oooo, history!

I found a really interesting article about the history of our neighborhood while I was faffing around on the local library's website. It refers to the English Consul estate, which is what our whole area used to be before a developer bought it in 1909. It was owned by the first English Consul to Maryland, William Dawson. The original estate's main house and several outbuildings still exist in the neighborhood, as private homes. The mansion itself is actually a couple of blocks away from our house.

And some history that ties our house directly into the history of the estate: our pool house (which in its former, less glorious life was a chicken coop), actually stands on the original foundation blocks of the estate's water tower! Underneath each corner of our little building is a gigantic concrete pyramid, going quite a ways into the ground, strong enough to support a very large water tower, which in turn supplied the whole area when it was the English Consul estate.

History is fun.