Lost

Washington has a rural history of agrarian landscapes and country estates. John Adlum, the Father of American Viticulture, experimented with American grape cultivation at The Vineyard, just north of today's Cleveland Park.

Slave laborers rolled hogsheads - wooden casks filled with tobacco - down present-day Wisconsin Avenue from farms to the port at Georgetown. The growing merchant class built suburban villas on the edges of the District and became the city's first commuters. In 1791, the area was selected as the capital of a new nation, and change from rural to urban was both dramatic and progressive. Author Kim Prothro Williams reveals the rural remnants of Washington, D.C.'s past.

John DeFerrari investigates the bygone institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an engaging collection of new vignettes and reader favorites from his blog "The Streets of Washington."

Washington seems the eternal and unchanging Federal City with its grand avenues and stately monuments. Yet the city that locals once knew - lavish window displays at Woodies, supper at the grand Raleigh Hotel and a Friday night game at Griffith Stadium - is gone. From the raucous age of burlesque at the Gayety Theater and the once bustling Center Market to the mystery of Suter's Tavern and the disappearance of the Key mansion in Georgetown, DeFerrari recalls the lost Washington, D.C., of yesteryear.