“On the Fort”: The Fort Reno Community of Washington, DC, 1861–1951
Taylor B. 2021. “On the Fort”: The Fort Reno Community of Washington, DC, 1861–1951. Historic Resource Study. National Park Service & Organization of American Historians. Washington, DC
The Fort Reno neighborhood was a predominantly Black, working-class community that existed on the outskirts of Washington from, roughly, the late 1880s through the 1940s. Over the decades, members of the Fort Reno community supported families, followed professions, worshipped, sought recreation, improved their neighborhood’s infrastructure, and fought for civil rights. Their neighborhood was destroyed by a conspiratorial group of real estate agents, civic leaders, and government officials who sought to ethnically cleanse the far northwest corner of Washington in which Reno stood; Reno residents fought their neighborhood’s destruction, and they kept Reno’s memory alive once they had moved elsewhere. This report details the formation of the Fort Reno community, the contours of daily life in Reno, the religious, recreational, educational, associational, and political activities of Reno’s residents, the campaign to destroy Reno, and Reno residents’ fight to save their community. It also suggests avenues for further research and interpretation of the Reno community. Newspaper records constitute the core of the primary source base for this study; searches of newspaper databases yielded hundreds of articles containing information on the Reno community and its residents. Archival work with Union Army records and the records of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission likewise yielded key information regarding the formation and destruction of the Reno neighborhood. Census records proved crucial to in-depth portraits of families that called Reno home for decades and to developing a sense for how population demographics changed in Reno over the years.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Taylor, Brian
- Date of Issue
- 2021
- Publisher
- National Park Service & Organization of American Historians
- Units
- NCR , ROCR
- Keywords
- African American, Black Church, Black History, churches, civic associations, Civil Rights, Civil War, Civil War Defenses of Washington, communities, community formation, District of Columbia, education, Fort Reno, historic resource study, history, racism, Reconstruction, Reno City, Rock Creek, Rock Creek Park, Washington DC