19th century In the 1880s, Senator
Francis G. Newlands of
Nevada and his partners began acquiring farmland in unincorporated areas of Maryland and just inside the District of Columbia, for the purpose of developing a residential
streetcar suburb for
Washington, D.C., during the expansion of the
Washington streetcars system. Newlands and his partners founded
The Chevy Chase Land Company in 1890, and its holdings of more than eventually extended along the present-day
Connecticut Avenue from
Florida Avenue north to Jones Bridge Road. Newlands, an avowed
white supremacist, and his development company took steps to ensure that residents of its new suburbs would be wealthy and white; for example, "requiring, in the deed to the land, that only a single-family detached house costing a large amount of money could be constructed. The Chevy Chase Land Company did not include explicit bars against non-white people, known as racial covenants, but the mandated cost of the house made it impractical for all but the wealthiest non-white people to buy the land." Houses were required to cost $5,000 and up on
Connecticut Avenue and $3,000 and up on side streets. The company banned commerce from the residential neighborhoods.
Leon E. Dessez was Chevy Chase's first resident. He and
Lindley Johnson of
Philadelphia designed the first four houses in the area. Toward the northern end of its holdings, the Land Company dammed
Coquelin Run, a stream that crossed its land, to create the manmade
Chevy Chase Lake. The body of water furnished water to the coal-fired generators that powered the streetcars of the Land Company's
Rock Creek Railway. The streetcar soon became vital to the community; it connected workers to the city, and even ran errands for residents. The lake was also the centerpiece of the Land Company's Chevy Chase Lake
trolley park, a venue for boating, swimming, and other activities meant to draw city dwellers to the new suburb. Similar considerations led the Land Company to build a hotel at 7100 Connecticut Avenue; it opened it in 1894 as the Chevy Chase Spring Hotel and was later renamed the Chevy Chase Inn. "The hotel failed to attract sufficient patrons, especially during the winter months," wrote the Chevy Chase Historical Society, and in 1895, the Land Company leased the property for a year to the Young Ladies Seminary. Part of the original Cheivy Chace patent had been sold to
Abraham Bradley, who built an estate known as the Bradley Farm. In 1887, Bradley's son Joseph sold the farm, by then named "Chevy Chase" to J. Hite Miller. In 1892, Newlands and other members of the
Metropolitan Club of Washington, D.C., founded a hunt club called Chevy Chase Hunt, which would later become Chevy Chase Club. In 1894, the club located itself on the former Bradley Farm property under a lease from its owners. The club introduced a six-hole golf course to its members in 1895, and purchased the 9.36-acre Bradley Farm tract in 1897.
20th century In 1906, the Chevy Chase Land Company blocked a proposed subdivision called
Belmont after they learned its Black developers aimed to sell house lots to other African Americans. In subsequent litigation, the company and its affiliates argued that those developers had committed fraud by proposing "to sell lots...to negroes." By the 1920s,
restrictive covenants were added to Chevy Chase real estate deeds. Some prohibited both the sale or rental of homes to "a Negro or one of the African race." Others prohibited sales or rentals to "any persons of the Semetic [
sic] race"—i.e.,
Jews. In 1903, Lea M. Bouligny bought the old Chevy Chase Inn and founded the
Chevy Chase College and Seminary. turning it into the group's Youth Conference Center. For decades, the center hosted the National 4-H Conference, an event for 4-Hers throughout the nation to attend, and the annual
National Science Bowl in late April or early May.
21st century Financially undermined by the
COVID-19 pandemic, the National 4-H Club Foundation sold the center in 2021 for $40 million; as of 2025, it is to be replaced by a senior living development. ==Demographics==