Hell’s Bottom was the nickname Washington gave to the blocks around 12th and Q Streets and Vermont Avenue NW, in what we now call Logan Circle and Shaw. The name stuck from the late 1860s into the early 1900s, and for most of those years the newspapers used it as shorthand for crime. What they rarely mentioned is how the neighborhood got started, as a Civil War camp for people who had escaped slavery.
We first wrote about Hell’s Bottom back in 2012, in two posts that leaned hard on the “worst of the worst” angle. So we went back to the original newspapers, the maps and the census, and this time we answered a question a reader asked us back in 2013. We also got a few details wrong back then, and we point those out along the way.
Where was Hell’s Bottom?
The center of it was Vermont Avenue between Q and R Streets, plus the side streets from about 11th to 13th. Like today’s neighborhoods, the edges moved depending on who was describing it.
In 1879 the Washington Post stretched it from 7th Street to 14th Street and from O Street up to the Boundary, the old city line that the Commissioners renamed Florida Avenue in 1890. (The Commissioners were the three appointed officials who ran the District in those days.)
When the Commissioners drew a line around it in 1891 to shut down the saloons, they used the east side of 8th Street, the west side of 13th Street and everything from P Street north to the Boundary. A Post look back in 1927 ran it from 8th to 13th Streets, with U Street as the northern edge.
If you like lost neighborhood names, we’ve also written about Murder Bay, Swampoodle and Buzzard’s Roost, and about what Logan Circle looked like in 1892, back when it was still Iowa Circle.
Before the Civil War this was the edge of town, with brick kilns and an old burial ground nearby. An 1857 map of the city shows the blocks around 12th and Q as empty squares with ponds drawn in them.
Keitt Sutherland, a saloon keeper the Post would later crown the “Ex-King of the Bottom” (his given name was Keith), knew the neighborhood from boyhood. He remembered men shooting reed birds where Corcoran Street is now, and said he’d caught “many a mud turtle there in the 60’s.”
It started as a contraband camp
In 2013 a reader read the 1879 Post article quoted further down, which calls Hell’s Bottom “a former contraband camp,” and asked us which camp it meant. We never answered. The answer is Camp Barker.
During the Civil War, people who escaped slavery and reached Union lines were called “contrabands.” By the summer of 1862, Washington’s contraband camp had moved into old cavalry barracks near 12th Street and Vermont Avenue, and on August 12, 1862, the Evening Star reported that the people there were “now permanently located.”
That October the Star counted 675 people in the camp, about 100 of them in its hospital. Historians place the barracks on the block bounded by 12th, 13th, R and S Streets, and the camp hospital grew into Freedmen’s Hospital, the ancestor of today’s Howard University Hospital.
In 1863 the government began moving people across the river to Freedmen’s Village in Arlington. Not everyone went. On December 26, 1863, the Star reported that the camp buildings were being torn down, and that some families were instead “settling themselves in small shanties in the neighborhood of the camp.”
Those small shanties were the beginning of Hell’s Bottom. Twenty years later, in 1883, the Star spelled out the connection itself.
Many of the citizens of the District are aware that the neighborhood of the old Contraband camp, 12th and R streets, which was thickly settled during and immediately after the war by colored people, the majority of whom had been slaves, became known by the suggestive name of “Hell’s Bottom.”
Many of the people living in Hell’s Bottom were freedpeople and their families, living on land nobody had bothered to develop, with no sewers, no water mains and very little help from the city.
How it got the name
Keitt Sutherland told the Post in 1900 that “‘Hell’s Bottom’ began to get its name shortly after the close of the war in 1866.” The earliest use in print that we found is in the Evening Star on July 12, 1869, which reported temperance meetings “on Q street, between 11th and 12th streets, in the place quaintly termed ‘Hell’s Bottom.'” Sounds like everybody already knew the name by then.
Sutherland explained it this way. Freedpeople waited at the camp for white employers to come hire them, money was scarce and cheap whiskey wasn’t, the police force was small, and the magistrates rarely fined anyone more than $2.
Plenty of people who lived there didn’t like the name one bit. In 1886 the Fourth Baptist Church on R Street announced that it “has done her part in changing the name of the place from Hell’s Bottom to the beautiful Paradise of Earth.”
In 1892 the Washington Bee, the Black weekly edited by W. Calvin Chase, called it the part of town “known by the fanatics as ‘hell’s bottom’ but which in reality and truth is a paradise to some other portions of the city.”
Shanties condemned, 1879
In the summer of 1879 the District’s sanitary inspectors toured Hell’s Bottom, and on August 11 the health officer condemned 26 shanties there. The Post’s account the next morning is hard to read, partly for what it describes and partly for how it talks about the people living there.
It opens by describing where “the lowest stratum of negroes live,” in shacks no bigger than a hall room, sometimes shared by two or three families. Below is most of the article. We left the language the way it was printed.
