History of Dumbarton United Methodist Church

Dumbarton United Methodist Church has been a continuous presence in Georgetown since 1772.  The congregation initially gathered in a cooper’s shop near the riverfront, then built a church on Montgomery Street (now 28th Street) in 1795, and finally moved to its current location on Dumbarton Avenue, now Dumbarton Street, beginning services in 1850.  The church underwent a significant remodeling in 1897, which included the addition of the Romanesque front facade that still stands today.  Stained-glass windows were installed between 1898 and 1900.  Established before the official creation of the Methodist Church, Dumbarton is one of the oldest continuously operating Methodist congregations in the world.

Pre-Founding History

No honest history of Methodism, or any denomination anywhere in America, can begin without first acknowledging that the lands on which our churches now stand were taken from their original possessors by Europeans.  For a brief history of that taking, leading to the founding of Georgetown and ultimately the District of Columbia, click here.

A tobacco port first settled by Scots and founded in 1751, Georgetown was a busy and successful port city by the 1770's, looking to rival Baltimore as a maritime gateway to the northwestern territories of Ohio and beyond.  The Maryland legislature incorporated the town in 1789, when the toddling U.S. government began planning the District of Columbia.  The settlement initially teemed with blacksmiths, boat builders, teamsters, wharf workers, coopers for the tobacco barrels, and these workers’ families.  Decades later, millers eventually replaced tobacco traders as wheat replaced tobacco as Georgetown’s primary cash crop.  Mills run by waterpower lined the Georgetown waterfront. 

Humble Beginnings

The group that would later become Dumbarton UMC was originally neither Methodist nor even a church, let alone one named Dumbarton.  Methodism’s British founder, John Wesley, never intended his followers, dubbed “Methodists” by scoffers in England, to become independent of the Anglican Church.  A group calling itself the “Georgetown Society” met on December 24, 1772, in a barrel maker’s shop in Georgetown, now part of Washington, DC.  This marked the Society’s founding, because the faithful had obtained their first permanently appointed but still-unordained traveling pastor.  The congregants were attracted to the fervent, Bible-driven evangelism of often self-appointed circuit riding pastors who traveled up and down the Atlantic seaboard on horseback, preaching that salvation through faith was available to all, regardless of wealth or station. For one contemporary congregant’s sometimes irreverent view of Dumbarton’s and early Methodism’s unpromising beginnings, click here.

The American Revolution Through the War of 1812

The Georgetown Society struggled during the American Revolution.  Its members were widely assumed to be loyal to the Church of England, a beneficiary of detested British taxes on the colonists, and John Wesley, the Anglican founder of Methodism, was a pacifist and vocal supporter of the British Crown.  This divided the Society as the fight for independence raged on. 

Despite these challenges, the congregation received several visits from Francis Asbury, Wesley’s chosen representative to the colonies who split from his mentor in 1784 to become the founder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America.  The Montgomery Street church was also where John Hersey, one of the most significant Methodist evangelists of the 19th century, experienced his conversion. 

One of the church’s early leaders was Henry Foxall, who owned the Columbia Foundry, producing 300 heavy guns and 30,000 rounds of shot annually for the U.S. Navy.  Deeply grateful to God that his foundry wasn’t destroyed when the British occupied Washington in 1814, Foxall, himself a mayor of Georgetown and a lay preacher, contributed substantial funds to support his Montgomery Street church and found several new ones in the District.  When questioned about the apparent contradiction between his roles as an armorer of war and a proclaimer of peace, he famously replied, “If I do make guns to destroy men’s bodies, I build churches to save their souls.” 

Before, During, and After the Civil War

In the antebellum period, African-Americans, many of them enslaved, were relegated to the church balcony during worship.  Disgusted by their second-class status, many Black members left in 1813 to form what in 1815 became Mount Zion Church on 29th Street NW, now the oldest predominantly-Black United Methodist Church in Washington.  Other Black parishioners remained with the Montgomery Street congregation, which continued to prosper during the first half of the century.  Eventually, the church completed its current building on what is now Dumbarton Street in late 1849. 

