Francis Scott Key’s House in Georgetown, and How DC Lost It

Francis Scott Key wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner” while living in a comfortable brick house in Georgetown. You cannot visit it today. It did not burn, and it did not fall down on its own.

Washington took it apart on purpose. Workers numbered the bricks so the house could be rebuilt, stacked the pieces near the river, and then lost track of the whole thing. The home of the man who gave the country its national anthem simply vanished.

Here is the story of Francis Scott Key’s house in Georgetown, where it stood at 3516-18 M Street NW, and how the nation’s capital managed to misplace it.

The house where the anthem was born

A merchant named Thomas Clarke built the brick house around 1795, back when M Street was still called Bridge Street. Terraced gardens sloped down behind it to the Potomac River, well before any bridge or canal cluttered the view.

Francis Scott Key leased the place in late 1805. He had come to Georgetown to practice law alongside his uncle, Philip Barton Key, and he and his wife, Mary Taylor Lloyd, would raise eleven children in the house.

Key was living here in September 1814 when he sailed to Baltimore to win the release of a captured doctor. Detained on a British ship, he watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry and the flag that still flew at dawn, and he started scribbling the lines that became the anthem.

The Keys left Georgetown around 1830, after the new Chesapeake and Ohio Canal opened directly behind the house and filled the old garden slope with boat traffic. They moved closer to the courts near Judiciary Square, though Key kept an office in a wing of the house until close to his death in 1843. Like much of his Georgetown world, his household included people he enslaved.

From mansion to dry-goods store

After Key, the neighborhood went industrial and the house went commercial. Over the decades it served as a hotel and restaurant, a blacksmith shop, and a dry-goods store, while grimy mills and factories crowded the old tobacco port around it.

In 1896 an owner floated a plan to turn it into a hotel. The Washington Post reported he was “anxious to preserve the historical house,” but the same scheme called for stacking two more stories on top and tearing the old chimney down. The renovation never happened.

Someone eventually painted “THE KEY MANSION” in big black letters across the front to pull in shoppers. Across the street rose the massive Georgetown Car Barn, and the residential block Key had known was gone for good.

The first attempt to save it

In 1907 a group of prominent Washingtonians formed the Francis Scott Key Memorial Association to rescue the house. The roster was heavy with stars: Admiral George Dewey, Rear Admiral Winfield Scott Schley, the District commissioner Henry MacFarland, and Key’s own great-grandson, Francis Scott Key Smith.

They wanted to repeat what Philadelphia had just done with the Betsy Ross House. The lawyer Hugh T. Taggart bought the building after Dewey talked him into it, and the association dressed the exterior in flags and hung a portrait of Key.

The house opened to the public after a dedication on February 23, 1908, and a Flag Day ceremony that summer brought speeches and a 21-gun salute. Then almost nobody came. The block was shabby, there was no original furniture, and there was nothing much to see. The little museum closed within a few years.

Stripped beyond recognition

When Taggart died in 1912, his heirs remodeled the place into something unrecognizable. They pulled off the gabled roof, ripped out the facade for plate-glass commercial windows, knocked down Key’s one-story law office, and removed the big chimneys.

The result looked like any other storefront on the strip. Plenty of Washingtonians assumed the real Key house had already been demolished and replaced. During World War I, the building even did a stint as a factory turning out American flags.

Promises, plans, and the Depression

The Key Bridge opened beside the house in 1923. In 1931 the National Park Service bought the block to clear it for a riverside park, and when locals protested, officials promised the Key house would be spared and restored.

Then the money never came. A Depression-era fundraising drive led by Ulysses S. Grant III fell short of its $25,000 goal. By 1935 the Park Service floated a restoration estimated at $55,000, even as Key’s great-grandson argued the house was too far gone to truly restore.

A Park Service architect named Stuart Barnette put the doubts in writing, and his verdict was brutal.

Only two things would justify the restoration of any ancient structure reduced to the present physical state of the Key House: historical significance and architectural importance. It is my opinion that neither the ruins are of great architectural importance, nor was the man great whose name is associated with the structure.

Taken apart for a freeway ramp

World War II sealed the decision. Planners approved a ramp linking the Key Bridge to the new Whitehurst Freeway, giving drivers a fast way out of the city and a quicker route toward the Pentagon. The Key house stood squarely in the path.

Preservationists, including the Columbia Historical Society, fought through the 1940s to move the road or relocate the house. As a compromise, Congress voted in 1948 to spend about $65,000 dismantling the building and rebuilding it nearby.

The contractor Alexander and Repass took the house down, numbered the bricks and foundation stones, and trucked them to a storage spot under the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Everything was ready for the rebuild.

Then President Harry Truman pocket-vetoed the funding, after the Bureau of the Budget warned that a replica would cost too much to build and maintain. The Post summed it up on June 29, 1948, with the headline “President Kills Rebuilding Of Francis Scott Key House.”

The bricks that walked away

Once the rebuild was dead, the numbered pile by the river had no purpose and no real guardian. NPS historian Barry Mackintosh later put it plainly.

After the reconstruction prospects died, so did much incentive for the Park Service to zealously guard the brick pile.

Over the years the stack shrank until nothing was left. Some of the material probably went into other restorations around Georgetown, including the nearby Old Stone House, and a Georgetown mansion called Quality Hill is said to wear the Key house doorway.

In 1981 the Post caught up with the absurdity in a story titled “The Case of the Lost Landmark,” reporting that the Park Service could no longer find the house it had carefully taken apart.

What stands there now

The site did finally get its memorial. In the 1980s a group of Georgetown citizens raised the money for a small park, and on September 14, 1993, the 179th anniversary of the anthem, the Francis Scott Key Park and its Star-Spangled Banner Monument were dedicated at 34th and M Streets NW.

The park holds a bronze bust of Key sculpted by Betty Mailhouse Dunston and flies a 15-star, 15-stripe flag, the same design Key saw over Fort McHenry. The National Park Service maintains it as part of Rock Creek Park. The house itself is gone, but the little park marks roughly where Key’s Georgetown stood.

Key once turned a flag that survived a night of cannon fire into a song the whole country sings. His house, fittingly enough, could not survive peacetime, a budget office, and a highway ramp.