The first known settler was General
Uriah Forrest, an aide-de-camp of
George Washington who built an estate called
Rosedale (now at 3501 Newark Street) in 1793, when he began serving as a
Congressman from
Maryland. Later, it housed
Youth For Understanding, an international student exchange organization. In 2002, the Rosedale grounds were placed in a public conservancy, and the farmhouse, said to be the oldest house in Washington, returned to residential use. Other estates followed.
Gardiner Greene Hubbard, first president of the
National Geographic Society, built the colonial
Georgian revival Twin Oaks on 50 acres (200,000 m²) in 1888. It was used as a summer home by the Hubbard family, including
Alexander Graham Bell, and is today home of the diplomatic mission of the
Republic of China on Taiwan. Tregaron, present-day home of the
Washington International School, is a Georgian house built in 1912. The neighborhood acquired its name after 1886, when
President Grover Cleveland purchased a stone farmhouse opposite Rosedale and remodeled it into a
Queen Anne-style summer estate called Oak View or Oak Hill (by other accounts, Red Top). After Cleveland lost his
bid for re-election in 1888, he sold the property in February 1890 to developer
Francis Newlands, whose under-construction
Rock Creek Railway streetcar line would galvanize the area's development. The Oak View subdivision was platted that year, the Cleveland Heights subdivision around the same time, Red Top in the meantime was inhabited by Washington architect Robert I. Fleming and later by his widow, and eventually demolished in 1927 to be replaced on the same site by the neo-Georgian mansion that still stands at 3536 Newark Street NW. Early large-scale development was spurred by the neighborhood's upland topography, which provided a breezy relief from the hot, fetid air in the lowlands that were then the built-up area of Washington, D.C. Most of the houses built during this period show their intended use as summer houses in the era before
air conditioning, having such architectural features as wide porches, large windows, and long, overhanging eaves. ==Civic Groups==