The history and evolution of Anacostia’s Barry Farm

Barry Farms in the early 1940s. Image source: D.C. Policy Center

From the D.C. Policy Center:

Barry Farm takes its name from an estate once owned by Washington City merchant and councilman James Barry, who had purchased this section of the “St. Elizabeths” tract in hopes of profiting as the city expanded eastward. However, the tract remained isolated from the rest of city in 1867, when the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) began searching for sites to house the 40,000 refugees from slavery who had arrived in D.C. during the Civil War (1861-1865). After white resistance prevented the Bureau from purchasing land west of the Anacostia near the Navy Yard, officials secretly negotiated to buy 375 acres from Barry’s heirs in early 1868. The site was hilly, densely forested and filled with underbrush. Black laborers cleared the land and cut roads.