From 1816 to the 1860’s, both Mt. Zion and Dumbarton continued to bury their dead in the same cemetery, but it took another 150 years and a financial crisis for the cemetery to bring the two churches closer to a mutually respectful relationship. 

The onset of the Civil War further divided the congregation, with members sending their sons to fight for both the Union and the Confederacy.  Meanwhile, many slaveowners in the congregation also received compensation from the District of Columbia for freeing their slaves under the city’s Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862.

After the Second Battle of Manassas in July 1862, Dumbarton was converted to a hospital to care for some of the many casualties that overwhelmed the city.  Legend has it that Walt Whitman came there to read to the wounded, as he was known to have done at other field hospitals, but only Dumbarton oral tradition supports this story.  It probably fits Mark Twain’s definition of a lie that’s acquired the dignity of age.

Abraham Lincoln attended the church’s March 1863 rededication service after it was decommissioned as a hospital, and the President was reportedly “moved to tears” by the sermon.  For an imagined monologue of Lincoln’s reflections on that Sunday as he was gathering his thoughts months later for the Gettysburg Address, click here. 

Following the Civil War, Dumbarton continued to serve the residents of Georgetown.  In 1871, however, Georgetown ceased to exist as a separate city and was absorbed into Washington, DC.  The identity of Georgetown was further eroded in 1895 when many streets were renamed to fit the DC grid system, though Dumbarton Street retained its original name.  In 1898, the church underwent renovations that gave it the appearance it has today.

Changing Fortunes in the Late 19th Century

Dumbarton’s membership grew rapidly in the late 19th century as the Methodist Episcopal Church became the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.  Church members embraced the camp meeting movement, attending out-of-town religious retreats.  Dumbarton's growth slowed, however, as Georgetown’s industries relocated, taking many church members with them.  Change also came with a massive flood in 1889.  Within six years, Georgetown lost its status as a port of entry into the United States. By 1915, it was considered out of the way, unfashionable, and run-down.  Preservation movements in the 1930s began to reverse that, but suburbanization continued to take its toll.  (See Washington at Home: An illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital.  Windsor Publications, Inc., Northridge, California, 1988.)

Challenges,  1900-1960

Like the rest of the nation, Dumbarton’s congregation lost lives to World War I, the 1917-1919 flu epidemic, and World War II.  Dumbartonians also felt the impact of the Great Depression, but reached out, especially to its own members, helping those in need with financial and moral support.   True to its Wesleyan roots, Dumbarton also remained active in discouraging alcohol consumption, even to the end of Prohibition. 

The greatest source of the congregation’s attrition, however, was the increasingly affordable motorcar.  As auto travel became more common, many members moved to the suburbs, joining churches closer to their new homes.  At one point in 1940, Dumbarton had only 65 cents in its bank account.  By any measure but spiritual, it was at death’s door.  That it was able to survive its mid-century years at all was something of a small miracle.

Focus on Peace and Justice:  1960 to the Present

By mid-1968 when the Rev. Harry Kiely arrived as the new pastor, Dumbarton was a “church whose glory was visible only in a rear-view mirror.”  The church had seen the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. that had caused urban riots across the country, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, militant student unrest, and widespread public protest against the Vietnam War.  “The streets of Georgetown,” according to Rev. Kiely, “home of the chic affluent and government power brokers, were crammed, night and day, with hippies.”  (See Rev. Kiely’s chapter in the book “Many Witnesses: A History of Dumbarton United Methodist Church” edited by Jane Donovan, 1998.)

Within this societal context, in a congregation composed primarily of a handful of older members, Rev. Kiely reached out to the few young families affiliated with the church, and with them, began to build something new.  Though no longer a neighborhood church, Dumbarton also began to attract college students from nearby Georgetown University. 

Slowly, primarily through word of mouth, more young families and some singles began to attend and join the church.  Attracted to preaching that stressed John Wesley’s understanding of the Christian life as requiring not only personal piety but social action, these new members formed a community whose foundation survives today. 

The church, once non-political except for its involvement in the temperance movement, became deeply involved in civil rights marches, peace rallies, and both local and global affairs.  This also reflected the people who chose Dumbarton.  Among them were several leaders of organizations and movements devoted to wider justice and social change, including Washington offices lobbying for more effective gun controls, human rights in Latin America, and international labor rights.

