Chevy Chase: Piscataway Land to Streetcar Suburb Built by a White Supremacist

The Piscataway Nation, whose ancestors arrived in the Maryland piedmont more than ten thousand years ago, held this land as part of a territory stretching from the Potomac to the Patuxent. English colonists arrived in the sixteen thirties; by sixteen forty-two Governor Calvert had declared war on the Piscataway and barred the sale of guns to Native people. Within a generation the nation was displaced.

In seventeen twenty-five Colonel Joseph Belt received a colonial patent for five hundred sixty acres just northwest of the future capital and named it Cheivy Chace, a medieval English place name. The land stayed farmland for a hundred and fifty years.

Then in eighteen ninety Nevada senator and avowed white supremacist Francis Newlands quietly bought more than seventeen hundred acres through front agents along the planned extension of Connecticut Avenue. He and his partners formed the Chevy Chase Land Company, built a streetcar line from Washington to an artificial lake at the district's edge, and marketed the suburb to government workers who could commute downtown. Newlands's company set high minimum home costs that put the suburb out of reach for most non-white buyers, and restrictive covenants in the nineteen twenties barred Black and Jewish buyers outright. His name is still carried by the memorial fountain at the circle at Connecticut and Western Avenues, and debate over that memorial continues.