Over its 250 years history, Georgetown Lutheran Church has served many needs in the community. But perhaps no ministry has had a longer lasting legacy beyond our congregation than opening our doors to a free clinic in 1968.

It is easy to think of Georgetown as a leafy neighborhood, isolated from social changes, but this was not the case in 1968. While the area was not significantly affected by the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April, it was home to a lot of disaffected youth. Social issues were emerging, including gay rights and the fight against racism. The picture below shows a rally on racial issues held only a few days after Dr. King’s assassination on April 3, 1968 at Volta Park, a few yards away from Georgetown Lutheran Church. 

​It is in this context that the Washington Free Clinic opened on July 1, 1968 in Georgetown Lutheran Church’s basement, serving the many runaways and at-risk gay and straight youth then populating Georgetown. It was the second-ever free medical clinic in the country.

Consisting of a waiting room, a counseling room, and an examination room, the Free Clinic was initially open in the evening, six nights a week. One administrator, one doctor (Dr. Stephen Brown), a member of clergy, and one counselor comprised the entire nightly staff in the early days when the Clinic was seeing only three to four patients each evening as it was still building acceptance in the youth community.

​But the patient load gradually grew, and, by January 1969, the Clinic was treating fifteen to twenty people each night. As the Free Clinic became a viable community facility, more and more resources became available. Private physicians and church groups donated medicines and equipment, and more volunteer doctors and psychiatrists joined the staff, as did nurses, laboratory assistants, pharmacists, social workers, and other professionals.

In turn, Georgetown Lutheran Church allocated more of its basement space to the Clinic, which grew to encompass a large waiting room, four complete examining rooms, a group therapy room, four counseling rooms, an interviewing room, pharmacy, laboratory, and four bathrooms. By 1970, between 60 and 70 patients were treated each evening by a staff of more than 150 clinic volunteers working rotating schedules.

In November 1973, the Gay Men's Venereal Disease Clinic began operating as part of the Washington Free Clinic. It was the first gay and lesbian community medical support organization in the city. It was able to hire its first full time staff in 1976. Dr. Richard Digioia was the VD clinic’s doctor, volunteering every Saturday morning to see patients. In 1977, he opened a private practice as the first openly gay physician in Washington, DC. 

The VD Clinic split from the rest of the Washington Free Clinic in 1977, and its staff and volunteers began to develop a vision for a new organization. In 1978, Whitman-Walker Clinic was chartered, and would go on to play a vital role in the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

There were a few tensions in the late 1970s between the Free Clinic and Georgetown Lutheran Church, in particular when the church asked the Clinic to start paying rent. The Washington Free Clinic remained at Georgetown Lutheran Church until 1980 when it relocated to St. Stephen’s Church. Eventually, in 2007, the Washington Free Clinic merged with the Whitman-Walker Clinic. In 2011, Whitman-Walker Clinic became Whitman-Walker Health.

In case you are wondering, Whitman-Walker Health is named after poet Walt Whitman (a former D.C. resident) and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a noted Civil War-era physician in the District and women's rights activist. 

By the early nineteenth century, Georgetown Lutheran Church was in disarray. The original log cabin church built in 1769 ​had fallen into disrepair, and regular services were no longer held.

There remained, however, a burying ground on the land that had been allocated to the Lutheran Church by Charles Beatty and George Frazier Hawkins in 1769. Grave markers for  early members of the congregation were clearly visible, and the land had been fenced to keep animals away.

The heirs of Beatty and Hawkins saw in the derelict church building an opportunity to reclaim the land deeded to Georgetown Lutheran Church and use it to develop new, more lucrative, buildings. According to court documents, they entered the property and “threw down the fence and tombstones.” Georgetown had grown considerably since 1769, and was now more densely populated, with rowhouses sharing space on the streets with businesses and public buildings, as seen on the artist sketch below.

Although the church building had fallen down, there still existed a voluntary society of Lutherans, and they filed an injunction seeking to end the trespassing and resolve the dispute over the land title. The case eventually found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it is recorded as Beatty v. Kurtz, 27 U.S. 566 (1829).

The heirs of Beatty and Hawkins claimed that the 1769 deed to the Lutheran church was conditional, which would have terminated the title when the church fell down and was not replaced. 

The Court found in favor of the Lutherans. Justice Joseph Story, writing the unanimous opinion of the Court, affirmed a perpetual injunction against the heirs of Beatty and Hawkins (the defendants). 