New members also integrated their progressive values into the life of the church by instituting new liturgies, incorporating inclusive language, practicing a more collegial form of decision-making, and going so far as to rearrange the pews in a circle rather than the formal rank and file.

Providing Sanctuary from Central American Political Violence

In 1985, Dumbarton helped a Salvadoran refugee enter the country illegally.  The cause was part of the national sanctuary movement in which U.S. churches defied national law by sheltering undocumented refugees fleeing political persecution.  Dumbarton’s special guest, formerly head of the El Salvadoran Mothers of the Disappeared, promptly began exposing the dark side of U.S. support for Central American dictatorships at churches and college campuses across the country.  After her eventual arrest, Dumbarton hired legal counsel to win her political asylum and a green card. 

Church members have also taken numerous mission trips to Latin America and Palestine from the 1980s through the turn of the century to observe conditions, help ameliorate them, and recommend changes in U.S. policy.

Mounting a Children’s Crusade for Nuclear Disarmament

Another notable time in the 1980s was the church’s production of “Alice In Blunderland,” a traveling children’s musical highlighting the dangers of an accelerating nuclear arms race.  Church parents and their kids produced a number of performances at DC-area schools and churches for several years.

Welcoming LGBT+ People

Dumbarton became one of the city’s first Reconciling Congregations in 1987, joining a national movement within the United Methodist Church that came to welcome lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender people, as well as those identifying themselves as gender-diverse.  Many of these individuals joined Dumbarton because it provided a space where all were welcome to worship.  When the District of Columbia legalized same-gender marriage in 2009, Dumbarton became the first United Methodist congregation in the city to celebrate “love and loyalty wherever they are found.”  This defied national UMC policy against homosexuality at the time.

Reviving Common Roots with Mt. Zion

Another transformation began in Dumbarton’s long-distant relationship with Mt. Zion.  By the end of the 1960’s, suburbanization had ravaged both congregations’ memberships to the point where each was staring at a financial precipice.  Dumbarton unanimously approved a proposal to Mt. Zion to merge the two churches, which Mt. Zion politely but firmly declined.  DUMC then turned to what it thought was its only financial lifeline:  selling the cemetery, which it had leased to Mt. Zion for almost 99 years, to a developer.  But the stubborn consciences of one couple brought the congregation to see that it could not faithfully sell off one of the city’s few remaining gravesites for enslaved Blacks. 

Researching their cemetery’s history, both churches came together to push for the cemetery, along with the adjoining Female Union Band Society cemetery, to be declared a national historic site.  Both churches eventually managed to survive their respective financial crises, and the cemeteries are now recognized as an important stop on the Underground Railroad for enslaved Americans escaping to freedom.

Becoming A More Anti-Racist Church

Dumbarton has strengthened its commitment to racial justice in the past few years.  In 2015, the church held a special “Service of Repentance,” and participated in Mt. Zion’s Homecoming Service marking the 200th anniversary of its founding after Black members of our church, tired of being relegated to the balcony during worship, decided to form their own church.  At the Homecoming Service, Dumbarton pastor Dr. Mary Kay Totty read a letter to Mt. Zion publicly apologizing for its past racist policies and practices.  Click here to read the letter.

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and racial justice uprisings around the country, Dumbarton pledged to deepen its commitment to inclusion and work toward becoming an Anti-Racist Church.  The congregation signed on to a pledge by the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church to embody anti-racism as a church.  To read more about this pledge, click here.

In 2022, after the massacre of 11 African Americans in Buffalo by an avowed “Christian Nationalist,” Dumbarton adopted a statement opposing “Christian Nationalism” as an oxymoron completely antithetical to Christian theology.  The statement asserted, among other things, that authentic Christianity does not discriminate by citizenship, national borders, gender, culture, ethnicity, or race.  For the text of the statement, click here.

To back up its opposition to “Christian Nationalism” with more than words, Dumbarton also adopted an addendum to its statement committing itself to a number of actions to re-examine and change its worship, education, community-building, mission, and justice ministries as well as its fiscal decision-making.  To read the addendum, click here.