Before the British and the tobacco came, this bluff above the Potomac was a Nacotchanke village called Tahoga. English fur trader Henry Fleet recorded the settlement in 1632, the earliest written description by a European of the site. British colonists settled the area in 1696 and quickly displaced the indigenous population. Georgetown was incorporated as a town under the Maryland colonial government in 1751 - whether named for King George II of Britain or for two local landowners named George Gordon and George Beall remains disputed in the historical record. The town's position at the northernmost navigable point on the Potomac River made it a strategic trading hub for the Mid-Atlantic colonies. Tobacco grown in Maryland and Virginia plantations came down to Georgetown for export to Britain. Enslaved Africans, brought from Africa or the Caribbean, were sold at Georgetown's slave market - the trade in human beings was central to the town's commercial life, a fact the neighborhood's tourist literature has only begun to acknowledge in recent decades. By 1789, Georgetown was prosperous enough to support the founding of Georgetown University, the first Jesuit institution of higher education in the new United States.

Construction began in 1828 on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, intended to connect Georgetown with Cumberland, Maryland, and eventually the Ohio River. The canal cost approximately 11 million dollars to build - an enormous sum for the era - and was completed to Cumberland in 1850, by which point it had been rendered economically obsolete by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which reached Cumberland eight years earlier. The canal ran along the western shore of the Potomac through Georgetown, but never carried enough freight to be profitable, and its operations were chronically disrupted by floods. Yet the canal towpath - 184.5 miles of it from Georgetown to Cumberland - became one of the most beautiful linear corridors on the East Coast. Today the C and O Canal National Historical Park, established in 1971 and championed by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (who personally led a 1954 protest hike of the entire towpath to save it from being paved as a parkway), is one of the District's premier outdoor spaces. The Georgetown end of the canal still holds water in lock 3 and lock 4, and visitors can watch lockkeepers demonstrate the mechanism on summer weekends.

By the late nineteenth century Georgetown was no longer the prosperous port it had been. The Potomac itself had silted up to the point where deep-draft ships could no longer dock; the canal had failed commercially; the surrounding industries closed. The Anglo-American elite moved to newer Washington neighborhoods. By the early twentieth century Georgetown had become a majority African American neighborhood - the descendants of freed people and newer migrants from the post-Reconstruction South found cheap housing in what had been one of the most prosperous parts of the region. Mount Zion United Methodist Church, founded in 1816, is the District's oldest historically Black congregation and still stands at 29th and Mill Streets. Black residents made up a majority of Georgetown's population as recently as the Second World War. The neighborhood's transformation in the postwar decades was driven by a combination of forces: the Federal Housing Administration's reluctance to insure loans on properties in mixed-race neighborhoods, restrictive covenants on many Georgetown rowhouses, and the District's collaboration with white developers to condemn African American homes as 'substandard' so the buildings could be torn down or renovated and sold to white buyers. By 1955, when Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy bought a townhouse at 3307 N Street NW, Georgetown was rapidly becoming the most expensive neighborhood in the city.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy lived at 3307 N Street from 1957 until they moved to the White House in 1961. The Kennedy presidency made Georgetown the social capital of the Camelot administration. Robert McNamara lived around the corner. Joseph Alsop, the syndicated columnist, threw the parties that became Washington political mythology. Averell Harriman, Frank Wisner of the CIA, Phil and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post - the entire midcentury Washington power structure clustered within walking distance of each other in Georgetown. Jacqueline Kennedy returned briefly to 3038 N Street after her husband's assassination, then sold the house and moved to New York in 1964 to escape the tourist buses. The Kennedy townhouse on N Street is now a private residence and unmarked, by the family's request. The legacy is still visible in the neighborhood's real estate market. Median home prices in Georgetown's residential blocks now exceed two million dollars.

Today's Georgetown commercial life centers on M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, the two main thoroughfares that cross at the heart of the neighborhood. M Street's retail strip - Brooks Brothers, Anthropologie, Apple, Athleta, Sweetgreen, Lululemon - resembles the upscale main street of any prosperous American college town, which is essentially what Georgetown has become. The university itself has grown to about 7,500 undergraduates and another 12,000 graduate students on the campus that sits at the western edge of the neighborhood, complete with its famous Healy Hall (1879) crowning the bluff above the Potomac. The 'Exorcist Steps' connect M Street to Prospect Street up a steep flight of seventy-five concrete steps tucked behind a gas station - the location of the climactic scene in William Friedkin's 1973 film, where Father Karras throws himself down the steps after Pazuzu enters him. The steps were dedicated as an official D.C. landmark on Halloween 2015. Director William Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty attended the dedication, about fifteen months before Blatty's death. Tourists climb and descend the steps continuously now, often with Karras's last words on their lips.