Here is a key extract from the decision:

“This is not the case of a mere private trespass; but a public nuisance, going to the irreparable injury of the Georgetown congregation of Lutherans. The property consecrated to their use by a perpetual servitude or easement, is to be taken from them; the sepulchres of the dead are to be violated; the feelings of religion, and the sentiment of natural affection of the kindred and friends of the deceased are to be wounded; and the memorials erected by piety or love, to the memory of the good, are to be removed so as to leave no trace of the last home of their ancestry to those who may visit the spot in future generations. It cannot be that such acts are to be redressed by the ordinary process of law. The remedy must be sought, if at all, in the protecting power of a court of chancery; operating by its injunction to preserve the repose of the ashes of the dead, and the religious sensibilities of the living.”

The Beatty v. Kurtz decision is considered a foundation of U.S. law regarding cemeteries and the status of human remains for several reasons.

• It emphasizes the importance and special status of burying grounds.
• It places burying grounds under the protection of a public court in the absence of an established church or ecclesiastical courts.
• By referencing “irreparable injury,” it signals that the appropriate remedy to the “public nuisance”caused by the intrusion is equitable relief, not money damages.

The Beatty v. Kurtz decision spurred a renewed energy in the Lutheran congregation, and a second sanctuary was built around 1835. The cemetery remained undisturbed until the construction of a parsonage on the land in 1920, which likely caused the graves to be removed. Some of the graves were still visible at the turn of the twentieth century, as can be seen on the pencil drawings below, drawn by Pastor Stanley Billheimer, GLC's pastor from 1894-1904.  

​If the bodies were reinterred in a different cemetery, the church did not keep a record of it. The author reached out to a number of local cemeteries, who could not locate a record of re-burials from our site in 1920-21, and were unable to provide any additional information as to the current resting place of the earliest members of the congregation.

Our sanctuary was designed in 1914 by the architecture firm of Murphy and Olmsted. Oddly enough for a Lutheran church, the firm and its partners were noted for their work on Catholic churches, and their work can still be seen in many buildings in the D.C. area.

Frederick V. Murphy (1879-1958) and Walter B. Olmsted (1871-1937) formed their architecture firm in 1911, after Murphy graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1909. They had met as young draftsmen working in the Office of the Supervising Architect in the Department of the Treasury. Both men had close ties to Catholic University (where Murphy chaired the Architecture Department starting in 1911), and designed numerous churches in the D.C. and Baltimore areas.

​Georgetown Lutheran Church is in the Gothic revival style, similar to St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Alexandria, VA, which they designed in the same period.

One of the firm’s most elaborate projects in the 1910s was the chapel of Our Lady of the Angels in Catonsville, Maryland, which is in the classical revival style with marble walls, an elaborate main altar, and mosaics by Bancel LaFarge.

Between 1919 and 1936, Murphy was one of the architects working on the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic church in North America, located in Northeast D.C.

Murphy continued to have a distinguished career after Olmsted’s death in 1937. He worked in his own until 1940, and later formed Murphy and Locraft, which he ran until his retirement in 1954. He led the Department of Architecture at Catholic University until 1949. 

In the second half of his career, Murphy continued to design churches, including the Shrine of the Sacred Heart on 16th Street NW. He expanded his practice to larger buildings, still related to the Catholic community, such as the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See (Embassy of the Vatican) on Massachusetts Avenue, and several buildings on the campuses of Catholic University and Georgetown University.  His final project was the Lorraine American Cemetery and Memorial, a cemetery for American soldiers killed during World War II located  in St. Avold, France.

​In 1769, the founders of Georgetown Lutheran Church set out to build a small log cabin church ​on the lot that had been allotted to them. Early congregation members were buried in the churchyard, as was the practice at the time. Around 1790, a steeple was added to the church with a bell. 

But attendance was sparse, services were not held regularly, and soon the log building became dilapidated to the point that it fell down, and the graveyard was overrun with weeds. We know this from the 1829 Supreme Court case that involved GLC, although this is a story for another day…

Around 1835, the congregation was reinvigorated and built a new building to worship. This second sanctuary was a frame building. We do not have any pictures of this building in the church’s archives and could not find any in publications about nineteenth-century Georgetown. But we can imagine a modest structure, with wood siding and a small steeple.

This second wood building only stood for about thirty years. In 1867, a third sanctuary was built, this time a one-story brick building. The church was larger than the previous ones, and housed a school until 1870. School was taught in German, but in 1870 the congregation decided to end the use of German language and close the school. Georgetown Lutheran Church was re-incorporated as an English-speaking church, and the congregation set out to renovate the sanctuary, install gas lighting, and repaint the building. A rededication ceremony took place in June 1870.

