Before anyone called it Wisconsin Avenue, this road had been an ancient Indian trail, Georgetown’s main commercial artery, a country pike running north toward Maryland, and the subject of a bitter naming battle that dragged on for decades. The name “Wisconsin Avenue” is barely more than a century old. The road itself is ancient.
The earliest European name for what is now Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown was “High Street.” The term came straight from English tradition — in England, “High Street” simply means the main street of commerce in a town. Georgetown deeds from the era described it as “Commerce or High street.”
The name appeared in documented use by at least 1755, when Colonel Dunbar’s Regiment set out from Georgetown northward along it on the way to join General Braddock’s campaign. By 1770, Georgetown’s town expansion — the so-called Beatty and Hawkins’ Addition — spread northward on both sides of High Street. Four decades after that, on June 30, 1791, George Washington rode up High Street on his way to Frederick, Maryland, just after meeting with the commissioners who were planning the layout of the new federal city. When President Adams arrived in Washington on June 3, 1800, he came down the same road, catching his first view of the unfinished Capitol and the unfinished Presidential Mansion from the heights above Georgetown.
You can see the name plainly on this 1830 map of Georgetown — “High St.” runs right up the center of the city. An 1874 map shows it still labeled that way more than a century after the name first appeared in the records.
But “High Street” only covered the Georgetown portion. Once you traveled north past the Georgetown town limits, the road went by a completely different name: Tenallytown Road — or Tennallytown Road, depending on who was writing it down. That section took its name from the small settlement that had grown up around a tavern at what is now Wisconsin Avenue and River Road NW. (If you want the full story of how that community’s name shifted from Tennallytown to Tenleytown, we covered that separately.) The road also went by a third name for the full route from Georgetown to Rockville, Maryland: the Georgetown and Rockville Pike. One road. Three names. The name you used depended entirely on where you were standing.
By 1881, the District made its first move to rationalize Georgetown’s street names, proposing to fold them into Washington’s numbered-street grid. Under that plan, High Street would have become 32nd Street. The effort stalled — old names die hard in Georgetown. The real change came from Congress. In 1895, an act of Congress formally absorbed Georgetown into Washington, D.C., and required that Georgetown’s street names be standardized to conform to the rest of the city. High Street had to go. The replacement name was Wisconsin Avenue, which the District Commissioners had already selected in their Annual Report of July 22, 1890 for the northern section of the road. Maps continued to show “High Street” as late as 1899.
None of this settled the question for the stretch north of Georgetown, though. In 1904, residents along the Tennallytown Road section were still pushing back hard against the Wisconsin Avenue name. We came across this remarkable article in the Washington Post from June 3rd, 1904:
Tennallytown road will remain Tennallytown road for the immediate future, but it will be spelled officially “Tenleytown.” Such was the decision of the District Commissioners yesterday, taken upon the recommendation of Engineer Commissioner Biddle, who recently moved to designate the thoroughfare “Wisconsin avenue.” The reconsideration is to give people living along the road opportunity to be heard.
When Col. Biddle first moved to designate the thoroughfare Wisconsin avenue, he thought he was meeting a popular demand, but numerous protests convinced him of his mistake. What the ultimate preference of the people will be is a much mooted question. Names varying widely in some instances and in others distinguished only by a single letter have been suggested, and applied to the thoroughfare. Among the entries are Georgetown and Rockville road, Tennallytown road, Tenallytown road, Tenleytown road, Tenley road, High street, Thirty-second street, and Wisconsin avenue. In favor of each name there are staunch supporters.
Eight different names proposed for one road. Engineer Commissioner Biddle had thought Wisconsin Avenue would be welcomed — instead he got an earful. The commissioners decided to give residents more time to be heard before any final decision.
By 1905, the commissioners settled it. Wisconsin Avenue was extended south all the way to the Potomac River, creating a single, unified name for the road from Georgetown to the Maryland line for the first time in recorded history.
Streetcar service had already been running along the corridor since 1890, connecting Georgetown to Tenleytown and Bethesda. Horse cars at Wisconsin and O Street in Georgetown were a fixture of the neighborhood by the 1890s, and by 1900 the track reached all the way to Rockville. Those streetcars on Wisconsin Avenue would remain until January 3, 1960, when the last car made the trip.
Today, Wisconsin Avenue connects Georgetown’s historic commercial district to Friendship Heights and Chevy Chase and on into Maryland — running along the same ancient ridgeline that bison herds, native traders, tobacco farmers, and George Washington all traveled before the road ever had a name at all.