History
The original Georgia Avenue was the road now named Potomac Avenue in Southwest and Southeast. Current-day Georgia Avenue was originally named 7th Street Extended and Brightwood Avenue.
Seventh Street Pike was built as a plank road from Boundary Avenue (now Florida Avenue) to the District Line in 1852. Being a plank road, it was essentially paved with wooden planks that had to be replaced periodically due to rotting. The road was also known as Brightwood Avenue.
The road was also the path of the Seventh Street Railway, which took riders from Brightwood to downtown. The railway consisted of cars dragged by horses, guided by metal tracks that protruded above the road. On April 12, 1890, Seventh Street Railway became electrically powered; its cable cars were powered by overhead electrical lines, and the cars themselves were guided by metal tracks embedded in the road. Other electrically powered railways were built elsewhere in the District in later years.
In 1906, Georgia's senator Augustus Octavius Bacon was so dismayed that Georgia Avenue had become so neglected that he proposed to rename it Navy Yard Avenue and at the same time change the name of Brightwood Avenue to Georgia Avenue. While Senator Bacon's proposal did not come to fruition, Wisconsin's senator John Coit Spooner offered the same proposal again in 1907. Renaming of Brightwood Avenue was opposed by residents of Brightwood and Park View. The 1909 appropriations bill ended up changing the name of Georgia Avenue to Potomac Avenue and Brightwood Avenue to Georgia Avenue.
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
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