08 Jul 2016

History:

Lost Capitol Hill: The National Capitol Brewing Co.

AC TNToday is a day off for most people, and thus time for another rerun (This rerun was meant to run on Monday, but didn’t because we were taking the day off too and oops! Sorry about that. –MHC). And, as it’s the 4th of July, the appropriate topic is beer. I am particularly pleased to dig this old column up, as in my original introduction, I wrote of my hopes of there being a brewery on the Hill again – and it looks like we will not only have that soon, but it will be named after the one about which I wrote this piece years ago.

Albert Carry (pic), born in Hechingen, Germany, arrived in DC in 1886. He bought a brewery on in the 500 block of 4th St., NE, but sold it a few years later. With the profits, he built a new brewery on the square bounded by 13th, 14th, D and E Streets, SE – the very location of our Safeway today. The National Capital Brewery, as it was called, opened to great fanfare in 1891. The Washington Star wrote about it thus:

A brewery that turns out 100,000 barrels of first-class pure beer every year for local consumption solely is a big institution for any city, and yet Washington has recently had just such an addition made to its business enterprises in the National Capital Brewery. Organized by Washington men, officered by Washington men, and with every share of its stock owned here at home, it would seem to be a local enterprise first last and all the time.

The article goes on to describe the purity of the beer, as well as the cleanliness of the establishment itself. A press officer couldn’t have done a better job.

The National Capitol Brewing Co. brewery in 1917 (shorpy.com)

The National Capitol Brewing Co. brewery in 1917 (shorpy.com)

About 20 years later, on October 2 1912, the brewery was once again in the news, though not in a way to please Mr. Carry:

1 Body in Furnace; 1 Dead by Bullet
A mass of charred bones and human teeth, raked yesterday from an ashpit of a giant boiler in the engine room of the National Capital Brewing Company, and the dead body of Lentte L. Jett, fireman at the brewery, lying at his home with a self-inflicted bullet wound in his head, furnish a deep mystery which is baffling the police.
The bones are believed to be all that remain of Arthur A. Webster, at one time a close friend of Jett, and who disappeared on September 17 after he was seen to enter the brewery.

The brewery survived this negative publicity, but was not able to survive the threat of prohibition, switching to making ice cream in 1914, with Carry selling the business in 1918.
Today, none of the imposing building that Carry had built in 1891 remains, and only a few old newspaper articles remain to remind us of the beer-brewing aspirations, first met, then faded, of our predecessors on the Hill.
Thanks to the folks at shorpy.com as well a capitolhillhistory.org for the information they have posted about this.

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