SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010
KLMNO Old D.C.’s Manifest Destiny: Staying put.
n March, you noted that the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of D.C. was founded in 1865 primarily to fight efforts to move the U.S. capital from Washington. Do you have further information on this effort to move the capital? It is news to me, and I’d like to know more. — Steve Marshall,Warrenton
I JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
Poor Washington. The mortar was barely dry on its first public buildings when people started agitating for it to be uprooted and plopped down elsewhere. The earliest efforts to move the capital were because of how long it was taking for the darn thing to take shape. A severe shortage of hotels and
boardinghouses meant there was hardly any place to stay in Washington, wrote Whit Cobb in a 1995 article in the Dickinson Law Review on efforts to move the capital. By 1804, Sen. Robert Wright of Maryland was so desperate for lodging that he formally proposed moving the capital to Baltimore. A decade later, more voices joined the chorus. The ease with which the British sailed into Washington in 1814 and put the torch to the city convinced some in Congress that a more defensible location was required. These efforts went nowhere, not least because of the difficulties involved in reimbursing people who had invested in the new capital. In the years after the Civil War, the bandwagon really got moving. In 1867, Rep. John A. Logan of Illinois tried unsuccessfully to create a committee examining the suitability of relocating the capital. He was not alone in feeling that many in Washington were “disloyal,” surrounded as the city was by two former slave-holding states. Two years later, a man named
Logan U. Reavis published a 170-page tract titled “A Change of National Empire; Or Arguments in Favor of the Removal of the National Capital From Washington City to the Mississippi Valley.” In it, he
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Rep. John A. Logan of Illinois tried to get Washington moved to somewhere less “disloyal.”
painstakingly argued that the capital should be moved to “the great Mississippi Valley — to the banks of the Father of Waters — to St. Louis, occupying as she does substantially the geographical center of the nation.” It also happened to be where
Reavis lived. The arguments were basically
that since the country was expanding to the west, the capital should move with it. Not only was St. Louis close to the geographic center of the nation, the population was growing in the West, as was commerce. Washington may have been fine in the country’s early days, but not anymore, or as Reavis put it: “The Atlantic slope and Washington City are but the cradle and place of national life in our governmental infancy, and it is intolerable and impossible to attempt the continued confinement of our national life to that cradle after the nation in its maturer years has grown far away and far too great for that place of childhood.” In other words: We’ve outgrown you, Washington. Congressional supporters of
LOCAL DIGEST VIRGINIA
State’s wine-travel tweets win award
Virginia has won a national tourism award for its social me- dia campaign about wine travel in the state. Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) said the Virginia Tourism Corp. won a Mercury Award for Niche Marketing from the U.S. Travel Association. The industry group awards only 12 each year, and Vir- ginia took top honors for Vintage Tweets. The social media campaign
used Twitter to promote wine tourism and targeted the media, bloggers and consumers. Virginia is home to 160 win- eries and 16 wine trails, and it was recently named one of the top five up-and-coming wine des-
ANIMAL WATCH
The zoo releases a hot Chihuahua
CONNECTICUT AVE. NW, 3100
block, July 31. A Washington Hu- mane Society officer responded to a call from National Zoo police, who had removed a dog that had been left inside a vehicle in a parking lot for more than 30 min- utes. The Chihuahua was taken to the zoo’s police office. When the owner returned to the vehicle, the officer discussed the hazards of leaving a dog unattended in a vehicle in hot weather. The man said that he was unaware of the hazards and that he would not leave the dog unattended in the vehicle again. The dog was re- turned to its owner.
