The Origins of Burleith

The Origins of Burleith. . You are standing in the midst of Burleith, a community of about 530 single family houses bounded by Reservoir Road to the south, Whitehaven Parkway to the north, and 35th and 39th Streets to the east and west respectively. The majority of the houses were built in the 1920s by the real estate firm Shannon and Luchs, which broke ground on the new development in March 1923., The name Burleith was first associated with this area in 1849, when Richard Smith Cox (1825-1889) inherited 55 acres of land north of New Cut Road (now Reservoir Road) and built a two-story brick house, Burleith. The first husband of Cox's great-grandmother emigrated from Kilmarnock, Scotland, so the name Burleith likely derives from a nearby hamlet identified as Barlyth on a 1654 map, and later as Barleith on an 1849 map of Ayrshire., The boundaries of Cox's property were similar to those of the current neighborhood. By 1886, the title had been transferred to Frederic Huidekoper, who later subdivided the land. Huidekoper's "Burleith Addition to West Washington" set the stage for more intensive development in subsequent decades., The ground where Cox's two-story Burleith home once stood now serves as the primary-school campus of the Washington International School, which moved to the new building on the site in 1998., This fire call box restored in 2015 with generous donations from the residents and friends of Burleith.