Celebrate 75 Years of Dumbarton Oaks Park, June 4

Along with the centennial of the National Park Service, Georgetown’s Dumbarton Oaks Park will celebrate its 75th birthday this Saturday, June 4, noon to 2:30 p.m. The park land was donated by Ambassador Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss in 1940.

“Gate opens on the fabulous verdant summer garden at noon,” announced the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy, a nonprofit of concerned volunteers that helps to maintain and improve the park.

Tara Morrison, NPS superintendent of Rock Creek Park, will address the crowd and open the gate of the park. There will be Park Partner exhibits, walking tours, children’s activities and live music. Park stewardship volunteer hours are 9 to 11:30 a.m. Gate opening and tours will be noon to 2:30 p.m. — and the party features Twenty20, a D.C. boy band.

Here are more details for June 4:

9 a.m. — Service project, weeding and maintaining tree planting
 along Lovers’ Lane (which begins at R Street and leads to the entrance of the park).

Noon —  Ceremonial gate re-opening with Rock Creek Park Superintendent Tara Morrison.

12:30 p.m. — Performance from Washington’s very own Twenty20.

1 p.m. — Drawing lessons with landscape architect Carla Ellern.

1:30 p.m. — Restoration tour with the Montgomery County Conservation Corps
and DOPC Project Manager Amanda Shull.

1:45 p.m. — Bird walk (all ages) with birder Kate Moore.

Featured exhibitors will include:

British School of Washington, Carla Ellern Landscape Architecture, City Wildlife, DOPC Environmental Education, George Washington University Undergraduate Honey Bee Lab and Apiary, Jelleff Boys and Girls Club (face painting), Montgomery County Conservation Corps, Rock Creek Birdsong Project, Rock Creek Park and Urban Adventure Squad.

A recipient of the National Capitol Region 2015 Hartzog Volunteer Group Award, Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy has clocked in 30,000 volunteer hours, it says. It will be participating in Stone Soup Films Doc-in-a-Day.

*The establishment of Dumbarton Oaks Park is a remarkable Georgetown story, told below by the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy.*

“In 1920, a career U.S. diplomat and his wife, Ambassador Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss, returning to Washington from 20 years abroad, purchased an early 19th-century mansion surrounded by six acres of disheveled gardens and ‘gentleman’s farmland’ on the northern edge of Georgetown.

“With a goal of creating, in Robert Bliss’s words, ‘a country estate in the city,’ over the next 20 years, the couple vastly expanded that acreage and, under the guidance of landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, created one of the greatest garden ensembles in American landscape history.

“Farrand’s 1921 design envisaged a carefully phased transition from formal gardens near the mansion to informal gardens further away, ending in a designed pastoral and woodland landscape in the valley below the mansion, centered on a stream with numerous constructed waterfalls and ponds.

“In a remarkable act of generosity, in 1940 the Blisses — still healthy and only in their 60s — donated their estate. The mansion, out-buildings, and formal gardens nearby went to Harvard University (Robert Bliss’s alma mater) for use as one of the world’s leading research institutes in three fields in the humanities. The majority of the estate, comprising the carefully contrived pastoral and woodland — 27 acres which are now Dumbarton Oaks Park — was donated by the Blisses to the American people, as represented by the National Park Service, which since has administered the park as a unit of Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.

“The donation in 1940 coincided with the ongoing Great Depression and soon thereafter World War II, which would consume the nation’s energies. The National Park Service thus from the beginning was limited in the resources necessary to maintain the park, which slowly deteriorated over decades. Community efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s helped restore some of the park and also catalyzed National Park Service support. Those efforts achieved some visual improvements and successes in conservation landscaping, but not fundamental break-through solutions to the underlying issues of invasive plants and hydrologic (water drainage, stormwater surge, and erosion) problems.

“The Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy, created in 2010, respects the previous efforts but affirms — at cost of modesty — that we are the best organized, best supported organization in 75 years to bring back this park. By tackling the underlying problems in order to create a long-term sustainable and affordable environment, the conservancy believes that Dumbarton Oaks Park can contribute to the community and ‘polish up’ a true aesthetic gem of American landscape design.”