Washington DC
Chevy Chase

Chevy Chase (not to be confused with the nearby Maryland suburb) was first settled by colonists in the 1700s, after the land was deeded by Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore, to Colonel Joseph Belt. The 560-acre parcel, which included land in what is now D.C. as well as Maryland, gets its name from a ballad about a 1388 battle between England and Scotland. In the late 1800s, Francis G. Newlands, a Mississippi-born lawyer who inherited his late first wife’s family fortune, moved to Washington and became a real estate developer. Newlands, who was eventually also elected as a U.S. senator representing Nevada, got the idea of buying up what was then farmland and building a neighborhood that would sprawl across both sides of the District line, and would be connected to downtown D.C. by a streetcar line that he would build. (Newlands also had a disturbing side; he was an outspoken white supremacist who barred immigrants, Jews and Blacks from his streetcar line. There’s increasing talk of removing his name from a memorial fountain on the neighborhood’s boundary with Maryland.) Today, Chevy Chase is a tree-lined, walkable neighborhood filled with a variety of 20th-century architectural styles, including bungalows, Foursquares, Tudors and Cape Cods.