When the Obamas walked out of the White House in January 2017, they didn’t leave town. They moved about two miles north, to a brick mansion at 2446 Belmont Road NW in Kalorama, and they’re still there.
That made Barack Obama the first former president since Woodrow Wilson to stick around Washington after his term ended. Wilson did it a few blocks away, on S Street, almost a hundred years earlier.
Here’s the part we love. When we first wrote about this house back in 2013, it was just an empty mansion for sale, listed at $6.5 million, and we had no idea who would end up living there. We were just biking around Kalorama looking for a cool home to dig into.
Turns out we picked a good one.
The Obamas rented the place from its owner starting in January 2017, then bought it outright a few months later for $8.1 million. Nine bedrooms, eight and a half baths, three stories, a little over 8,000 square feet, sitting on a private lot above Rock Creek Park. They bought it through a family LLC, the way you do when you used to be president.
So let’s do what we do best around here, an If Walls Could Talk on a presidential address, and find out who lived here first.
Building permit for a brick dwelling
The first mention of the property in the newspaper is March 4th, 1928. The Washington Post listed it in the day’s building permits.
F. B. Moran McConihe, to erect two-story and basement brick and hollow tile dwelling, 2446 Belmont road northwest; estimated cost, $50,000.
That permit belonged to F. Moran McConihe, a busy young real estate developer working the Belmont Road blocks of Kalorama, an old country estate that had been carved into building lots a generation earlier.
I’m pretty sure the powder room costs that much today.
For sale, and then for sale again
Want to be the first resident of 2446 Belmont Road? You had your chance. If you saw this advertisement in the Washington Post on December 28th, 1928, you could have been the one.
The house didn’t sell right away. It was still on the market the following spring, with another ad running on May 12th, 1929. Then the stock market crashed that October, and a brand-new $50,000 mansion was suddenly a hard thing to move. It sat empty for a year or two.
Captain Charles Maddox, a Navy radio pioneer
The man who finally bought it was Captain Charles Hamilton Maddox of the U.S. Navy. And he was not your average homeowner.
In 1912, Maddox built the radio set that sent what is generally credited as the first wireless message from a U.S. naval aircraft to a ship.
On July 26th of that year, near Annapolis, he went up in a Wright B-1 flown by Lieutenant John Rodgers and tapped out a message in Morse code to the torpedo boat USS Stringham, sitting about three miles off. Later tests reached the ship from as far as fifteen miles out.
Maddox didn’t undersell it. “These were the first radio messages ever received from an airplane radio transmitting set in the United States and probably in the world,” he wrote.
When he died in September 1964, after more than three decades at 2446 Belmont Road, the Washington Post ran an obituary.
Capt. Charles Hamilton Maddox (USN-Ret.), who was a pioneer in the uses of radio on naval ships and aircraft and a veteran of both World Wars, died of pneumonia Tuesday at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was 78.
In 1912, Capt. Maddox designed and tested in flight the first successful radio equipment used in naval aircraft.
During World War I, he served on the staff of the Pacific Fleet commander as radio officer and was radio superintendent for the San Francisco district. He also served as a radio officer with naval forces operating in the Atlantic.
Capt. Maddox, a native of Hamilton, Ont., was a member of the 1909 class of the United States Naval Academy and later attended Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a life member of the Institute of Radio Engineers.
In the Washington area, he was a member of the Army and Navy Club, the Metropolitan Club and the Chevy Chase Country Club. He also was active in the New York Yacht Club.
Back in 2013 we wondered how a career military man could afford a place like this. We have the answer now, and it isn’t the Navy salary.
His wife, Isabel Ramage, was an heiress. She was a daughter of Samuel Young Ramage, a wealthy oil industrialist and financier out of Oil City, Pennsylvania. The Maddoxes lived at 2446 Belmont for well over thirty years and kept a summer house called Easterly up in Newport, Rhode Island.
That explains the New York Yacht Club.
Muriel Maddox, debutante and romance novelist
The family member who turned up most often in the society pages was the Maddoxes’ daughter, Muriel.
She made her social debut in August of 1940, up in Newport, back when those events were still a big deal. Then she went west and tried Hollywood.
Muriel appeared in “The Men,” the 1950 picture that was Marlon Brando’s own film debut. She had a few more roles after that, but never as the star. Where she actually made her name was on the page, as an author of romance novels.
She died in 2010 at the age of 89.
Her artistic streak showed up early. The Washington Post published this drawing of hers, “A Windy Day,” on October 4th, 1931, when she was still a kid living on Belmont Road.
From the Maddoxes to a president
After Isabel Maddox sold the house around 1970, it passed to Cecil Woods Vest Jr., a Washington public affairs officer, and his wife Susan. They held onto it for about forty years.
The Vests sold in 2009, and after a stretch on the market, the house went to Joe Lockhart, who had been Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary in the late 1990s. Lockhart paid about $5.3 million for it in 2014.
Then came January 2017. Lockhart leased the house to the outgoing first family, who rented for a few months before buying it from him for that $8.1 million.
The Obamas landed in good company. Kalorama, and the Sheridan-Kalorama blocks in particular, has long been where Washington’s most powerful people quietly live behind the hedges.
Some of its grandest houses ended up as embassies, like the old Windom mansion that became the Australian Embassy.
Woodrow Wilson retired to S Street here in 1921 and died in the house three years later. When the Obamas moved in, their neighbors included Jeff Bezos, who had just bought the largest house in the city, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who were renting around the corner.
The mansion that nobody wanted in 1929 is now one of the most photographed front doors in America.
Not bad for a house we found on a bike ride.
If you want more from this corner of the city, here’s the tale of a very creative Kalorama burglar from 1898.
As to the question of Captain Maddoxs wealth, his wife Isabel was the daughter of a wealthy oil baron from Oil City, PA by the name of S.Y. Ramage.