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Harvest at Pleasant Plains,
ca. 1750
By the late 17th century, English colonial settlements and tobacco plantations had reached what is now Washington, DC. By the 1750s the ports of Alexandria and Georgetown were built, and soon afterward a series of mills expanded along Rock Creek to serve the surrounding farms. In 1727 James Holmead received a land patent for an area he called Pleasant Plains, which included today's Mount Pleasant. The Holmead family ran its estate through the 1850s, and likely grew corn, wheat, and other produce as tobacco declined in importance.
The Holmeads were slaveowners, as were many other farmers in Maryland and Washington. President Lincoln abolished slavery in Washington, DC in 1862, during the Civil War. In the decade following the war, developers converted farmland around Mount Pleasant into one of the first suburbs of downtown Washington.
Art on Call is a program of Cultural Tourism DC with support from:
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities
Office of the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development
District Department of Transportation
This call box is also supported by:
Historic Mount Pleasant
National Endowment for the Arts
Mount Pleasant Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1-D
Fay
Armstrong
Michael K. Ross, Sculptor
www.historicmountpleasant.org
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