… Notices were served on a number of the owners of these places some time since to have them vacated, or the sanitary condition changed, but when it was found that, as a rule, no rent was collected, it was resolved to proceed directly against the occupiers, the owners not being willing to go to the expenses involved in ejectment suits. The usual abatement or condemnation notices were therefore served on the miserable squatters, for such, in most cases, they practically are. Yesterday twenty-six of these expired in the locality known as “Hell’s Bottom,” a former contraband camp, situated in the northwest portion of the city, and extending, irregularly, from Seventh to Fourteenth streets, and from O street to the Boundary. Fourteen of the dens are on Eleventh street between P and Q streets, and eight on P between Tenth and Eleventh streets. The tenants have been removing rapidly for the last day or two, and only a few needed the pressure of the police yesterday, when the time expired and the doors were ordered to be nailed up. They moved to other shanties in the localty [sic], not hitherto under the ban, but which, from their new accession of inhabitants, probably soon will become so. … The present places are of the rudest possible construction, few having any sashes in the window aperture, a board shutter closing out the cold winds, light and ventilation together, when shut. …
The same article noted that the Black death rate in the District was “generally double that of the whites,” and that most of the dead were children, lost to diarrheal disease in summer and pneumonia in winter. The Post itself admitted the shacks sat “without a vestige of sanitary system,” and that the only permanent fix was building cheap housing with real sanitation.
The Star and the National Republican covered the same action. The Republican named the owners. The 14 shanties on 11th Street belonged to a Patrick Murphy, and the eight on P Street belonged to a city policeman. The German-language Washingtoner Journal added a detail none of the English papers did. The evictions, it said, caused no small excitement among the Black residents.
A woman lamplighter
Two years later, on October 13, 1881, the Post ran a short item about a lamplighter whose route was in Hell’s Bottom.
Washington possesses what no other city, perhaps, in the United States does, a woman lamplighter. Her name is Mrs. Welsh. She is of Irish extraction, and is represented as a busy, bustling little woman of about forty years of age. Her district is situated in what is known as Hell’s Bottom, one of the worst sections of the city, and through this section, at all hours of the night, Mrs. Welsh may be seen hastening from lamp-post to lamp-post, either lighting or extinguishing. She does not use a ladder, but runs up the post with the agility of a squirrel. On the darkest nights she penetrates the inmost recesses of the alleys with a bravery that knows no fear. …
She took over the route because her husband was in jail, and she wanted to keep the job in the family. The Post set her against “a six-foot man” on another route who whistled loudly in the dark spots “for the purpose, it is said, of keeping up his courage.”
Our 2012 post said it was “quite rare for women to have any occupation” in the 1880s. That was wrong. Washington women worked as servants, laundresses, teachers and government clerks. What was rare was a woman lamplighter.
We really wanted to know who she was. The city directories for 1878 and 1881 list more than a dozen lamplighters, but none named Welsh, Welch or Walsh, and the 1880 census has dozens of Irish-born Welsh women in Washington with nothing to say which one she was. Her first name is still a mystery.
The killing of Officer Crippen, 1889
The police used the name too. When the Evening Star covered the night of November 5, 1889, it began by explaining that the blocks north of P Street between 10th and 13th were “known among the policemen as ‘Hell’s Bottom.'”
At about 10:30 that night, a man of about 20 named Osborne Basey was called out of a pool room in a one-story shanty at 11th and Q and shot on the sidewalk by George Bush. Officer Americus N. Crippen of the second precinct was nearby, and he chased Bush to “Bob” Brown’s saloon at 12th and Q.
Bush ran upstairs, shouting that he would kill the first policeman who tried to arrest him. Crippen followed him into the front room on the second floor, the two men fired at each other, and both went down. Crippen was killed on the spot.
Basey died at Freedmen’s Hospital around 3 a.m., and Bush died there around 8. The coroner didn’t think an inquest was necessary, since, as the Star put it, “all the participants were dead.” (Our 2012 post spelled Basey’s name “Busey.” The Star, which covered the shooting in detail, spells it Basey.)
Crippen was in his mid-30s and had been on the force just over three months. He’d come to Washington from Dranesville, Virginia, more than a dozen years earlier, and his body went home to be buried beside his mother. He’s the only Washington police officer we could find who was killed in Hell’s Bottom.
Our 2012 post said Hell’s Bottom “was not the beat you wanted as a policeman.” A reader pushed back on that line right away, pointing out that good officers want to be where the action is. Here’s the thing, though. Crippen didn’t pick that beat. He was filling in that night for the officer who usually walked it, who was out sick.
The saloon war of 1891
Crippen’s killing fed a campaign against the neighborhood’s saloons that had already started, and it came to a head in November 1891. Churches pushed hardest. Rev. George W. Moore of Lincoln Memorial Church at 11th and R asked the Commissioners to refuse every saloon license in the area, because the place, he said, “had been made a hell by its saloons.” His congregation signed petitions, and so did many property owners.
Another pastor, whose Vermont Avenue church sat within “six squares” of the neighborhood, wrote that many of his members had to walk through it on their way to services. His congregation of about a thousand had voted to ask for the same thing.
On November 17, 1891, the Commissioners turned down every application in the neighborhood.
