Tucked away in Washington, D.C.’s chic Georgetown neighborhood, Dumbarton Oaks is a historic gem often overshadowed by the boutiques and cafes that line M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. Though it sits apart from the National Mall and its famed museums, Dumbarton Oaks stands among the city’s most storied landmarks: part research center, museum and garden sanctuary that gave rise to the international world we know today.
Georgetown is known for a mix of historical styles, from Federal, Georgian, Victorian, and Colonial Revival. From simple red brick buildings to ornate Georgian designs, the neighborhood is an amalgamation of centuries of history that persist even in its smallest row houses to its most complex estates.
Historical origin of Dumbarton Oaks
In 1702, Colonel Ninian Beall, a Scottish-born colonial officer, received a 795-acre land grant, then larger than present-day Georgetown. Beall named the tract “The Rock of Dumbarton,” honoring a natural rock monolith formation in his homeland.
Beall’s descendants subdivided the estate to profit from the northern expansion of Georgetown from the banks of the Potomac River. By 1800, William Hammond Dorsey, a Maryland-born public official, acquired 20 acres of the former Beall estate and built a Federal-style house that survives in part as a core of the current estate. Throughout the 19th century, the house expanded as it changed hands, most notably to Robert and Mildred Bliss in 1920. It’s under their care that the estate became affectionately known as “The Oaks” for the large white oak trees that line R Street.
At Dumbarton Oaks, Mildred Bliss collaborated closely with Beatrix Farrand, one of the most renowned American landscape architects of the 20th century. While Farrand’s work can also be seen at Yale, Harvard, Oberlin College and the University of Chicago, Dumbarton Oaks stands as her most complex and fully realized design.
Here, she created a series of formal and informal terraces and garden rooms that merge structure with natural rhythm, embodying timeless and adaptable design. To preserve her vision, Farrand left her successors, Robert Patterson and Ruth Havey, The Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks, a detailed record of her planting plans and design rationale that continues to guide the care of the gardens today.
From private estate to public good
According to the museum, the Blisses were “collectors and patrons of art and scholarship in the humanities.” Robert Bliss, a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, traveled throughout South America and Europe, for work. While abroad, the couple collected pre-Columbian and Byzantine art which are now a part of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum’s coveted collection.
As early as 1932, Robert planned to donate the estate to Harvard University, his alma mater. In 1940, the estate was subdivided to Harvard, as planned, for the continuation of scholarship, and the National Parks Service, for the American public to enjoy.
Dumbarton Oaks in the Second World War and diplomatic history
This subdivision occurred just after the U.S. entered World War II. The estate was swiftly offered to the Department of War and Department of State and various relief organizations to “facilitate the establishment of world peace,” according to the museum. Dumbarton Oaks fellows provided government officials with lists of endangered sites, monuments and pieces of art across occupied Europe to ensure their protection. These activities during the war set the stage for the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations in 1944, which would outline the duties of an international organization that would become the United Nations in 1945.
The Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization – as the meetings were officially known – hosted delegations from China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom at Dumbarton Oaks to discuss worldwide peace and security post-war.
Today, the gardens and grounds act as an intersection point between scholars and the public, just as the Blisses intended for its legacy. Yet their legacy feels newly relevant in a moment when questions of access, privilege and preservation shape nearly every academic and cultural space.
