very pretty.
Tuesday, August 5, 1902: Bought a very pretty Jersey cow, $30.00. Baby named her Blossom. She gives nearly two gallons of milk a day. She is very gentle, and the children just played with her all day, and in the evening when papa milked her, baby and little Theresa kept the flies off with palm leaf fans, while Gertie held her. She had quite a reception when she came; Gertie, Lil, Mr. Blade, Lillie, and Theresa were at the gate to meet her, and we did nothing but pet her all evening.
Monday, September 22, 1902: A beautiful bright warm day. Baby started to school, and a sad day it was for me, I can tell you. She did not know whether she would like it or not, but I went with her and stayed in the schoolroom with her until school was dismissed at 11:30. Miss Byrne her teacher is a very nice sweet girl. Lillie was very much pleased with everything, and as Lydia McElwee and the two little twins of Mrs. Wertmueller, Hortense and Selma, went, she did not feel lonesome. The second day, I let her go up with the twins alone. I followed shortly with her lunch, stayed a few minutes, came home, went back at recess, saw that she had her lunch. Then when the bell rang for them to go in and she was seated at her little desk, I left her. Went back again at 12:30 when the little ones were dismissed, and brought her home, perfectly happy and delighted, and she said, I had the best day at school I ever had, and this was only her second day. Oh, how I wish that I was home, and could go up with her every day, and watch over her. But such is life, and she must take it with all the rest.
Monday, November 10, 1902: Today at noon, Lil and Mr. Blade were married, a perfect almost-summer day. Baby went from school to see her married.
Thursday evening, November 13, 1902: Baby was vaccinated by Doctor Loseham on Tennessee Street. The weather so far this month has been perfectly beautiful, they say it is Indian summer. The days are as warm as summer, the nights are perfectly lovely, the moon as bright as day, the air balmy and hazy. A pair of shoes, $2.00.
Sunday, December 28, 1902: Baby is well and is seven years, five months old. Lillie has had a pretty blue cheviot dress made with Duchess pleats in the skirt, waist, and sleeves, very becoming. A pink all-wool crepe, lined with pink silk, a little drop skirt of pink silk, with fine knife pleating at the bottom, yoke of pink silk, trimmed with cream lace.
The Barn out Back
1902
Washington City is unique in America for the full equality of its citizenry, the entirety of which is disenfranchised. Women, men, coloreds, whites: none of them have the right to vote for so much as the city dogcatcher, or even the President. It’s an odd thing for a town to live hip-deep in everyone else’s elected officials, without having a single one to call its own. The city is Congress’s plaything, and since not a single one of the esteemed gentlemen hails from the District, it’s an easy thing for them to bat the city back and forth across the aisle like a shuttlecock.
The one governor the city has ever known, Boss Shepherd, was good for the city but bad for Congress. Once appointed, he tore off on a three-year spending spree to bring a level of sanitation and basic services heretofore unknown to the population. Clutching L’Enfant’s city plan in one hand, he used the other to direct the installation of paved streets and streetlights, water, sewer, and the beginnings of the National Mall. Without his intervention, the city might still be living with the open sewer that long ago was Tiber Creek. But Congress was alarmed at the price tag and quickly showed the Boss the door, slamming it shut on the experiment of the Territory of the District of Columbia and any form of Washington self-government.
In its place, the neighborhood became the primary organizing force for demanding, cajoling, hectoring, or enticing individual Congressmen to coax their cohorts into delivering some minimal level of services. Of course, the new, tonier areas like Kalorama or Cleveland Park, with their built-in connections to wealthy senators, are awash in parks, sidewalks, and regular garbage pick-ups. Others have to try harder. Brightwood, one of the oldest of the uptown neighborhoods, grown from its days as the tollbooth on the Seventh Street Turnpike, learned this lesson early and well. It was the muscle of the neighborhood association that got Brightwood one of the earliest streetcar lines. Before electric was available, the hill up from downtown into the neighborhood proved a hardship on the horses, earning the car line the nickname G.O.P.: get out and push. But the electric to the cars arrived just in time to support Charley Beck’s dream of living on a farm plot out in the country and still being able to make it to work on time every day.
Brightwood Park is the scrawny little brother to beefier Brightwood, but benefits from the association. For example, when city water starts flowing into Brightwood at the turn of the new century, the Park gets to drink from the fountain too. Though the city water is never as sweet and clean-tasting as it is from the well, and the change from gravity to pressure-fed delivery blows apart a few solder joints in their old water line, Charley is happy to say goodbye to hand-cranking water up to the rooftop tank when the summer doldrums hit and there’s no wind to turn the mill. The galvanized bones of the old mill, disassembled bit by bit, serve for many years to prop up Charley’s laden tomato plants.
Another boon from pressurized water delivery is the sudden ease of transporting irrigation to where it’s needed, even into the far reaches of the back planting beds. This helps to smooth out the vagaries of the weather and bumps up production considerably, allowing Charley and Emma to squeeze an even more impressive yield from their slice of earth. Though the seasons are unpredictable—winter often comes and goes sporadically or never shows up or never leaves, and there are years when spring misses them entirely—Charley has a farmer’s feel for knowing when the season has settled down to business and it’s time to plant. No matter how beautiful the weather, Charley cannot be fooled into putting the tomatoes in ahead of schedule. For the vegetables, it’s produce or perish; no one has the space or time to waste with a balky or demanding plant. Even the flowers, for which both Charley and Emma have a weakness, are expected to provide payback: the lilies-of-the-valley that grow by the thousands in the side yard are picked, tied in fist-sized bunches, and sold for a quarter apiece to Cammack’s, the wholesale florist known citywide for his big greenhouses and excellent produce. The income is enough to pay the winter coal bill for the big, drafty farmhouse. Peonies go to the May altar in the new church, ants and all, but roses are allowed to exist for themselves alone, as long as they consistently bloom. The mystery of the wisteria is that in decades it never once sets a bud; Charley only tolerates it for the shade it offers the porch.
The Becks are not the only agriculturally minded residents to appreciate the rural character of Brightwood so close to the city. John Saul, who gains fame as a horticulturalist with a hand in landscaping the National Mall, has a forty-acre orchard just up Fourteenth Street that supplies the fruit and nut trees that Charley plants the second year at 741. There are apple and peach trees, walnut and butternut trees, all expected to earn their keep. Five Noir de Schmidt black cherries and three Montmorency sour cherry trees are breathtaking in the spring, but it’s their fruit that allows them to hold onto the real estate. The garden grows in size every year, finally pushing beyond the boundaries of 741 and demanding that Charley lease the farm plot far out of the city in Hyattsville. But it is Blossom that makes them build the barn.
They’ve been considering the barn since they bought the property. Long ago, to dissuade himself from putting it under cultivation, Charley stakes off the spot, levels it off, and tamps it down. They calculate the cost of upkeep of various animals against the savings on milk, butter, eggs, cheese, and dinner’s main course. That last may prove problematic, given that Lillie tries to adopt and mother every living creature she stumbles over.
They start with the chickens in the spring, but it isn’t until Charley pulls a trailer up to the gate and coaxes out their new tan-and-cream Jersey dairy cow that Emma gets around to applying for the permit to build. She asks permission to put up a two-story stable and chicken house, to be built by one Charles J. Beck. As with the main house, the permit for the barn is approved the same day, though this time it’s stamped with the correct
