From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

5. Yarrow of Georgetown

5 Yarrow of Georgetown Brooke Beall had at least two properties when he succeeded to ownership of Yarrow after Samuel Beall’s death. One was a huge country estate called Beallmount near present-day Potomac, Maryland; the other was a business and residence in Georgetown. Yarrow would live at both. It was in Georgetown, though, that Yarrow became famous. He would not have left historical footprints if he had been condemned to work on a tobacco plantation or if he had stayed at the remote, rural Kelly’s Purchase or Frederick Forge in Washington County. Georgetown had the wealth and proximity to Washington, the new capital of the United States, to attract the writers and artists who preserved Yarrow ’s story and image. In addition, a number of men, who had played important roles in the American Revolution and knew the Bealls, lived in Georgetown and spoke well of Yarrow. And of course, Yarrow would not have gotten attention if he had remained a slave. Not even in Georgetown did slaves become famous. Georgetown owed its existence to the Potomac River. Though the river was relatively shallow there, it had a deep channel, making it navigable all the way to the sea for oceangoing ships of the day. Rock Creek, which today is a trickle of a stream winding through northwest Washington and which separates Washington proper from Georgetown , emptied into the Potomac with enough force in the eighteenth century to gouge a forty-foot-deep-hole in the river bottom. Even when the river was low, large sailing ships could anchor there without their captains worrying the ships might touch bottom and damage their hulls or roll on their sides as the water level dropped. This hole in the 62 | yarrow of georgetown river bottom is what made Georgetown a port, indeed the last northern port on the Potomac. Ninian Beall was the first European to appreciate the advantages of the land at the mouth of Rock Creek. To the northwest, the Potomac extended deep into the unsettled interior all the way to what is now West Virginia. Two sets of falls above Georgetown, Seneca Falls and Great Falls, impeded waterborne commerce from the interior and necessitated portage, but this was manageable, particularly since once the goods got to Georgetown, they could be sent anywhere in the world by water. Ninian acquired the property on the Maryland side of the river with its natural harbor. He called it The Rock of Dunbarton, purportedly because the rock outcroppings rising from the river reminded him of those at Castle Dunbar in Scotland, where he had been captured by Cromwell’s forces. The resemblance is tenuous. Ninian’s grandsons, George and Thomas Beall, inherited the Rock of Dunbarton and literally put Georgetown on the map when they helped incorporate it as a town. Next, they made a fortune by subdividing it into residential lots and selling them. The two large and beautiful homes they built with the proceeds are still there: the Beall-Washington House at 2920 R Street, which was the home of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and Beall House at 3033 N Street, which was once owned by Jacqueline Kennedy. In addition to being a seaport, Georgetown had a vital ferry link across the river to Virginia. During the French and Indian War, British General Edward Braddock led a force of British regulars and Virginia recruits out of Alexandria, Virginia, and across the Potomac via the ferry at Georgetown. Today, on the District of Columbia side, at the bottom of what appears to be a well next to a freeway, lies Braddock Rock, the supposed place where the general stepped ashore. Braddock later met the French and Indians near Fort Duquesne, what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was killed and his army routed. His aide, George Washington, lived to fight another day and to revisit Georgetown. The Mason family of Virginia owned the ferry by the latter part of the eighteenth century. The terminus on the Virginia side was on yarrow of georgetown | 63 Analostan Island (now called Theodore Roosevelt Island) with a causeway linking it to Virginia. The best-known member of this family of ferrymen was George Mason, one of the arbiters in the contract for Frederick Forge between John Semple and the Ross Company. He also wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights, which was the model for the Bill of Rights...