A Little Bethesda History
from William Offutt's Bethesda - A Social History
Civil War...
Under the parking lot behind Sibley Hospital, lie the
remains of Battery Vermont that, with Fort Marcy across the
Potomac, controlled the river and protected the water sup-
ply of the Capital with their seacoast cannon. The only big
fort in Bethesda itself was Fort Sumner, the remains of
which were easily seen well into the 1950s but have now all
but disappeared under the lawns of upscale subdivisions and
the Defense Mapping Agency.
Sumner was a huge fortress composed of three connected
redoubts called Kirby (Fort Franklin), Cross (Fort Ripley)
and Davis (Fort Alexander) built on three small knolls with
a total perimeter of about 850 yards. The fort was named for
General Edwin Vose Sumner, a veteran of the Black Hawk and
Mexican wars and the bloody disturbances in Kansas. Its
cleared fields of fire spread from present-day MacArthur
Boulevard to Massachusetts Avenue north of Little Falls
Branch and included the homes of the Loughboroughs and the
Brookes, who like most of their neighbors were Southern
sympathizers.
For most of the war years hundreds of soldiers camped at the
complex to man the twenty-two large cannons, the battery of
mobile 6-pounders, and pair of Coehorn mortars as well as
the trenchlines between the gun platforms. Widower Edmund H.
Brooke of "Oak Hill" and his daughters, Maria and Anne, all
Rebels at heart, learned to tolerate the attentions of the
First Maine Heavy Artillery.