Among cases handled by the Washington Humane Society
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— Associated Press
Known sex offender arrested in store
Fairfax County police arrested
a 59-year-old man for allegedly exposing and touching himself in the toy section of Wal-Mart at the Fair Lakes Shopping Center. Police said that store employ- ees observed Jerome A. Fleming watching children in the store on Aug. 8. He was seen crouching and waiting until adults left the area before allegedly touching him- self, police said. Fleming, a registered sex of-
fender, was charged with making an obscene sexual display and taken to the Fairfax County Adult
Showdown set over proposed Wal-Mart
A trial date has been set on an
effort to block a Wal-Mart Su- percenter near an endangered Civil War battlefield in Orange County. At a hearing Friday, Cir- cuit Court Judge Daniel Bouton scheduled the trial for Jan. 25. In April, Bouton kept alive the
fight to prevent a store near Wil- derness Battlefield, where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first met on the field of battle. The judge ruled that residents who live near the battlefield and a historic group can contest the county’s approval of the store in Locust Grove at trial. — Associated Press
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moving the capital held up money for construction of new federal buildings, but in 1871, funds for the Old Executive Office Building were finally approved. That investment signaled that the capital would stay put. Something else had happened, too: Washington wasn’t such a dump any more. “It was the public improvements that [District Gov. Alexander “Boss” Shepherd] put in from 1871 to 1874 during the territorial government that absolutely drove all the nails into the coffin of capital removal,” said local historian John Richardson. After World War II, a few people attempted to pry the nails out. In 1946, the headline on a New York Times magazine article asked, “Should We Move the Capital to the Rockies?” As you might have guessed, the answer, author Richard L. Neuberger argued, was yes. To the familiar geographical argument, Neuberger (later a senator from Oregon) added a few more: Washington’s scenery was flat and featureless, hardly worthy of the grandeur of the nation. D.C. was too hot, the miserable summers reducing workers’ efficiency to 65 percent. The city was racist and segregated. There was a subtext to
Neuberger’s argument — and to all the others: that Washington was somehow immoral, corrupted and corrupting. “Washington does something to most people, and that something is not good,” Neuberger wrote. Answer Man isn’t sure how moving the capital to St. Louis or Denver would elevate the political discourse. Wouldn’t all the politicians move, too?
Write
answerman@washpost.com.
S
C3
Md. man challenges law on concealed-gun permits
gun from C1
cense?” Woollard said. Under cur- rent law, the only people likely to carry guns are criminals who do not follow the law anyway, Wool- lard said. “And the police, as good as they are, show up after the fact.” After the 2002 break-in, Wool- lard said, he and his family waited 21
⁄2 hours for police to arrive. Cpl.
Michael Hill, a Baltimore County police spokesman, said records show that the 911 call came in at 9:52 p.m. and that because of icy roads, holiday staffing and the ru- ral location, officers did not arrive until about 11. The Second Amendment Foun-
dation, a Bellevue, Wash.-based nonprofit group that was a plain- tiff in McDonald v. Chicago has joined Woollard’s lawsuit against the state police and the Maryland Handgun Permit Review Board. The lawsuit says that people should not have to prove “a good and substantial reason,” as re- quired by Maryland law, to exer- cise a fundamental constitutional right.
“I think that what’s going to happen now is, we’re going to start to test where these boundar- ies lie in what is a ‘reasonable’ and an ‘unreasonable’ regulation,” said Dave Workman, a spokesman for the Second Amendment Foun- dation, which is challenging simi- lar discretionary regulations in New York and North Carolina. CeaseFire Maryland, a nonprof- it group that advocates for gun control, brushed off the challenge. “Good luck to him,” spokesman
Casey Anderson said. “I would have a hard time imagining that the Supreme Court is going to say you have a constitutional right to hide a firearm on your person.” Elena Russo, a state police
spokeswoman, said the agency could not discuss a pending law- suit. In 2002, there were 4,405 Mary-
land residents with active permits to carry concealed handguns. As of July 31 this year, there are 47,471 active concealed-carry per- mits. In Virginia, there are more than 228,000.
