One out of every 36 people in Washington, D.C., is a lawyer. It’s been a city demographic since the turn of the 19th century, when expanding American businesses dispatched their legal troops to the District to do battle with the courts and Congress. But amid that historical horde one Washington lawyer stood out, honored and unmatched in influence, and his Bethesda country estate, Stone Ridge, would rise in equal prominence, a noble proclamation of his position among the legal elite.
George Ernest Hamilton was born in 1854 in Charles County, Md., the son of John and Mary Hamilton, old-line Catholics and prosperous proprietors of the Prospect Hill plantation. His was a privileged Southern boyhood, set among the tobacco and the slaves, an antebellum world that would soon be shattered by the onset of the Civil War. The family fortune dwindled as the conflict raged. Still, the Hamiltons remained among the gentry and, befitting their status, at the war’s end in 1865 sent 11-year-old George off for a proper preparatory education to the Jesuit-run Georgetown College in Washington.
Young George showed a prodigious capacity for learning and moved with ease through preparatory school, then through college and law school at Georgetown, earning his legal degree in 1874, a member of the second law school class to graduate. His perspicacity caught the attention of the preeminent Washington lawyers Martin Morris and Richard Merrick, who invited the 20-year-old Hamilton to join their firm. Hamilton prospered under their tutelage and, following the death of Merrick in 1885, became a partner in the firm. He gained renown for his “forcible and eloquent speech,” encyclopedic knowledge of the law and indefatigable defense of American business. He landed lucrative clients such as the B&O Railroad, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and became head of the District Bar Association. He was one of the organizers of the Union Trust Company, served as general counsel and president of the Capital Traction trolley company, helped organize the Court of Appeals of the District, now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and was the first lawyer admitted to practice before it.
But Hamilton’s greatest legacy would begin in 1885, when he joined the faculty of the Georgetown School of Law. For the next 60 years he would be an influential figure in the life of the school and its scholars, imparting his legal wisdom to generations. He twice served as dean of the law school, his second term beginning in 1914 and ending with his retirement in 1943—the longest tenure of any dean of an American law school. Impressively, at his retirement, all but four of the 1,800 Georgetown law alumni then living had been his students.
In 1892, Hamilton married Louise Merrick, daughter of his late associate, and the couple settled into domesticity in a rented residence on 16th Street Northwest, idyllic until a paper shade on a lamp accidentally ignited, setting the lace curtains in the front parlor ablaze in a fire that would destroy the entire contents of the house. All that Louise Hamilton managed to save was the family silverware.
Shortly thereafter, in 1893, the Hamiltons began construction of a new home on S Street near New Hampshire Avenue. Local architect Leon Dessez, an acquaintance of Hamilton’s, was directed to create a residence “where the colonial style will be strictly followed,” wrote an architectural critic for The Washington Post.
Dessez enjoyed a brisk business at the turn of the 19th century, specializing in the design of imposing residences for the city’s elite. Among his commissions, in 1893, he was made a director of the Chevy Chase Land Company and charged with ensuring that the homes constructed in the new development met the highest standards for quality and price, with houses fronting Connecticut Avenue to cost no less than $5,000 and those on other streets no less than $3,000. In May 1893, Dessez became the suburban community’s first resident, moving into a house on Connecticut Avenue just northwest of Chevy Chase Circle.
In 1904, Hamilton would turn to Dessez again to design a new country home on a 20-acre parcel he had purchased that year, fronting the old Rockville Pike just north of the little crossroads village of Bethesda. It was to be a rural retreat, far From the stifling humid heat of inner-city summers, and built for a growing family that eventually embraced seven children—five daughters and two sons. Dessez returned to the Colonial era as inspiration for the design of the new estate.
Built on the property’s highest point, atop a long ridge studded with stony out-croppings, the massive brick house would be reminiscent of the 18th century manor homes, solid and stately, that Hamilton knew as a boy. Across the west-facing front, shuttered windows flanked a square, balustraded portico sheltering a large center doorway surmounted by a leaded fanlight. Its arch is repeated in the fan-shaped panel of the window directly above. Atop this, at the center of the gable roof, rose a large dormer crowned by its own fanlight, a shape echoed in the rounded windows of two smaller dormers that sat on either side.
Inside, a broad entrance hall was dominated by an open two-story staircase, its slender, turned balusters supporting a curving banister leading to the bedrooms. At the hall’s eastern end was a mirror image of the front door, the arch of its fanlight reflected in a rounded, barrel-vault ceiling. To the right was the expansive dining room, serviced by a domestic staff bringing meals from the basement kitchen. To the left was the spacious living room, large and inviting and soon to be the site of a never-ending parade of parties for which the Hamiltons became famously known throughout Washington society.
As Hamilton’s stature as a lawyer and businessman grew in the early 20th century, so did his country estate. He quintupled his land holdings with the purchase of adjacent parcels. He created a small village on his property, building a tenant house, cow barn, auto shed and sundry other outbuildings. He expanded the house, creating what The Post exclaimed was “one of the loveliest homes near the Capital, a fine Georgian house standing high on a hill, surrounded by spreading lawns and beautiful gardens.” Aptly, he named his estate Stone Ridge.
By the early 1920s, George and Louise had taken up permanent residence at their Bethesda home, enjoying the country life and hosting parties that were highlights of the social season. In the spring, Louise, dressed in chiffon, her hair topped by a wide-brimmed straw hat, would hold a huge garden fete to show off her thousands of flowers in full bloom. In the fall, the Hamiltons would hold a sumptuous feast honoring that Chesapeake delicacy, the oyster.
“The huge Georgian house standing on a high elevation dominates the rolling lawns and farmlands beyond,” one oyster-fest attendee, Evelyn Payton Gordon, wrote in The Washington Post in 1934. As the guests arrived, “hundreds of cars rolled up the drive under the maple trees which gleamed bright yellow and red in the lights from the house and from the motors,” Gordon reported. Inside, Louise and her daughters received the guests in the living room, where built-in bookcases, chintz-covered chairs, soft lights and a crackling fire “made a cheery setting.” Congressmen, U.S. Supreme Court justices, foreign diplomats and noted legal and business leaders mingled with debutantes and young couples.
In a grove of trees off the back terrace, dozens of men piled oysters into ovens, while several more opened and served the succulent bivalves to the waiting guests. In the dining room, the horde gathered around a long buffet groaning with whole turkeys, roast suckling pigs, country ham, joints of lamb and a grand display of salads, hot biscuits and rolls.
Just three years after retiring, in 1946, George Hamilton died at the age of 92. His wife, Louise, died the next year, and the 100-acre estate was divided among the children. However, their daughter Louise, who had earlier moved to Albany, N.Y., and become a member of the Catholic order of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, had a vision of Stone Ridge as the perfect setting for the order’s Washington-area school, offering a bucolic campus for young women in pursuit of knowledge. Since 1923, Sacred Heart had operated a school on Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest D.C., but by the end of World War II, the number of students had outgrown the city quarters. So in 1947, the order acquired the estate house and a surrounding 35 acres, and that year opened the Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, with 150 students, 25 instructors and seven lay assistants. Eventually the school took the name of Stone Ridge.
As the school grew during the ’50s and ’60s, the historic home known as Hamilton House was expanded to accommodate the burgeoning student population. Today, with more than 650 students, the grounds of the estate have been populated with a host of modern academic buildings. Still, the historic house remains the centerpiece of the school, a fitting memorial to a man who devoted 60 years of his life to the education of others.
Mark Walston is an author and historian raised in Bethesda and now residing in Olney.
