There are all sorts of places that I find old things to write about. This week’s story comes from Old Time DC, a place on Facebook to find wonderful old pictures of Washington. They are from all across the city and from all times, but I am partial to those showing parts of Capitol Hill as yet unknown to me. This particular picture was indeed in that last category.
It’s quite a picture: A four-story Victorian tower looming over its much smaller neighbors, houses which appear to be no more than shacks in comparison to it. Around the house a well-tended garden surrounded by a picket fence. In the foreground, a man in a bowler crosses the street, casting a suspicious eye on the photographer.
Whose house was this? And where, exactly, did it stand? And what was its final fate – for nothing remotely like it remains on Capitol Hill.
Thomas Taylor is one of those unsung heroes of science who labored throughout the 19th Century, attempting to bring order into the huge amount of new data being produced by modern methods. Taylor’s particular strength was the microscope, and as a microscopist at the Department of Agriculture he did his greatest work.
Taylor was born 1820 in Scotland, he studied chemistry there and, as a young man of 30 – after marrying Marjorie McIntosh – emigrated to the United States. His work at first had little to do with production of chemicals: He became involved in the production and improvement of bullets, work that was honored by President Lincoln during the Civil War.
After the war, he moved to the Department of Agriculture and took up the study of poisonous foods, in particular, what made foods go bad, as well as poisonous mushrooms. For this study, he turned to the microscope, and became an expert in its use.
In the middle of the 1870s, he decided to build a house. It would be a grand house, one that fit his rising stature in the city, and close enough to his work at 12th Street SW on the Mall. Taylor chose a site at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and 3rd Street NE. On this he built a grand house in the style that was then the custom: Tall and narrow, with ornamentation everywhere from the roof down to the elaborate porch that surrounded it. Multiple bay windows were added, including one that wrapped all the way around the corner. Truly, a house to be proud of.
The house at 238 Massachusetts Avenue (sometimes also 328 D NE) (GhostsofDC)
Taylor would live at this house for the rest of his life, though while he published tracts on mushrooms, it was his wife who was responsible for its upkeep. She was the one who had to approach the city for permits for repairs and additions to the house.
Shortly after moving in, Taylor had another brush with the presidency: In those long months between the shooting of President Garfield and his demise, anyone with expertise in any subject related to the President’s wounds was summoned. Taylor’s long-ago work on bullets was what brought him to the attention of the authorities, and Taylor could say with some certainty that the bullet had not flattened on impact, and should be “slightly upward and to the right” of the entrance wound. The bullet was, in fact, not there, and the probing for it was what eventually caused Garfield’s death.
A year later, Taylor, now well past 60 years old, graduated from Georgetown medical school. He would live almost another 30 years, dying in 1910. His house would survive another 16 years, before being knocked down and replaced by a large apartment building that survives to this day. You may well have been in it recently: It’s currently the Bagels and Baguettes bakery.