10 Apr 2017

History:

Lost Capitol Hill: Gilbert Vanderwerken and His Omnibus pt. 2

Last week, we looked at Gilbert Vanderwerken and his Omnibus, the first truly viable form of public transportation in the District of Columbia. Today, we will finish up the story.

While it is unclear what Vanderwerken did about “loose hanging fat” being transported in his omnibuses, the latter half of the 1850s were a bit of a mixed bag for him and his company. In March of 1857, horses from his stables pulled a float portraying the Liberty Pole in the Buchanan inaugural parade. Not quite as impressive a float as the boat that had been supplied by the workers of the Navy Yard, but worth a line in the local newspapers, nonetheless.

A few weeks later, he began using six new omnibuses, one of which was named after Philip Otterback, a well-respected long-time Hill resident, who had begun his life there as a butcher and worked his way up to a bigtime landowner. In the article mentioning these new conveyances, the Star pointed out the many expenditures that Vanderwerken had had in recent year, including the time “when in less than ninety days he lost $7,500 worth of horses [to] glanders.” Glanders is a terrible disease that strikes mainly horses and can be transmitted to humans under exceptional circumstances.

Also in 1857, Vanderwerken extended the Navy Yard omnibus line to Congressional Cemetery, allowing for visitors to go from 6th and Pennsylvania Avenue late in the afternoon, and return after an hour or two visiting the dead there.

Advertisement from the Washington Evening Star selling the new extension to Congressional Cemetery (LOC)

The real problem was the continued denial of the right by Vanderwerken to build train tracks down Pennsylvania Avenue. In early 1859, the DC committee in the Senate denied the Metropolitan railroad company this right, because the request by Vanderwerken’s company was still pending. Nonetheless, Vanderwerken’s request was eventually denied.

The next attempt came the next year, with a bill to create the Washington and Georgetown Railroad, with Richard Wallach at the head of a group of well-connected citizens as owners. Part of the bill that created this new company required them to buy up the remains of Vanderwerken’s company. This bill never seems to have passed, and so it was not until May 1862 that finally the end of Vanderwerken’s company came with the creation of another Washington and Georgetown Railroad Company. With Henry D. Cooke (pic) as president, the company rapidly sold all its stock, and could begin the task of laying track down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Even then, Vanderwerken did not go quietly, with negotiations about the value of his property dragging into July, even as tracks were already being laid on Pennsylvania Avenue. For the following month, the Washington and Georgetown Railroad continued to operate Vanderwerken’s buses, by which time enough track had been laid to switch to that mode of transport. By late August, the entire stretch between Georgetown and the Capitol had been completed, and Vanderwerken’s omnibuses had been relegated to history.

Vanderwerken retired to his home in Virginia and concentrated on the quarry that he had established there, the Potomac Blue Stone Company, stone from which was used to build Healy Hall on the Georgetown University campus, as well as well as St. Elizabeths Hospital and the Hains Point sea wall. Vanderwerken lived until 1894, though he seems to have gotten out of the mass transit business entirely.


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