Reno City: the community that stood where Fort Reno Park is today

Fort Reno Park in Washington, D.C., is known today for its ball fields, its water towers and its long-running concert series. From the last decades of the 1800s into the middle of the 1900s, the land held a vibrant, working-class community of men, women and children who made their homes "on the fort." The National Park Service summarizes its Historic Resources Study for Reno City below.

How Reno City began

The Union Army took the land in the early days of the Civil War. After the war the area was subdivided, named Reno City and sold. In the last decades of the 1800s Black Americans began renting and buying lots there, and the neighborhood became known as Fort Reno, or just Reno, the names its residents preferred. Its borders, by the names the roads carried in the twentieth century, were Fessenden Street NW to the north, Howard Street NW to the east, Chesapeake Street NW to the south and Belt Road NW to the west. Some residents had been born enslaved and many took part in the Civil War era; one, Nelson Vale, claimed to have accompanied Sherman's army on its March to the Sea in late 1864.

1919 real estate survey map of the Fort Reno neighborhood. Image from the Library of Congress, via the National Park Service's page.

The neighborhood at its height

Reno's best years were the first decades of the 1900s. It had several Black churches, civic organizations, a baseball team, the Fort Renos, and a school: the Jesse Lee Reno School, opened in 1903 and still standing. By the early 1910s residents had formed the Reno Citizens' Association, which met monthly to work on neighborhood improvements, host lectures and press city officials, and which protested streetcar segregation and the showing of the film Birth of a Nation in local theaters.

Most residents held blue-collar jobs. Many men were day laborers, janitors or chauffeurs and many women worked as domestics or laundresses in nearby white families' homes, while some had federal government jobs. Reno was never all Black: Black residents outnumbered white ones, but families of both lived side by side on many streets, and some former residents recalled good relations. People from outside the boundaries belonged to the community too, attending Rock Creek Baptist Church and St. George's Episcopal Mission and taking leading roles in the association. The community held dances at the Brothers and Sisters of Moses Lodge, ran night classes at the school and led a community garden movement, all under segregation, disenfranchisement and economic inequality. Two longtime members, Thornton Lewis and Samuel Hebron, described it as a community of law-abiding, working people.

3900 block of Davenport Street NW, early twentieth century. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The push to clear it

White citizens' associations in Tenleytown, Chevy Chase and Cleveland Park, which had grown up around Fort Reno, pushed for the federal government to acquire the land for a park and schools for white children. The summary calls this an effort to ethnically cleanse the corner of the city, and says it matched the aims of officials implementing the McMillan Plan, a turn-of-the-century report that recommended monuments, parks and roads in and around Washington. Local real estate companies that stood to profit helped, and the associations won over District and federal officials and secured legislation to fund the acquisition and conversion.

Residents fought back with legal action, protests at several Congressional committee hearings and help from local NAACP officials. At a 1927 hearing Samuel Hebron told Ulysses S. Grant III, there for the commission that would acquire much of Reno in the 1930s and 1940s, that driving people off the fort was unjust and un-American. Their efforts delayed the destruction for several years. But residents who were forced out found it hard to buy comparable homes, because they sold at artificially low prices under threat of condemnation; the summary describes the homes as stolen. The Reno School closed in 1950 with fewer than ten students, which the summary treats as a sign that the effort to destroy the neighborhood had succeeded.

Houses on Ellicott Street NW, early twentieth century. Image from the National Park Service's page.

What remains

Former residents held a yearly "homecoming" in Fort Reno Park into the 1980s, and historical research has recovered much about the community: the homes, jobs, associations and causes, and the fight to stay. Today the park offers nearby neighborhoods recreation space and public programs, but, the summary says, at a price. A 2003 study for Rock Creek Park by researcher Irina Cortez put it this way: Tenleytown gained a park and new schools, at the cost of destroying a whole community; there is no way to know what history was lost with the demolition; and the government allowed it and took part. The summary adds that no scholarship can undo that damage, but looking at the neighborhood's history can help present-day conversations about race, place and space.

The completed Historic Resources Study for Reno City is available through the National Park Service's data store at irma.nps.gov, under reference profile 2291435.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Fort Reno Park - A Brief History of Reno City" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/fort-reno-park-a-brief-history-of-reno-city.htm). The 1919 map is from the Library of Congress. A fourth picture, credited to a named photographer, is left out. The page is part of the Civil War Defenses of Washington and Rock Creek Park collections.
• National Park Service's page; rewritten in hubnx's own words.