A private person
Woollard is an unlikely person to become the face of a resurgent gun rights movement. The Navy veteran is an electrician and works for a government contrac- tor in Baltimore, and he said he never gave much thought to using guns for personal protection until the break-in. He said the Reming- ton 12-gauge shotgun he used against the intruder had only been used to hunt deer and small- er game. His neighbors along Saint
Abrahams Court describe him as private. Several said they have heard him shoot targets more of- ten than they have heard him talk. Another said Woollard rigged a motion detector on his driveway, which snakes off the hard road for nearly a mile through fields and past a deer stand and a pond. But he’s not reclusive. Several neighbors said Woollard took part in a neighborhood campaign or- ganized by the Prettyboy Water- shed Preservation Society to block Loyola College’s plan to build a re- treat near their properties. Robin VandeWater, 49, said Woollard called her recently to spread the word that a coyote had been spot- ted near their homes. In a phone interview the day af- ter the lawsuit was filed, Woollard described a furious struggle with the Christmas Eve intruder, say- ing that the man had grabbed Woollard’s shotgun, causing it to tumble down some stairs. Wool- lard’s son, Bradley, then 25, got another shotgun and helped sub- due the intruder. Woollard, who said he has not had so much as a traffic violation since 1965, said he did not know the intruder. He described him as
“some kind of nut” and declined to identify him. His lawsuit does not identify the intruder, but it says he has been released from prison and lives three miles from Woollard’s home.
A family connection
Court records show that the man who broke in nearly eight years ago was Woollard’s son-in- law, Kris Lee Abbott, 40, who has a history of depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic vio- lence. After pleading guilty to third- degree burglary in the break-in, Abbott received an 18-month sus- pended sentence and three years’ probation. Court records show that his
probation was terminated unsat- isfactorily and that he was sent to jail after a series of violations, in- cluding a burglary in Carroll County and a violent confronta- tion with police in Baltimore County. After the break-in, Woollard obtained a two-year permit to car- ry his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The permit was renewed in 2005.
When he attempted to renew it again, Woollard said he was told that he had failed to show evi- dence of “apprehended fear,” such as police reports indicating that he had been subjected to threats or harassment. The state police denied his application April 1, 2009. The Handgun Permit Re- view Board upheld the denial in November. Asked about denying that he
knew the intruder, Woollard said he was trying to protect his daughter. “This is about me being denied my permit,” Woollard said. “It’s not about my family, or my parents, or whoever was there that night.”
kunklef@washpost.com
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
Suspect ‘never had any issues’ spray from C1
Saturday on a $50,000 bond, had no criminal record prior to the case, according to police and his attorneys. “He does have an explanation and an expectation that he is go- ing to be found not guilty of these accusations,” defense attorney David Martella said. Edwards worked for a private
firm, Stronghold Security, guard- ing the front gate and making rounds at the Washington drink- ing water treatment plant on MacArthur Boulevard, which is part of the Washington Aqueduct, according to court records and Tom Jacobus, general manager of the facility. “He did his job and brought no
attention to himself,” Jacobus said.
Edwards cleared a background check before getting his latest job,
Jacobus said. After the allegations came to light, he was removed from his duties. There were no in- dications that Edwards had done anything untoward at the plant. “We pay a lot of attention to
what goes on here,” Jacobus said. Diane Edwards spoke on her
son’s behalf at a court hearing Thursday and told a judge that she would take her son into her home if he is released. He was liv- ing alone in an apartment in Montgomery County at the time of his arrest, according to court records.
Diane Edwards said her son’s girlfriend of 10 years has stood with him since the charges were filed. She said that although her son has only been charged, exten- sive media attention gives the im- pression that he already has been convicted. “It’s very sad,” she said. “He can’t work.” The case began July 15, when
police were called to Giant. Using store surveillance video and other clues, detectives charged Ed- wards with squirting semen onto a woman as he followed her out of the store. In that case, and in the case at
Michaels, detectives tested cloth- ing worn by the victims — a skirt from the Giant shopper, a sweater from the Michaels shopper — and they came back positive for se- men, according to court records. In the other cases, detectives don’t know who the alleged vic- tims are. They have not stepped forward, authorities say, perhaps because they don’t know what happened.
Gaithersburg police ask anyone with information about the case to call 301-258-6400.
morsed@washpost.com
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
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