DACOR Bacon House garden

On the other side of 18th and F Streets, N.W., is the DACOR Bacon House (also known as the Ringgold-Carroll House), built in 1824/5.

On Wednesday evening, I attended a reception there and was able to spend a little time in its nice walled garden — a serene, old-fashioned place in the midst of tall modern office buildings.

Since 1980, the house has been the home of the DACOR Bacon House Foundation and DACOR, Inc.

From 1831 to 1833, it was a boarding house whose tenants included Chief Justice John Marshall and several other Supreme Court Justices. Virginia Murray Bacon and her husband, a U.S. Congressman, bought the house in 1925.  She lived there until her death at the age of 89, when she bequeathed it to the Foundation.

I was told that Mrs. Bacon spotted the garden’s huge willow oak  in the nearby town of Silver Spring about 65 years ago.  She was so taken with it that she bought it and had it dug up and trucked to 18th and F Streets, then hoisted over the garden wall by crane.

DACOR Bacon House also houses the Ringgold-Marshall Museum and can be toured Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m.  It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The DACOR Bacon House Foundation works to develop mutual international understanding and strengthen ties between the people of the United States and other nations.  DACOR, Inc., is an association of retired officers of the U.S. Foreign Service and of other foreign affairs agencies and their spouses.

DACOR members (click the link above) may rent the house and garden for weddings, and it would be a really lovely venue.  (In the 1860s, President and Mrs. Lincoln attended a wedding there.)