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Posted by Stephen Hansen

The Story of St. Thomas Church: A Rise From the Ashes

The story of St. Thomas church at 1772 Church Street, NW began in 1886 when Reverend John Abel Aspinwall moved to Washington, DC.  Aspinwall was the son of William Aspinwall,  president of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company who had built the Panama Railroad across Panama.  Due to poor health, John Aspinwall resigned as the rector of a church in Bay Ridge, Long Island, where he had been serving as rector for 21 years.   After a three-year rest, and perhaps in search of another wealthy congregation, Aspinwall came to Washington, purchasing a mansion at 17 Dupont Circle.  Upon his arrival, he became active in the formation of St. Thomas Parish and served as its first rector.  The parish’s first congregation began meeting in 1890 with a mere handful of people, worshipping in the abandoned Holy Cross Episcopal Church on Dupont Circle (now the site of the Sulgrave Club today at 1801 Massachusetts Avenue).  That parish had closed due to financial troubles a few years before (most of the weal
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Posted by Stephen Hansen

The Fosters: Three Generations of Secretaries of State

John Watson Foster.  Photo: LOC.

One of the more politically prominent residents of Dupont Circle was John Watson Foster. Foster was born in Petersburg, Indiana in 1836. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he served in the Civil War under both Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, entering the army as a major and eventually rising to the rank of general. After the war, Foster returned to Indiana and became editor of the Evansville Daily Journal.
During his second term as president and in gratitude for his political support, Grant launched Foster on a life-long diplomatic career with an appointment as Minister to Mexico in 1873 and again in 1880. President James A. Garfield then appointed Foster Minister to Russia, a post he held for only a year. After a brief return to private law practice, President Chester A. Arthur appointed Foster Minister to Spain, where he served until 1885, whereupon he returned to private practice and served as counsel representing foreign diplomatic legations in the United States.

In 1900, Foster made the move to the Dupont Circle neighborhood and contracted locally prominent architect Clarence Harding to build a four-story home at 1323 18th Street, NW. Five years later, Alexander Graham Bell’s daughter, Daisy, moved just across the street from her father and next door to the Fosters at 1331 18th Street after her marriage to David Grandison Fairchild.  

The Foster home at 1323 18th Street, NW.  Photo: LOC

In 1890, Foster’s daughter, Eleanor, married a legal advisor working at the State Department, Robert Lansing, who would replace William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State in 1915, when Bryan resigned in protest of Woodrow Wilson’s approach to U.S. neutrality in the war in Europe. The Lansings made 1323 18th Street their permanent home as well, and lived there during Robert’s term as Secretary of State. Foster’s widow, Mary, remained in the house with the Lansings until her death in 1922 at the age of 81. Robert Lansing died in the house in 1928.

Robert Lansing.  Photo: LOC

Another of John Watson Foster’s daughters, Edith, married a Presbyterian minister, Allen Dulles, and their children included John Foster Dulles, who also served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Allen Welsh Dulles, the founder and longest-serving director of the CIA. Their daughter Eleanor Lansing Dulles went on to become a noted economist and diplomat.
By 1934, the Foster residence at 1323 18th Street had become home to the Inter-American Institute of Columbus University, and later to the Catholic University School of Law. In 1964, the law school moved to a new building constructed on the university’s campus, claiming that the Foster house was too old and too small. The house was razed in 1974 for a 123-unit apartment building, now known as the Palladium. Unlike the fate of the Foster home and so many other houses in Dupont Circle, the former home of Daisy Bell Fairchild still stands today, adjacent to the Palladium Condominium.
Site of the former Foster residence now occupied by the Palladium at 1325 18th S, NW.  The Fairchild house still stands to the north at 1331 18th Street.  Photo: Google Earth.


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