The Post listed the six saloon keepers who were refused, and look who’s on the list: Robert R. Brown, 1600 Twelfth Street. That’s almost certainly the saloon where Officer Crippen died.
The Washington Bee wasn’t a fan. The next year it argued that the ban had cost “the few colored men” who held licenses their business while white dealers kept selling, and that for every front door the Commissioners closed, three speakeasies opened in back.
The King of Hell’s Bottom
On February 4, 1900, the Post ran a long feature on a man it called the “Ex-King of the Bottom.” His name was Keith Sutherland, and everybody called him Keitt.
The article opened with the hand-lettered sign over his door:
I, am, going, to, put, my, name, above, THE DOOR.
Then the reporter explained it.
The above legend with its superfluity of commas, inscribed on a piece of board about a foot square, nailed above the door of a tumble-down building at the intersection of Vermont avenue, Twelfth and R streets, marks the abode of the “King of Hell’s Bottom.”
Sutherland was born enslaved in Charles County, Maryland, came to Washington in 1862, and worked as a bootblack around the Treasury Building as a boy. He told the reporter he remembered Lincoln’s funeral procession passing by. By 1900 he stood six-foot-one, weighed 250 pounds, and ran the “Northern Light Poolroom” plus a saloon in an old stable, where he sold fish, beans and sandwiches.
Indeed, the police used to say that “Keitt” was as good as a sergeant and a squad with loaded “billies.”
So what’s with the sign? His family owned the property, he said, and when a traveling show came through singing a song called “I am going to put my name above the door,” he decided to stake his claim early. “After while the folks died, an’ I got the property.”
His story checks out. The 1880 census finds Keith Sutherland, a 25-year-old laborer, on the 1600 block of Vermont Avenue with his wife, Hattie, and their two children, in the same house as Sandy and Rachel Sutherland and their 12-year-old son, Webster. Keitt’s 1933 death notice calls Webster his brother, so Sandy and Rachel were almost certainly his parents.
City directories put the family at 1643 Vermont Avenue, at the corner of R Street, from the 1870s on, and in 1908 the Star recorded the sale of 1643 Vermont “for Webster and Keith Sutherland.” (Our 2012 post said he lived there “with 16 other people.” The census page shows ten people in that house, not 17.)
He’d had trouble with the license board even before the 1891 ban. The Star reported in 1890 that his liquor license at 1643 Vermont was rejected.
The Fairview Hotel
After he sold the Vermont Avenue property, Sutherland opened a tiny open-air lunch stand he called the Fairview Hotel, at Eckington Place and Florida Avenue NE. In August 1916 the city ordered it torn down. He fought back with hand-painted signs, his customers backed him with a petition the Star said was nearly eight feet long, and on September 8, 1916, Commissioner Louis Brownlow sent word that “Fair View is saved!”
He came back to the old neighborhood, too. In October 1921, at about 67, Sutherland bought a narrow rowhouse at 1640 11th Street NW, just south of R Street. It’s on the same block whose Q Street side the Star called “Hell’s Bottom” back in 1869. He bought it in installments from the sellers and paid them off by 1925, years ahead of schedule.
In the years that followed the papers called him a “colored philosopher,” and he spent his later years handing out forecasts and political predictions to reporters. He died in that house at 1640 11th Street NW on February 19, 1933, at about 79, and was buried in Harmony Cemetery.
He left the house to his son Arthur. When Arthur borrowed against it in 1935, the paperwork named him the “devisee of Keith Sutherland, otherwise styled Keitt Sutherland.” So even the land records knew him as Keitt.
What happened to Hell’s Bottom
Folks who lived there were trying to ditch the name almost from the start. In 1881 the People’s Advocate, a Black weekly, reported that the neighborhood’s small houses were giving way to much grander ones.
By 1883 the Star was writing that “what was ‘Hell’s Bottom’ once now deserves another name,” though the police and the papers kept using it for another twenty years. In 1890, a business owner who’d worked in the middle of the neighborhood for seven years wrote to the Star that “‘Hell’s Bottom,’ so called, is not, after all, such a very, very bad place. As a matter of fact it is one of the most quiet and orderly quarters of the city.”
That didn’t mean poor families stopped living in shacks. Alley housing hung on across Washington for decades, and Farm Security Administration photographers were still documenting it in the 1930s.
Today the old Hell’s Bottom blocks are lined with rowhouses. Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, which started in 1866 as the Fifth Baptist Church and which the Star placed “right in the heart of what was known as Hell’s Bottom” in 1884, is still at 1630 Vermont Avenue NW. The Camp Barker block is Garrison Elementary School. And a few blocks south, at 1433 11th Street NW, lived Ella Watson, the woman in Gordon Parks’s photograph American Gothic.
The newspapers mostly remembered Hell’s Bottom for its shootings and saloons. The people who lived there, many of them freedpeople and their children, built churches, Sunday schools and businesses on the same blocks, and spent years trying to get rid of the name.
We dug this one up with help from AI and checked it against the original records below. Here’s how we use AI.
