Decatur House stands on Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Home from 1819 to a wealthy naval hero, it became one of Washington's great social stages: presidents, ambassadors and members of Congress gathered there to talk, gossip and measure one another's rising and falling fortunes. For more than 130 years, living there — close to the president — signaled power. Today the National Trust for Historic Preservation runs it as a museum.
Decatur House. Image from the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places lesson on Decatur House.
A muddy capital
Washington was an unpromising place in its early years. Carved from Maryland and Virginia as part of a compromise over federal assumption of the states' Revolutionary War debts, it sprawled along the marshy Potomac. Abigail Adams called it "the very dirtiest Hole," its streets a "quagmire after every rain." Lawmakers rented rooms near the Capitol during short sessions, and even year-round officials didn't settle in, half expecting the capital to move again.
Wars changed that. Fighting the Barbary pirates and then the War of 1812 expanded the navy and army, and ambitious men began arriving — among them Stephen Decatur.
The hero
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 1779 | Born into a prominent Philadelphia family; his father was a Revolutionary privateer |
| 1798 | Becomes a midshipman aboard the new frigate United States; a lieutenant a year later |
| 1804 | During the war with Tripoli, slips into Tripoli harbor at night with 10 sailors and burns the captured U.S. frigate Philadelphia so the enemy can't use it. He is promoted to captain, and Britain's Lord Nelson reportedly calls it "the most bold and daring act of the age" |
| War of 1812 | Captures the British ship Macedonian and brings her home as a prize |
| 1815 | Leads a squadron to Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli and secures agreements ending U.S. tribute payments |
| 1816 | Moves to Washington with his wife, Susan, as a commodore on the Navy Board of Commissioners |
Prize money from captured ships made Decatur wealthy. In June 1818 he bought 19 lots on President's Park — later Lafayette Park — and hired Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the country's leading architect, to design a house on the most prominent one, with a view of the President's House and a clear path to the new St. John's Church. It was the first private home on the square, and others soon followed. The Decaturs — he a lively conversationalist, she an accomplished harpist — made it the center of Washington society.
Benjamin Latrobe's 1816 drawing of President's Park, before Decatur House was built. Image from the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places lesson on Decatur House.
A duel of honor
Years earlier, Decatur had sat on the court-martial of his old friend Commodore James Barron. In 1807, Barron's frigate Chesapeake, attacked off Norfolk by the more powerful British Leopard with only one gun ready, had surrendered and let the British seize four alleged deserters. The court found Barron at fault and suspended him for five years. Barron, overseas when the War of 1812 began, didn't come home to fight; Decatur criticized that, and Barron believed Decatur was ruining his name.
After Barron returned in December 1818, the two traded increasingly bitter letters. Decatur wrote that dueling could not raise any man's reputation — but that a military man was not free to refuse a challenge. Barron called dueling "a barbarous practice" yet accused Decatur of persecuting him. "If we fight," Decatur replied, "it must be of your seeking."
Their seconds agreed on the terms on March 8, 1820: pistols at eight paces, at Bladensburg, Maryland — an unofficial dueling ground outside the District, where dueling was banned. On March 22, 1820, both men were shot. Decatur died hours later at his home.
The nation mourned. John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary that some ten thousand people gathered for the funeral, and called Decatur "a spirit as kindly, as generous, and as dauntless as breathed in this nation, or on this earth." Susan Decatur moved away and later entered a convent, where she died in 1855.
The house after Decatur
Decatur lived in his house barely a year, but it kept his name — and its role.
Lafayette Park and its neighbors in 1891, redrawn from a diagram in Leslie's Popular Monthly. National Park Service.
| Years | Occupants |
|---|---|
| 1820–1836 | Susan Decatur rents it to a series of prominent figures: the French minister Baron Hyde de Neuville; the Russian minister Baron de Tuyll, who said Washington's venison, wild turkey, canvasbacks, oysters and terrapin beat Paris and lacked only cooks; and Secretary of State Henry Clay, whose household entertained constantly |
| 1836–1844 | Hotel owner John Gadsby, who had grown rich partly through the slave trade. A French diplomat of the time praised the house but scorned its owner and his company |
| After 1844 | Gadsby's widow rents it out to more notable tenants |
| Civil War | The federal government uses it for offices |
| 1871 | General Edward Beale — who carried news of the California gold strike to Washington in 1848, fought alongside Kit Carson, scouted western roads and railroads, and experimented with camels in the desert — buys it and remodels it in Victorian style |
| 1902–1956 | His son Truxtun and Truxtun's wife, Marie Beale, a celebrated hostess who threw a party for diplomats after each White House Christmas reception and whose wine cellar outshone the White House's during Prohibition. She stayed on for 20 years after her husband died in 1936 |
| 1956 | Marie Beale leaves the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation; it becomes a museum where receptions are still held |
Sources
Based on "Decatur House: A Home of the Rich and Powerful," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Robin Fogg Schuldt, published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Quotations come from Abigail Adams, the 1819–1820 Decatur–Barron correspondence and John Quincy Adams's diary.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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