Composer, musician, and bandleader John Philip Sousa, around 1890.
Eighth Street would indeed become a place of business,but not as L’Enfant envisioned.Instead small businesses sprang up to serve the Navy Yard’s workers,most of whom lived nearby. For more than 150 years, the Navy Yard gave this part of Capitol Hill its distinctive industrial fla- vor. The Navy Yard began as a modest ship design and building facility.In 1845 the Navy Yard began testing and manufacturing weapons and ammunition, developing into Washington’s largest industrial plant.Here enslaved and free blacks worked alongside whites in the foundries and workshops to produce guns,anchors,and ammunition. Michael Shiner, an African American,left behind a fascinating diary of his 52 years as a laborer here — both as an enslaved and a free man. John Dahlgren created the Navy’s first sustained weapons research and development program at the Navy Yard.A close friend of President Abraham Lincoln,Dahlgren personally designed important and effective guns in time for the Civil War. In the first half of the 19th century,Martha Prout McKnight was the largest landowner in this area.She had inherited her properties from her father William Prout, whose early land spec- ulations and enterprises supported the develop- ment of a community around the Navy Yard. According to historian Ruth Ann Overbeck, as the area’s population grew,McKnight apparently ignored Washington’s “southern” attitudes and sold or rented property to everyone: free blacks; Irish,Italian,and German immigrants; and American-born whites.The population diversity continues to the present.
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