Qualla: Dumbarton House

Dumbarton House: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dolley Madison was unscrewing a portrait from a wall. The British were marching up Bladensburg Road. Smoke was already rising from the federal city. Her friend Charles Carroll of Bellevue was in very bad humor with her because she would not leave. He had come to escort her out of the President's House, but she insisted on waiting until the full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington was safely cut out of its frame and rolled. When she finally agreed to flee, on the evening of August 24, 1814, it was to Carroll's brick Federal-style townhouse on the northern edge of Georgetown that she went. The British burned the White House that night. Dolley waited at Carroll's home, the building we now call Dumbarton House, for word from her husband on where the couple should meet.

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dumbarton House: A Treasury Register's House

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr. BlofeldOpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY-SA 2.0. The house had been built in 1798 and 1799 by Samuel Jackson, a Philadelphia merchant who held it briefly before the mortgage passed to the federal government. The two-story brick house had a central passage, four rooms per floor, semicircular back rooms, and two brick wings conne...

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Image: Dr. BlofeldOpenStreetMap contributors | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dumbarton House: The People Who Did the Work

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 1785 and 1840, census records show that ten to thirteen enslaved or indentured people worked at Dumbarton House at various times. The names of some are known. An enslaved Black woman named Dinah cooked. Another named Fran helped her in the kitchen. An enslaved Black man n...

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Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dumbarton House: Moved to Make Room for a Street

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1915, the District of Columbia decided to build a new bridge across Rock Creek to connect the two halves of Q Street, which had been separated by the gorge for a century. The new alignment ran directly through Dumbarton House. The owners faced a choice: tear it down or move it...

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Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dumbarton House: The Colonial Dames

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 4.0. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America bought the house in 1928 for its national headquarters and renamed it Dumbarton House, drawing the name from a Scottish landmark called the Rock of Dumbarton, which had also given its name to the surrounding eighteenth-century...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dumbarton House: What You See Today

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 4.0. The acre of grounds includes the East Garden, designed by Virginia landscape architect M. Meade Palmer in the 1950s on land donated by the Belin family of neighboring Evermay. In 2010 Georgetown landscape architect Guy Williams installed an herb garden inside the East Garden, rep...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 4.0