Barry Farm

Barry Farm is a neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C., located east of the Anacostia River and is bounded by the Southeast Freeway to the northwest, Suitland Parkway to the northeast and east, and St. Elizabeths Hospital to the south. The neighborhood was renowned as a significant post-Civil-War settlement of free Blacks and freed slaves. The streets were named to commemorate the Union generals and Radical Republicans who advanced the rights of black Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction: Howard Road SE for General Oliver O. Howard; Sumner Road SE for Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner; Wade Road SE for Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade; Pomeroy Road SE for Kansas Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy; and Stevens Road SE for Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. The neighborhood name is not a reference to the late former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, but coincidentally has the same spelling.

In 1867, the Freedmen's Bureau (officially the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) bought a 375-acre farm from David and Julia Barry, white landowners, and transformed Barry Farm into a post-Civil War community of formerly enslaved and free-born African Americans. Earlier, the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, had asked African Americans squatting on land in Washington, D.C., what might help them to become self-supporting. They said, "Land! Give us land!" Howard promised to acquire land near the city. Howard transferred $52,000 from the refugees' and freedmen's fund to be held in trust by himself, Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, and John R. Elvans for the use of three institutions: Howard University, Richmond Normal School, and St. Augustine Normal School in Raleigh. They used some of these funds to purchase Barry Farm. The Bureau sub-divided the farm into one-acre plots, which the freedmen could purchase over a period of seven years. For an additional $76, they could buy lumber to begin constructing a house. By 1869, money from the sale of the land, reportedly $31,178.12, had been returned to the fund and distributed to the three institutions listed above.

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