Rosemont

Rosemont. City of Alexandia, Est. 1749. , Rosemont began as a streetcar suburb just outside the City of Alexandria. It remains an excellent example of this type of early 20th century development. By 1908, investors from Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and northern Virginia , operating as the Rosemont Development Company , began selling lots in what would become the 84-acre Rosemont neighborhood. The largely open, undeveloped land was near Shuter's Hill, where the George Washington Masonic National Memorial now stands. Initial development in Section 1 occurred along Rosemont Avenue and Cedar Street, with later sections opening in 1911 through the 1930s. The sizeable lots on hilly streets with short blocks facing a trolley line were marketed heavily in Washington as a convenient and healthy alternative to city living. Still many of Rosemont's early residents were from Alexandria., Within a decade, Rosemont had become a middle-class neighborhood of bungalows, Arts and Crafts, and Colonial Revival homes. The developers provided utilities, street lights, telephone service, and, in the early years, a night watchman. Residents played tennis on a court across from the Rosemont trolley station. Development continued after Alexandria annexed Rosemont in 1915. The Rucker-Johnson 30-home subdivision (1919-1920) offered more modest homes to hollow-clay tiles , although still with a separate servant's room , than found in early Rosemont. Trolley service was discontinued by the 1930s, but development continued beyond the original Rosemont neighborhood east of the original trolley line, now Commonwealth Avenue, and included small apartment buildings and Colonial Revival town houses., Rosemont became a National Register Historic District in 1992. Its boundaries extend from King Street east to roughly Hooff's Run east of Commonwealth Avenue, north to Rucker Place and W. Walnut Street, and to just south of Sunset Drive., [Captions:] , Rosemont, Section 1. , Union Station (bottom of map), built in 1905, offered transportation options for Rosemont residents., Philadelphia architect D. Knickerbocker Boyd designed one of Rosemont's earliest homes at 15 W. Cedar Street in 1908 for Ralph Goldsworthy, a train engineer. The sales agreement included a 20-year covenant noting among its restrictions that now pigs or cows could be kept on the property, nor could it be sold or leased to "any person not of the Causasian race." Architects Waddy Wood and Milton Dana Morrill also designed in the neighborhood, but most early Rosemont homes were designed and constructed by local builders., Philadelphia-based investors owned the Washington, Alexandria, and Mount Vernon Electric Railway , expanded in 1896 and upgraded in 1905 , that linked Old Town to downtown Washington, D.C., via Washington (later Commonwealth) Avenue. The line gave Rosemont easy access to both cities; sales ads for homes noted the trip to downtown D.C. took only 18 minutes. A trolley station at Rosemont Avenue, shown here ca. 1912, was designed by Milton Dana Morrill in 1909. Another trolley station was built a few blocks north at W. Walnut Street.,