How the Schools of Capitol Hill got their Name: Peabody Elementary

Photo by Tim Krepp

The next school in our installment came upon it’s name through a somewhat circuitous route. Built in 1879, Peabody Elementary was named to honor George Peabody, an early American financier and noted philanthropist. Peabody made a sizable fortune working with the father of J.P. Morgan, issuing securities and other instruments backing the explosion of railroads and other industries in pre-Civil War America. Although native to Massachusetts, he moved to London in 1837, where he would remain until his death in 1869. So respected was he in his adopted homeland, that he was laid to rest initially in Westminster Abbey, before being repatriated back to South Danvers, MA (renamed Peabody in his honor).

Peabody School on the Hill is not unique in honoring George Peabody. Music aficionados may be familiar with the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the first music academy in the United States and now part of Johns Hopkins University. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, home to (among other things) one of the finest collections of maritime art in the country, traces it’s origin to an institute founded by George Peabody. Harvard and Yale both boast museums donated by George Peabody, as if they had a dearth of things to boast about. And even here in DC, the DC Public Library Georgetown Branch includes the Peabody Room, a historic Georgetown neighborhood special collection. Peabody started off commercially in Georgetown after serving there in the War of 1812.

Hence it was a somewhat controversial decision to name the new school “Peabody School”. George Peabody was a well known international figure with ties to the Washington area, but Georgetown residents were somewhat annoyed that Capitol Hill was chosen to honor him, and not their neighborhood. Less than ten years after losing their separate status as Georgetown, DC, a Post article relates that this action “met with scant favor from the citizens of Georgetown, who were rebellious at having a citizen who had come to world-wide eminence from their midst honored on Capitol Hill.”

But perhaps the school trustees had had enough. You see, they had just renamed the school after Peabody. The original name, the L’Enfant School, after Major Peter L’Enfant, designer of Washington, DC, had been shot down by neighborhood residents. According to one, “the name means infant when spoken in English. It can never be correctly spoken in French. Our boys tell us they will be the laughing stock of the town by school gangs from other neighborhoods who will laugh at them and stone them because they are attending an infants’ school.” So, in 1880, before the school had even opened, a new name plate was added to the front, replacing the already carved “L’Enfant School” with “Peabody School”. And so Major L’Enfant was handed one more insult in a long stream of indignities that followed him well into the grave.