Page:The New England magazine (IA newenglandmagazi1891bost).pdf/391

DOWN at the foot of Seventeenth Street, away from the usual route of the guide-book sightseer, stands the oldest house in Washington. The moss had grown thick upon its humble roof long before quarrelling Congresses wrangled and disputed over the location of the future "Federal City," and when at last the dispute was ended, and a definite site selected, it was found that the unpretentious home and paternal acres of a sturdy old Scotchman, David Burns by name, occupied a large portion of the proposed situation.

Of the previous history of the Burns family little is known or recorded beyond the statement that the estate had de scended to David, through several generations of Scottish ancestors; all, probably, farmer folk like himself. They were, no doubt, a part of the same thrifty Scotch element that had contributed so much to the colonial prosperity of Maryland and Virginia, and which had borne so large a share in the founding and building of Georgetown and Alexandria.

The homestead itself was located almost upon the immediate bank of the Potomac, here a mile or more in width, and only a little distance away from the beautiful hill upon which the Observatory now stands the hill upon which, it is related, Braddock's forces camped on their first night out from Alexandria, in that ill-starred march into the wilderness, and the enthusiast has even drawn a beautiful though doubtless imaginary picture of the youthful Virginia captain looking out from that historic camping ground, and, with prophetic vision, locating here the unborn metropolis of an unborn Republic.