When did Washington, DC’s last farm disappear? When we first posted this in 2013 we thought we had the answer. On April 11, 1939, the Washington Post ran a headline that read like an obituary: “District’s Last Farm, in Family For 77 Years, Doomed by Road.” Under it were two photos of the Lindner family at work on their land at 3803 Wheeler Road SE.
We took the Post at its word, and we got it wrong. The real answer is the 1950s, and the Lindners were still farming Wheeler Road more than a decade after the Post wrote them off. Our readers told us as much in the comments, so this time we followed their tips through census sheets, maps, deeds and old newspapers.
“The last farm in the District is doomed”
Here’s how the Post’s story opened, along with a few lines from George and his daughter Catherine that stuck with us.
The last farm in the District is doomed.
The chocolate, loamy earth that George Lindner acquired from his father 52 years ago and worked and watched while it brought to life vegetables for the tables of Washington, is soon to disappear to accommodate a highway between Fourth street and Wheeler road southeast.
“It’s good ground. My boys here have been raised as farmers. They will have to learn something else to do. We can move, Ja, but where will there be land like this?”
“It is pretty in this valley: it’s like a little paradise here when things are up,” said Catherine. “He worked it for 50 years; Michael Lindner had it first. That was 77 years ago.”
“I worked it 52 years,” said George Lindner. “In 1918 I had 10,000 celery; and now there are the cantaloupes, beets, cabbages and kale.”
Ten thousand celery plants on Wheeler Road. That’s quite a garden.
George also told the reporter that the Park and Planning Commission, the federal agency that planned the capital’s parks and roads, kept sending for him. He was getting old, so he sent one of his sons, who “must go back again for another trial.” The photo caption spells the family name two different ways, “Linden” and “Linder,” but the article and every record we found say Lindner.
What readers told us
Comments trickled in on the 2013 post for years, and a lot of them were better informed than we were.
In 2014, Sheila asked whether we had looked at the 1900 census, which she said showed a 70-year-old Lindner living next door to George Lindner’s family, with everyone listed as gardeners. In 2015, a reader from the Wahler family wrote that the family “operated the Congress Heights Dairy on Wheeler Road through WW2 and into the 1950s.”
Another reader pointed out that the Census Bureau’s Historical Statistics of the United States still showed farmland in the District in 1950.
Al grew up in Southeast in the 1950s and remembered it as still pretty rural, with open fields and an old country store with wooden floors.
So we went back and followed up on every one of those tips.
Gardeners on Wheeler Road
Sheila was right. The 1900 census, taken on June 26, 1900, lists two Lindner households side by side on Wheeler Road. The first is headed by Barbara Lindner, a 70-year-old widow born in Germany, with her daughter Lizzie, 28, and a 23-year-old nephew named John M. Lindner. The second is George, 32, his wife Elizabeth (listed as Lizzie, like Barbara’s daughter), and their four young children. Barbara, her daughter Lizzie and George are all listed as gardeners.
Barbara’s line says she came to the United States in 1862, the year Catherine’s “77 years ago” points to. George told the Post he got the land from his father, so Michael was probably George’s father and Barbara quite possibly his widow. The census says George himself came over in 1885, so it looks like the family came over in stages.
By 1930 there were two Lindner farm households side by side on Wheeler Road. George, now a 64-year-old widower born in Bavaria, was farming with his sons Matthaus and James, and his daughter Catherine lived with them. Next door was Johann M. Lindner, also from Bavaria, with his wife Rosina and their sons. Johann was very likely the young nephew John M. from Barbara’s 1900 household, and the newspapers sometimes called him John.
To keep the family straight from here on: George’s branch, with Matthaus, James and Catherine, farmed the place the Post wrote about, later numbered 3803 Wheeler Road. Johann and Rosina’s branch, with their son Frederick, farmed next door at 3801. And Johann and Rosina also owned a separate, bigger farm farther south, near South Capitol Street and the District line.
