A Church Near The Capitol And How It Grew

Yet, more Rome, Mary-Land info thanks to a link from Dov of End of Days.


History

St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church was organized May 10, 1820. Some of the original members included Rev. William Matthews, Daniel Carroll of Duddington, William Brent, James Hoban, Nicholas L. Queen, James Scallan, Ed. Mattingly, James Spratt, and James Barry. The church building, erected in 1821, after being enlarged from time to time, was torn down in 1889. The present granite and marble building was erected on the site of the old church, at the corner of Second and C Streets SE; it was dedicated November 23, 1890.

A Church Near The Capitol And How It Grew

On seeing St. Peter’s Church so close to the United States Capitol, one naturally wonders if the two were ever part of a common piece of property. A look at the records assures that they were, and turns up two intriguing bits of history to set the stage for the story of St. Peter’s.

In May, 1664, the colonial Maryland land grant office issued a patent for a 400 acre tract covering the Capitol Hill area. It went to a whimsical gentleman called Francis Pope. He called his tract “Rome” and a stream at the foot of the hill the “Tiber.” Thus he could say that “Pope was at home at Rome by the Tiber.” Later many local residents, George Washington among them, thought the name Tiber was too pretentious and called it Goose Creek. But the name Tiber stuck, and the stream exists by that name today, underground (where it cost taxpayers millions as engineers struggled to divert it from the foundations of the Rayburn House Office Building).

In 1670 the ground on the top of the hill was acquired by a pioneer Catholic settler of Maryland, Thomas Notley. In honor of the ancient Benedictine foundation in Dorsetshire, England, his ancestral home, Notley named the property Cerne Abbey Manor.

Thus St. Peter’s found itself on a site named once for the seat of Catholicism and again for a place trod by storied medieval monks; all this in addition, of course, to being in the very cockpit of national history.

From another standpoint, St. Peter’s can now be seen as a “mother of churches” in the city of Washington. Within what was once the parish boundaries are located St. Dominic’s St. Joseph’s, St. Teresa’s, Holy Comforter, Church of the Assumption, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, St. Francis Xavier, and parts of St. Aloysius, St. Martin, and St. Francis de Sales.




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