The congregation continued to grow, and many changes were made to the building around the turn of the twentieth century. The history of the church published in 1909, for our 140th anniversary, by Pastor Luther Hess Waring describes the following improvements:

“This included new flooring and carpet, new pulpit and chancel rail, new roof and metal ceiling, stained glass windows, removal of old gallery, outside vestibule built, church repaired inside and outside, cellar dug and furnace put in, new fence built, and electric lights introduced.”

According to oral tradition, we have retained some of the pews, the altar, and the Communion railing that were used in this third sanctuary.

When Daniel Eli, a longtime member of the congregation, died in 1911, he bequeathed $50,000 to build a new church. The sanctuary was built of Potomac limestone and grey slate, with stained glass windows. The building was designed by the firm of Murphy and Olmsted, who were noted architects in the DC area and will be the subject of a later blog post.  The National Archives have retained the original construction permit for the church, showing that it was built for $17,500 by the Melton Construction Company.

The building included a basement for Sunday School classes and offices. It was dedicated in January 1915, together with a new pulpit and baptismal font. In 1919, a Möller pipe organ was added at the front of the sanctuary. The Möller company was a renowned builder of pipe organs, located in Hagerstown, Maryland. They numbered each organ they built (about 250 a year), and the nameplate on GLC’s organ bears the number 2722.

​The Tiffany-style stained glass windows are one of the most striking features of the 1914 sanctuary. During the renovation of the church for our 250th anniversary, a group of volunteers took on the task of cleaning the windows from years of candle soot and grime, and the result was spectacular, revealing new colors and patterns in the glass. We know little about the origin of the windows, and they do not have a maker’s mark.

We invite you to visit our historic sanctuary, and will continue to share bits of our story in this space.

2019 is a big year for Georgetown Lutheran Church (GLC) as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding in 1769. This makes us the oldest church in Georgetown, and the second oldest in the District of Columbia, after St Paul’s Rock Creek Church, an Episcopalian congregation established in 1712. 
​
So how did we get started? In 1769, two landowners, Charles Beatty and George Frasier Hawkins, deeded part of a tract of land called Knaves’ Disappointment for the enlargement of Georgetown. There were 304 lots of land in total, most of which were to be auctioned. But four of these lots were earmarked for public use: one for a Church of England church building, one for a Calvinist church, one for a Lutheran church, and one for a market house. Only the Lutheran church was built in 1769.

Copy of the 1769 deed and map
Photo credit: Georgetown Lutheran Church

The church was founded by a small German community, which had established a colony north of Georgetown on the banks of Rock Creek. Little is known about the first congregation members, and they did not yet have a permanent pastor.

It is difficult today to imagine what Georgetown (then called George Town) looked like in the late 1760s. Most of the buildings of “Old Georgetown” that have been preserved date back to the early nineteenth century, or the very end of the eighteenth century, after the Revolutionary War.

Georgetown began as a small settlement in the 1740s, serving primarily as a port exporting Virginia tobacco to England and Scotland. The first building recorded to have been erected was an inspection warehouse for cargo, and tobacco merchants petitioned the colony of Maryland for the creation of a town. This was done in 1751. The map below dates from that time and shows Georgetown barely expanding from its waterfront. Bridge Street corresponds to present-day M Street and High Street to Wisconsin Avenue.

But the town soon began to grow. In 1751, the first tavern opened, soon to be followed by two more, which served as the center of all activity. In 1752, land belonging to Scottish tobacco merchants George Gordon and George Beall was auctioned as eighty lots, which were used to build warehouses and other businesses, as well as houses. The other big activity after tobacco export was milling flour from Virginia and Maryland. And where there is business, there are lawyers: Francis Scott Key’s father, John Ross Key, and his uncle, Philip Barton Key, both had law offices in Georgetown. Slavery was part of the economy, and there are records of one John Beattie who traded in enslaved labor for tobacco plantations, other plantations and businesses. His auction block was located at the present corner of 32nd and O Streets.

Georgetown’s early inhabitants were diverse: most of the merchants were of Scottish origin, but there were also enslaved people and free black men working on the harbor. Although we lack census records, the population was small, estimated at 1,000-2,000 people at most.

Little remains of 1760s Georgetown, with the exception of the Old Stone House on what is now M Street (then Bridge Street), which was built in 1766.

​The original Georgetown Lutheran church is long gone. In the mid-twentieth century, the church commissioned the rendering below, which approximates to the best of our knowledge what our first building looked like. It was a log structure, to which a bell was later added. It is easy to dismiss the structure as small and insignificant, but considering that Georgetown did not get a post office until 1776, or a second church until 1780, the structure would have been a major local landmark in those early days.

​Our story continues at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Volta Place. Please check back in this space to read more about our church and our community.