Dumbarton House

The main house is a large central block flanked by two smaller wings of two stories connected by matching hyphens. The large windows and fanlight over the main entrance are features from the original house built in 1799. The interior follows a symmetry typical of the period, with rooms of equal size each side of the central passage. The bowed walls extending into the garden are distinctly Federal in style, and though this style of architecture was cleaner and less elaborate, there is an abundance of finely carved eagles, dolphins and caryatids, particularly over the doorways. The house is furnished with excellent examples from the Federal-period.

In 1703, Colonel Ninian Beall (1625-1717) of Bacon Hall, Maryland, was granted a tract of 795 acres of land that he named “Rock of Dumbarton” due to a similarity it shared with same named feature in his native Scotland. The land remained within the Beall family and a section of it later fell within boundaries of the newly chartered George-Town. In 1796, Ninian’s grandson, Thomas Beall, sold a 4 acre plot of the land (where the house stands today) to Peter Casenave who within two months had sold it on to General Uriah Forrest (1746-1805). The plot changed hands again the following year when it was purchased by Isaac Polack who sold it in 1798 to Samuel Jackson, the builder of Dumbarton House: A large “two-story brick house with a passage through the center, four rooms on a floor and good cellars”.

In 1804, Joseph Nourse purchased Dumbarton at public auction for $8,581.67 and renamed it “Cedar Hill”. In 1813, he sold it to Charles Carroll III of Carrollton (1737-1832) named the house “Bellevue” after his former plantation near Hagerstown, Maryland. In 1814, Carroll’s friend James Madison (1751-1836), 4th President of the United States, requested of him to persuade his wife, Dolley Payne Todd (1768-1849) to escape from the White House as the British and Canadian forces were about to burn Washington during the War of 1812. Carroll took her and Eleanor Young Jones, the wife of William Jones (1760-1831), to “Bellevue” before they left for Virginia.

From 1815 to 1841, the Carroll family leased the house out to several tenants. Included among them were Commodore John Rodgers (1772-1838) and from 1820, Samuel Whitall (1775-1855), a wealthy Quaker from Philadelphia. It was Whitall’s son who purchased the house from the heirs of Charles Carroll III in 1841 and he gave it to his sister Sarah Matilda Whitall (1822-1892) on her marriage that year to Charles Edwin Rittenhouse (1813-1880). She renamed the house “Rittenhouse Place” and lived there until her death in 1896, when it was sold to Horace Hinckley.

In 1912, the house was purchased by John L. Newbold, but three years later Q Street was extended to the bridge that crossed Rock Creek. The house was lifted onto huge rollers and slowly pulled by horses one hundred yards north of the original site where it stands to this day. In 1928, the house was purchased by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America and renamed “Dumbarton House”. The house has been open to the public since 1932 and is still maintained by the Society.