About This Project

What this is

This site documents the history of Anacostia, the neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. on the east bank of the Anacostia River around Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road SE. It tells the neighborhood's story — from the Nacotchtank and the founding of Uniontown, through Frederick Douglass's Cedar Hill, Barry Farm and the Freedmen's Bureau, St. Elizabeths, and the Anacostia Community Museum — and pairs that history with a current local guide to nearby businesses and events.

It is part of a small network of Washington-area neighborhood history sites built by the same hands and to the same standard.

Our standard: get it right, and show our work

Local history is only worth reading if it is accurate. We hold this site to a simple, strict rule:

Every specific date, name, and number on our history pages must trace to a cited source.

To enforce that, each fact is run through an automated verification gate before it can be published: the gate flags any specific claim that lacks a citation, and the page does not ship until every flagged item is sourced or removed. You can see the citations as numbered footnotes on the history and timeline pages, and the underlying archives are listed on the resources page.

We prefer primary and authoritative sources — the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. preservation records, and established histories — over second-hand retellings. Where a popular claim is a conflation, we say so plainly. (For example, "Anacostia" the neighborhood is not the same as all of Ward 8 or everything "east of the river," nor the Anacostia River or its park; and Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling is a separate military installation, not the residential neighborhood.)

Scope

The geographic focus is Historic Anacostia and its immediate surroundings — the historic district, Cedar Hill, Barry Farm, and the St. Elizabeths campus. Neighboring communities east of the river appear where their stories overlap.

Found an error? Tell us.

The whole point of this project is accuracy. If you spot a mistake, a missing source, or a story we should add, please get in touch — corrections are welcome and will be made promptly with a citation.

Illustrative images, where used, are labeled. Historical photographs are credited to their archives.