Who owned what on Wheeler Road
The Baist real estate atlas, published between 1919 and 1921, shows whose land was whose. “Geo. & Elizabeth Lindner” own a tract of about 12.7 acres west of Wheeler Road, and right next door is a slightly larger tract in the name of Johann’s wife, Rosina Lindner. Across the road is a 17.80-acre tract belonging to Anna M. Wahler, part of the dairy family our reader wrote about.
Look closely at that map and you’ll see the dotted lines of streets that didn’t exist yet, including a proposed Valley Avenue running straight through the Lindner land. That planned street is very likely the “highway” the Post was writing about in 1939.
The highway and the park
That same spring, the Evening Star printed a long legal notice several times, including on April 14, 1939. The United States had filed a condemnation case on March 24, 1939, “upon the request of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission,” to take land in Southeast “for suitable development of the National Capital park, parkway and playground system.”
So the government wanted the land for parkland, not just a road. The parcels listed include the tract the Baist atlas shows as George and Elizabeth’s, and the survey runs to the center line of the proposed Valley Avenue, so the planned street and the park were part of the same plan. George Lindner and Rosina Lindner are both named as owners, and so are Conrad, Francis, Joseph P. and Marie T. Wahler.
George didn’t live to see how it turned out. He died at home at 3803 Wheeler Road on November 18, 1939, seven months after the Post’s story ran. His death notice in the Evening Star says he was survived by three daughters and three sons.
The 1939 case came in the middle of a bigger push in this corner of the city. That January the Park and Planning Commission approved condemning the last land it needed for the Oxon Run parkway, a park and flood-control project running more than two miles up the valley. In March the Congress Heights Citizens’ Association asked for a playground on the block bounded by Fourth Street, Wheeler Road, and Mississippi and Valley Avenues, the same stretch the Post said the road would cross.
By July 1942 the city listed a new Oxon Run Recreation Center at Fourth Street and Valley Avenue SE. We haven’t found the jury’s award for the Lindner land, so we can’t say exactly how much the government took. But the family kept enough to go on farming Wheeler Road for another decade.
Still farming in 1950
The Lindners didn’t leave in 1939.
The 1940 census, taken on April 3, 1940, finds Matthaus Lindner, 42, heading the household at 3803 Wheeler Road with his sister Katharine (the Catherine of the 1939 Post story) and his brothers James and George C., the younger George. All three brothers are listed as farmers, and the house is marked as being on a farm. Next door at 3801, Johann Lindner, now 64, is farming with his sons Frederick and Rudolph.
Six years later, the Sunday Star went looking for farms inside the city limits. Its May 12, 1946, picture story, “Down on the Farm,” opened with a line we love.
There are 40 farms in the city of Washington.
That count came from the Census Bureau, which defined a farm as “an agricultural enterprise of 3 acres or more, or a smaller tract with an annual production of $250 or more.” And which farm did the Star call the largest in the District? Not the Wheeler Road place, but the family’s other land: a 40-acre tract near South Capitol Street and Southern Avenue, owned by “Mr. and Mrs. John Lindner” of 3801 Wheeler Road. That’s Johann and Rosina.
With the help of their son Frederick they raise a variety of vegetables which they sell in Union Market, Fifth and Neal streets N.E.
According to the Star, the Lindners kept two horses and a cow on Wheeler Road and three horses and two cows on the bigger place, and that larger farm had been in the family “for about 90 years,” longer than the 77 Catherine gave the Post for Wheeler Road.
(Union Market, which took in vendors from the old Center Market downtown, is a story of its own, and we’ve explored the area around Union Market and Gallaudet on an old map.)
Then came the 1950 census. On April 18, 1950, the enumerator recorded Matthaus Lindner (51, by the census taker’s count) at 3803 Wheeler Road as the proprietor of a farm, with his brother James working it with him. Next door at 3801, Frederick Lindner, 48, was a farmer putting in 60 hours a week, living with his wife Emma and his widowed father Johann. Both houses are checked as being on a farm.
Eleven years after the Post said it was doomed, the “last farm in the District” was still a working farm.
So when did DC’s last farm disappear?
