Dumbarton House

Dumbarton House is a Federal style house located in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was completed around 1800. Its first occupant was Joseph Nourse, the first Register of the Treasury. Dumbarton House, a federal period historic house museum, stands on approximately an acre of gardens on the northern edge of Georgetown, District of Columbia. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Displaying a fine collection of period decorative arts (furniture, silver, ceramics, etc.), it gives the visitor a concrete sense of a substantial private residence in the early 1800s. Constructed in 1798–99, the house was a private residence until The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) purchased it for its headquarters in 1928 and gave it the name it has today. In addition to meeting its administrative needs, the NSCDA wanted to illustrate domestic life in Georgetown in the early federal period. To achieve this, its two principal floors were opened to the public as a house museum in 1932, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Both the house and the nearby Dumbarton Oaks take their names from an 18th-century estate which made up much of the area, which in turn had been named for the Scottish "Rock of Dumbarton."