Washington, D.C.

Though he was the grandson of a Klansman, Bob Zellner realized at a young age that he didn't agree with segregation. As a young man, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and became the first white southerner to be a SNCC Field Secretary. In a time of high tensions, particularly in the Deep South, Zellner and his wife Dorothy held their ground as supporters of black freedom and desegregation. They traveled from Danville, Virginia for the March on Washington. Years later, Zellner remembered the experience.

On the days leading up to the March on Washington, buses from every direction poured into the District of Columbia. Culie Vick Kilimanjaro and her husband John Marshall Kilimanjaro came from Greensboro, North Carolina. No one knew exactly what to expect prior to the March. Many feared violence. Many feared that no one would show up and the March would be a bust. 

It's DC Beer Week and there are a lot of interesting activities going on around town where you can enjoy some great craft beer. It's a cool annual event, but not normally something that we would cover on Boundary Stones. But, thanks to the Heurich House Museum, DC Brau and local homebrewer Mike Stein, this year's beer week is also a celebration of local history!

Not surprisingly, our nation’s capital has undergone some pretty radical changes since its beginning. One hundred and sixty years ago, the landscape of the National Mall and surrounding streets looked vastly different than it does today. We’re talking an armory, one museum, the Washington Monument, and not much else.

You’d better believe there have been "mean girls" since the beginning of time, or at least the early 1800s. Rigid social structures dictated the behavior of Jacksonian high society; it was the height of rudeness, for instance, if a lady did not return your call. However, in a social war that engulfed the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, society’s rules were discarded and the national government ground to a halt all for one woman: the beautiful and intelligent Margaret “Peggy” O’Neill.

Colonel Ninian Beall, a towering Scottish settler who helped found Georgetown and lived to 92, earned a bronze‑plated memorial in 1910—complete with a hidden surprise. The stone carver was an aviation enthusiast who tucked newspaper clippings and a biplane photo into a compartment inside memorial, turning a colonial tribute into a quirky time capsule.

On the evening of March 5, 1854, nine men associated with the Know-Nothing party snuck up to the base of the Washington Monument and made off with a rather hefty hunk of stone. The men carried the stone to a boat waiting on the tidal basin, smashed it into pieces and dumped it in the middle of the Potomac. But why?

In the late 1890s, many women in the capital city began to push for a more open society, pursuing higher education, living alone, and managing their own affairs. This was the dawn of the Bachelor Girl age, which shocked and appalled many in the Washington press.

It’s a casual Sunday in April 1934 and you’re looking for something to do. How about a hike in the great outdoors? Lucky for you, there’s a new hiking club in town — the Wanderbirds — and they are preparing for their very first hike!

No doubt you are familiar with D.C.’s most prominent tributes to history -- the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, possibly even that unique sculpture of Einstein lounging on Constitution Avenue. But have you ever heard of the Zero Milestone?

In the 1850s, Georgetown’s Fourth of July celebration was a neighborhood pageant of marching Sunday schools, bands, banners, barrels of lemonade, and speeches at Parrott’s Woods, now the site of Oak Hill Cemetery.

Women’s fashion is a complicated subject, but one doesn’t usually think of it as deadly. However, the fatal dance between health and beauty was a reality for Washington women wearing corsets in the 19^th century.