JEANNE: People say Adams Morgan goes from Connecticut Avenue to Harvard, to Florida Avenue.

But you know, it's, Adams Morgan is a new name and it incorporates a number of older areas.

EDDIE: You have Kalorama Triangle, Washington Heights, Reed-Cooke, and Lanier Heights.

So this was a self-contained neighborhood when it was first being developed by the settlers.

And before the Civil War, this was the outlying farmland beyond the boundary of Florida Avenue.

There was a creek that ran down what's now Champlain called Slash Run.

And on that creek was a slaughterhouse, and that became where they would allow people of color to live.

Around, uh, 1900, they begin to build all of these townhouses, and different developers come in.

This was for an emerging class that came out of the post-Civil War period when there was an, a tremendous accumulation of wealth.

JEANNE: By 1887, a woman by the name of Mary Foote Henderson, the wife of a senator, moved into this area, uh, probably kicking and screaming because her husband bought property up here when it was totally rural.

So, once she moved in, she decided she'd make some changes.

And uh, she was going to have all these embassy people move up here 'cause she was gonna buy up the property and build embassies, which she did, she built 12 beautiful homes by well-known architects.

And other people started to think maybe they would build a house here.

And these luxury apartment buildings started to go up.

Luxury apartment buildings were for the wealthy, however, that building right there was built, I think in the 1920s, as the first co-op, so they were for working class people.

Of course, Washington DC had segregation.

And the fact that Adams Morgan is the name of the community now goes back to the segregation of the two schools, the Morgan school was a Black school, and the Adams school was the White school.

The community here said, "Whoa, wait a minute."

You know, "We all know each other," and they began to integrate.

And they were so proud of it that they actually took the names of those two schools to apply to the neighborhood.