Winning the War

Winning the War. Top of the Town. , The U.S. Navy arrived across the street at 3801 Nebraska Avenue during World War II, taking the Colonial style red-brick campus of Mount Vernon Seminary for secret “essential wartime activities.” Soon more than 5,000 workers occupied the campus. Among them were WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) responding to President Roosevelt’s call for women to tackle non-combat duties. , Most WAVES at this site operated cryptoanalytic equipment designed to break German and Japanese communications codes. Discussing the top-secret work with outsiders was considered an act of treason, so WAVE Elizabeth Butler could only write her family that her work was “very secret, one of the most in the Navy.” Jennifer Wilcox later said that “Breaking the Japanese code was our finest hour.” , Meanwhile the displaced Mount Vernon Seminary held classes nearby at Garfinckel’s department store on Massachusetts Avenue, and students boarded with local families. After the war ended, the Navy retained the facility, so Mount Vernon Seminary moved to Foxhall Road. In 1999 it became a campus of George Washington University. , Before the seminary arrived, this was Grassland, Nathan Loughborough’s 250-acre estate. In 1820 Loughborough, then comptroller of the U.S. Treasury, brought a lawsuit arguing “no taxation without representation.” Like most of his neighbors of means, Loughborough owned slaves. Thus it is ironic that in 1946, Georgetown Day School, the first consciously integrated private school in Washington, rented Grassland for its second location. The Grassland house was razed for NBC’s studios in 1956.”