A Country Road 39th Street, Grant road, and nebraska avenue nw
step back into the 19th century with a walk down Grant Road. This winding byway recalls Tenleytown’s farming past. In fact Grant Road’s undisturbed quality earned it National Historic District and DC Historic District designations. By the late 1800s, huge linden trees shaded modest, one-room-wide houses here. Cows, mules, horses, and chickens roamed the surrounding fields. Most families were working class, but two generations of Tenleytown physicians, John and Sidney Chappell, lived among the storekeepers, stone masons, and policemen. General Sidney Chappell, who served as the head of psychiatry for the U.S. Army, was a friendly man whose large, elegant house was run by a white-coated butler. As one of the few roads through the farmlands, Grant Road attracted outsiders. Burrows family members still recount the regular visits to their part of Grant Road (east of Wisconsin Avenue) by President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). Roosevelt had a hunting lodge nearby and enjoyed riding horses through the woods. The president even treated little Edna Burrows of number 4426 to horseback rides. In earlier days, Grant Road was the southern edge of the Civil War-era Fort Reno, and became part of the “military road” linking the city’s ring of forts (today’s Military Road takes a different route). Perhaps this was the quiet, meandering path poet (and Civil War era-Washingtonian) Walt Whitman took when he walked “on fine moonlit nights over the perfect military roads, hard and smooth.”
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