Euclid Park

Euclid Park and Euclid Woods, and North Kenilworth

Lots were sold beginning in 1916, the buyers being mostly working-class African-Americans living in Washington, DC. A good percentage of the buyers were women. Shaw sold 31 lots between 1919, but then decided to sell the entire property. The subdivision was bought in 1919 by The North Kenilworth Mutual Improvement Association of the District of Columbia in the U.S. of America, incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1919. By 1931 about half the platted lots had been sold, but only a few were built upon.

During the same period, houses in the original Cheverly subdivision were being sold with whites-only covenants. In a 1925 letter to his financial backer, Robert Marshall, Cheverly developer, asked for funds to purchase land adjacent to Cheverly to buttress it against African-American owned properties, apparently directly referring to North Kenilworth as "a small [African-American] subdivision directly adjoining Cheverly."

In 1920 a handful of households were enumerated in North Kenilworth. By 1930 there were none. The 1938 aerial map shows some house sites. We have tentatively identified two or three former house sites. We suspect these houses were built without foundations – a 1919 newspaper advertisement calls them “small bungalows” – so leave little evidence but that of possible landscaping efforts (apple trees, bridal wreath spirea, for example).

North Kenilworth was annexed to the Town of Cheverly in 1958.

In 1963 the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission began buying up the properties for Cheverly Euclid Park, a process that continued to 1998. Of the original North Kenilworth owners, the Gadson and Jackson families continued to own the original lots, a hint of the importance this land holds.

Kristie Kendall, a student in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland has done a project on the history and archaeology of North Kenilworth. The Cheverly History Club has a copy of her report about this interesting part of Cheverly, North Kenilworth: Rediscovering an Early Twentieth Century African-American Subdivision.

Elijah S. Gadson was born in Tennessee about 1877. He married Mary E. Jackson in Washington, DC in 1908. In 1918 he bought 14 lots in North Kenilworth and moved his family here, where the family, with five children, were enumerated in the 1920 census. He was then a helper in the Navy Yard. By 1930 they had returned to DC, but the family still owns the original North Kenilworth property.

Today Euclid Woods is a woodland of diverse microhabitats, including pine barrens and pine woods where you may see box turtles laying eggs, deer, strawberrybush and spotted wintergreen. Runoff from the adjacent sports field creates erosion, sending sediment into Tributary 1 and Lower Beaverdam Creek.