The Oldest House

The Oldest House. Village in the City. , Ingleside, the grand house to your left, once anchored a 139-acre estate. Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-1887), architect of portions of the U.S. Capitol, designed Ingleside in 1851. Today it is Mount Pleasant's oldest structure., New York Congressman Hiram Walbridge bought Ingleside in 1854, and his family kept it for more than 30 years. Hiram's stepdaughter Helen and her attorney husband, George Corkhill, occupied the house. Corkhill became famous as the prosecutor of President James Garfield's assassin in 1881., In 1889 the Walbridge heirs sold the house and some acreage. When Frank Noyes, the powerful editor of Washington's most important newspaper, the Evening Star, bought the house, an alley ran where the front lawn had been. So Noyes switched the front for the back. Later the Presbyterian Home for Aged Women and then Stoddard Baptist Nursing Home occupied Ingleside., On this block are two houses that were jacked up and moved here in 1902-1903, when the city extended 16th Street. The owners of 1821 relocated it from what is now the intersection of 15th, 156th, and Irving streets. The house at 1886 came from the northeast corner of 16th and Park., In 1913 art dealer and real estate speculator Fred C. Hayes constructed 1833, 1835, and 1837 Newton Street (still owned by the family in 2006). As you proceed to Sign 9, notice that some of the rowhouses on 19th Street become narrower. They were part of a new phase of affordable residential building after World War I ended in 1918.