Uniontown: DC's First Suburb and the Man Who Broke Its Rules

Before it was Historic Anacostia, it was Uniontown — and it was first. In 1854, John Van Hook, John Fox, and John Dobler formed the Union Land Association, bought roughly 100 acres of farmland across the Eastern Branch from the Navy Yard, and platted Washington's first planned suburb. The pitch was aimed at Navy Yard workers: a real house on a real lot, a short ride from the job, at prices the city proper couldn't touch.

If that sales pitch sounds familiar, it should. It's the same one every east-of-the-river developer has made since — Arthur Randle borrowed it wholesale forty years later for Congress Heights and Randle Highlands.

Founded on Exclusion

Uniontown's founding documents carried a clause that tells you exactly what 1854 Washington was: the association barred sales and rentals to Black and Irish Washingtonians. DC's first suburb was, by charter, a segregated one.

Which is what makes what happened next one of the great turnabouts in American history — because the man who broke that rule wasn't just any neighbor. He was arguably the most famous American alive.

The Rise of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, photographed in 1870. Library of Congress.

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved on Maryland's Eastern Shore around 1818, across the Chesapeake from the city he would one day call home. What happened over the next few decades is one of the most extraordinary self-made lives in the country's story:

• He taught himself to read as a boy in Baltimore — beginning with lessons a mistress was forbidden to continue, finished with bread traded to neighborhood boys for spelling help — convinced, correctly, that literacy was the path out.
• He escaped in 1838, dressed as a sailor and carrying borrowed seaman's papers, riding trains and ferries from Baltimore to freedom in New York in under twenty-four hours.
• His 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, became an international bestseller and made him the most powerful voice of the abolitionist movement — so famous that British friends purchased his legal freedom in 1846 so he could return to America without fear of capture.
• He built his own press. His newspaper The North Star — motto: "Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color" — made him one of the most influential publishers in America.
• He stood up for women's rights before it was a movement. At Seneca Falls in 1848, Douglass was the voice who swung the convention behind the demand for women's suffrage.
• He counseled a president. Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, pressed him on emancipation and equal pay for Black soldiers, and recruited Black troops for the Union Army — including two of his own sons, Lewis and Charles, who served in the storied 54th Massachusetts.
• He understood the power of an image. Douglass sat for photographers more than 160 times, making him the most photographed American of the nineteenth century — a deliberate campaign to put a dignified, unretouched Black face before a country that had never been shown one.

By the 1870s, Douglass was a national institution. And in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him United States Marshal for the District of Columbia — one of the highest federal offices any Black American had ever held.

The Sage of Anacostia

That same year, Douglass did something quietly momentous on the other side of the river. John Van Hook — the Uniontown founder — had built himself a fine hilltop house overlooking the neighborhood between 1855 and 1859. When his finances collapsed, the property passed to the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, and in 1877 Douglass bought it: the house and nearly ten acres, for $6,700.

When Douglass moved into Cedar Hill in 1878, the most famous Black man in America took up residence in a neighborhood whose founding papers said he couldn't — in the former home of the man who wrote the rule. The exclusion was finished as a practical matter, defeated not by argument but by arrival.

Douglass spent the last seventeen years of his life on that hilltop. He expanded the house to twenty-one rooms, served as the District's Recorder of Deeds and later as U.S. Minister to Haiti, wrote his final autobiography in its study, and did his thinking in a tiny stone hut in the yard he called the "Growlery." The neighbors called him the Sage of Anacostia. He died at Cedar Hill in February 1895 — hours after sharing a platform with Susan B. Anthony at a women's rights meeting, an activist to his last afternoon.

Cedar Hill today — the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, kept by the National Park Service.

From Uniontown to Historic District

The name "Uniontown" faded — so many towns claimed it that the post office pushed for a change, and the neighborhood took the river's name instead. What didn't fade was the housing: frame cottages, Italianate and Queen Anne houses, and workingmen's rows built between 1854 and about 1930. In 1978, roughly 550 of those buildings were designated the Anacostia Historic District and listed on the National Register of Historic Places — one of the largest collections of nineteenth-century wood-frame housing left in the city, with Cedar Hill's white-columned porch still watching over it from the top of the hill.

What the History Means for a Buyer

The historic district isn't just a plaque — it shapes the purchase:

• Exterior changes go through review. Siding, windows, porches, and additions in the district need Historic Preservation Review Board approval, and period-appropriate materials cost more than catalog equivalents. Interiors are generally unrestricted.
• Frame houses reward renovation lending. Much of the stock is nineteenth-century wood-frame that needs work. FHA 203(k) and HomeStyle loans underwrite against the home's value after the planned improvements — often the difference between a house you can buy and a house you can live in.
• The market has been the steadier one east of the river. That helps comparable sales, though a renovated house on an unrenovated block still calls for a thoughtful appraisal strategy.

Our Historic Anacostia financing guide covers all of it — the district rules, the renovation loans, and how DC's assistance programs stack at these prices.

Thinking about buying into DC's first suburb — the neighborhood Frederick Douglass chose? Get pre-qualified or talk to us first — we'll start with the house and the numbers.