One last summer holiday for 2016 and I do hope most of most of my readers are out enjoying the weather instead of reading what I have come up with this time. So I will make do with a rerun – though the vast new information that has been added online since I last looked at this topic gave me the impetus to do a little more research.
It all comes back to something I noticed when researching the history of my house: the number of women involved in the real estate market in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries: The first two owners of the house were both women, and the builder’s wife was a real estate force in her own right.
When William Murphy bought the land on which he built 217 and 219 11th Street, SE, his wife was listed on the deed with the usual “et ux.” This was, however, by no means out of politeness. Margaret Murphy was an integral part to William Murphy’s rise from simple bricklayer to large-scale developer of Capitol Hill properties. In fact, the first reference that can be found of them is her buying a lot in Congress Heights. Two years later, at the time, William was still listed in the city directory as a bricklayer, she sold this lot and bought two houses on Park Place NE.
The Murphys apparently moved into one of these, as a short article from that year indicates:
Washington Evening Star, December 25, 1906 (LOC)
Presumably Margaret’s sales allowed William to expand his business, and on September 16, 1906, she is featured in a Washington Times article entitled “Margaret E. Murphy to Build Four Houses” whose headline pretty much sums up the information within quite neatly, adding only that the buildings are to be built on East Capitol Street. Even more intriguing, her husband is not listed on the building permit as the builder. In later years, while Margaret would continue applying for permits, but then listing her husband as a builder.
A fair number of the houses that the two would build would be on East Capitol, though they would go further afield as well – to the 1300 block of North Carolina Avenue, and, of course, down 11th to the 200 block.
The Murphys sold 219 11th Street, SE to Mary S. Campbell. Although there was no question that she would do so alone — she was a widow — her real estate transactions had begun even before her husband’s death. She would supplement whatever pension James Campbell had accrued as a clerk for the DC Commissioners with further real estate deals until her death.
When Mary Campbell sold 219 11th Street in 1919, it was once again to a woman: Jean Perrie. Ms. Perrie was unmarried, and she moved into the house with her two parents. In spite of her being listed on the deed, when the census came by the next year, it was her father who was listed as the head of the household. Perrie would continue to own the house until the early 60s.
My research also took in the immediate neighborhood, and I discovered that the two projects on either side of the one which included my house were built by women. 211 and 213 11th Street were built by Catharine Bohrer, on land she had inherited from her mother, Sarah Otterback, while 221 – 225 11th Street were built by Mary Guy, daughter of Catharine Bohrer. While Bohrer’s real estate work commenced only upon the death of her husband, George A. Bohrer, Mary Guy was engaged in her work while her husband was still very much alive.
In short, women were an integral part of the real estate business on the Hill in its earliest day, acting both on their own and in concert with their husbands to finance, design, build and sell the houses that we live in. Nonetheless, this did not mean that their efforts lead to fame – I have never been able to find pictures of any of these women (to be entirely fair, I have not been exactly successful in finding many of the men, either) and so had to go with a generic ‘women at work’ picture to illustrate this article.