The village’s four-room schoolhouse, 1876.
Mount Pleasant founder Samuel P. Brown.
Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives
Along the Piney Branch tributary of Rock Creek, where Native Americans once fashioned quartzite into tools, villagers now quarried Potomac blue- stone to use in building walls and houses. Today you can find local bluestone and the lighter- colored Kensington tonalite on nearly every DC residential street. From the first, civic spirit ran deep in the village. The Mount Pleasant Assembly lobbied the city government for roads, sewers, and other improve- ments, organized transportation downtown, and built a school. Meetings, as well as religious services and parties, took place at a village hall. Eventually the Assembly evolved into the Citizens Association. Mount Pleasant’s first developers opted to ignore Peter C. L’Enfant’s original city plan, designed in 1791 with a regular grid of streets and diagonal avenues. Instead they used existing farm roads or laid out new ones that followed the contours of the land. Soon the U.S. Congress decided that the resulting “inharmonious subdivisions” interfered with the logic and the grandeur of L’Enfant’s design. In 1893 Congress passed a law requiring new subdivisions to conform to “the general plan of the City.” Thus, Mt. Pleasant Street and the streets to the east of it, all laid out before 1893, are off-kilter from the streets to the west.
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