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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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)