and Green, 115-116
- Torrey and Green, 117-119
- Torrey and Green, 116-117
- Torrey and Green, 119-121
Other Sources
- Ecker, Grace Dunlop. A Portrait of Old George Town Richmond, VA, Dietz Press, 1951
- Lesko, Kathleen M., Valerie Babb, and Carroll R. Gibb. Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of the Town of George in 1751 to the Present Day. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991
- Mitchell, Mary. Chronicles of Georgetown Life: 1865-1900. Cabin John MD: Seven Locks Press, 1986
- Mould, David and Missy Loewe. Remembering Georgetown: A History of the Lost Port City. Charleston: History Press. 2009