The best answer comes from the Census of Agriculture, which counted the District’s farms every five or ten years. In 1930 there were 104. By 1940 there were 65, and by 1950 there were just 28, covering 1,265 acres. Many of those were greenhouses, florists and nurseries, and only four farms reported growing vegetables in the open for sale.
When the 1954 count came around, Congress “expressly excluded the District of Columbia from the area for enumeration.”
The Lindners weren’t the only candidate, either. In 1956 an old-timer told the Star’s Rambler column that Al Heitmiller’s 40-acre farm near Florida Avenue NE, where Union Market stands now, “was one of the last farms in the city.”
DC Historic Sites, the DC Preservation League’s guide to the city’s historic places, says it simply: the “last District farms vanished in the 1950s.” Given the 1950 census, the Lindner place on Wheeler Road was very likely among them, and perhaps the Wahlers’ hilltop farm too, but we haven’t found a single document that names the last one to go.
The city moves in
For the Lindners, the end came fast, starting with the big farm near the District line. Rosina died in 1948 and left her land to Johann. On April 2, 1951, he deeded two lots and part of an old tract near the District line to new owners. That’s the same corner of the city where the Star had found the District’s largest farm five years earlier.
About a year after that, by the Post’s later account, Matthaus and James bought a farm of their own over the line in Maryland. We haven’t found the deed that shows when 3803 Wheeler Road left the family.
The reader from the Wahler family was right, too. When the city opened a new aluminum-trimmed bridge carrying Wheeler Road over Oxon Run on October 25, 1951, the Evening Star talked to one of the old-timers in the crowd.
Attending the opening was Francis Wahler of 3306 Wheeler road S.E., who has lived there 75 years. His father once operated a dairy farm on the site.
The same story says Wahler “now has a 8-acre farm on top of the hill north of the bridge.” Within a few years, the fields along Wheeler Road were filling in. By May 1954, classified ads were pitching storefronts in a “shopping center now nearing completion at Wheeler rd. and Wahler pl. s.e.” with over “4,000 families in immediate neighborhood.”
The road George pointed at in 1939 did come eventually. In 1955 the District went to court to take about three-quarters of an acre from Frederick Lindner and others to extend Valley Avenue between 9th Street and Wheeler Road, and a jury returned its verdict on November 30, 1955.
Today George and Elizabeth Lindner’s old tract is public land, home to the Southeast Tennis and Learning Center at 701 Mississippi Avenue SE, and Rosina’s old tract along Wheeler Road holds the Parkside Terrace apartments and a school campus on Wahler Place.
For more on how this part of the city looked before the build-out, take a look at Congress Heights through old photos and articles, a 1902 ad selling Congress Heights as a new suburb and the 1961 map of the new subdivisions ringing the city.
The last of the Lindners went over the line
That could have been the end of the Lindners’ farming story, but on November 6, 1975, the Washington Post ran a feature by Bill Peterson on Matthaus Lindner, then 78, headlined “‘There Aren’t Many Like Me Left'”.
Matthaus and his brother James, “both lifelong bachelors,” had bought an 8-acre truck farm at 7308 Central Avenue in Capitol Heights, about two miles from the D.C. line, around 1952. By 1975 apartment complexes, drive-in movies, taverns and service stations lined Central Avenue around them.
Matthaus, who worked his first horse while Teddy Roosevelt was president, was still plowing with Nellie, a swaybacked brown mare the Lindners had paid $250 for. The Post also noted, citing a 1939 issue of Farm Journal, that his father George had been the last farmer at work within the District of Columbia. As the Star’s 1946 count shows, that wasn’t quite true either.
Matthaus had his own way of explaining why he stuck with horses.
“‘Come on! Come up!’ That’s all you have to say and a good horse will go all day.”
The Post wrote off the District’s last farm in 1939. The Lindners just kept planting.
A note on the earlier version: We first wrote about the Lindner farm in August 2013, after a nudge from a reader named Hugh, and said the government had taken it over in 1939. That was wrong, and this October 2026 rebuild corrects it.
We dug this one up with help from AI and checked it against the original records below. Here’s how we use AI.
