Georgetown, DC: The Canal, the History & the Neighborhood Beyond M Street

Georgetown likes to remind you it was here first, and it's not wrong. The Maryland General Assembly chartered the "Town of George" in 1751 — a full forty years before anyone decided to put the nation's capital next door. It sat at the highest point on the Potomac that ocean-going ships could reach, which made it a serious tobacco port; by 1791 George Washington himself called it the greatest tobacco market in Maryland, maybe the whole country. When the federal city got drawn around it, Georgetown just kept being Georgetown, and it stayed a separately governed town until 1871.

The receipts are still standing. The Old Stone House on M Street went up in 1766 and is the oldest structure in DC still sitting on its original foundation — a modest little pre-Revolutionary house wedged between shops, run by the National Park Service, free to walk into, with a surprisingly peaceful garden out back. It survives mostly because of a legend (false, but useful) that George Washington slept there. Hours shift seasonally, so check the NPS site before you build a stop around it.

The version of Georgetown on the postcards — rich, white, preppy — is recent. For most of its history, Georgetown had a large Black community, enslaved and free, doing the work that made the port run. After the Civil War, the blocks east of Wisconsin Avenue around Rock Creek became Herring Hill, a thriving Black neighborhood of thousands. Mt. Zion United Methodist Church on 29th Street, founded in 1816 when 125 Black parishioners walked out of a segregated congregation, is the oldest Black congregation in the city — it sponsored one of DC's first Black schools in 1823 and served as a station on the Underground Railroad.

That community was largely pushed out in the twentieth century as "restoration" made Georgetown fashionable and expensive — a displacement story that repeats across DC. The history is still visible if you look: Mt. Zion still holds services, and the Mt. Zion–Female Union Band Society cemeteries off Q Street, where free and enslaved Black Washingtonians were buried, have gained international recognition as a Site of Memory associated with UNESCO's Slave Route Project. The neighborhood's African American Heritage Trail maps the rest. For the citywide story, start with our Chocolate City guide.

The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal starts in Georgetown and runs 184.5 miles to Cumberland, Maryland — a nineteenth-century freight highway that never quite beat the railroad, which is exactly why it survived as a park. The Georgetown stretch is the prettiest urban mile of it: green water, stone walls, old warehouse buildings converted to homes and offices, and a flat towpath that locals treat as a running trail. After a decade with no boats in the water, Georgetown Heritage and the Park Service brought back mule-free, electric-powered canal boat rides on a handsome new boat — guided, about an hour, boarding near the canal visitor center around Thomas Jefferson Street NW. They run seasonally and sell out; check the current schedule before you go.

Keep walking south and you hit Georgetown Waterfront Park, which is the neighborhood's best free afternoon: river breeze, Key Bridge and the Kennedy Center in view, rowing shells sliding past, and a fountain kids run through in summer. You can rent kayaks and paddleboards near the waterfront in season, or just get ice cream and watch the Potomac do its thing.

M Street and Wisconsin Avenue are the two spines, and on a Saturday they are a full-contact shopping experience — national chains at street level, independents and design shops as you climb Wisconsin toward Book Hill. Go early or go on a weekday; by mid-afternoon on a nice weekend the sidewalks are shoulder to shoulder. The side streets are the actual reward: get one block off M and you're walking past Federal rowhouses that have been standing since before the Constitution had amendments.

The famous stuff is real and worth a detour. The Exorcist Steps — the steep 75-step staircase at 36th and Prospect where the movie ends — got official DC landmark status in 2019 and a plaque to match; joggers use them for hill repeats, which is its own kind of horror. Martin's Tavern on Wisconsin, open since 1933, is where then-Senator John F. Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953 — Booth 3, marked with a plaque, and yes you can sit in it if it's free. And the great cupcake rivalry is settled among locals: the tourists queue down the block at the famous one, and DC people walk to Baked & Wired by the canal.

North of the retail crush, Georgetown goes quiet and residential, and that's where its best cultural stop hides. Dumbarton Oaks is a Harvard-run research institute with a world-class museum (Byzantine and Pre-Columbian collections, free to enter) and, more famously, sixteen acres of terraced formal gardens that are legitimately among the finest in the country. The gardens are seasonal — roughly March through October, afternoons, closed Mondays — and now run on timed-entry tickets bought in advance, with no sales at the gate, so plan ahead rather than stroll up.

The same upper blocks hold Tudor Place, a Federal-era mansion built by Martha Washington's granddaughter with six generations of family history inside, and Oak Hill Cemetery, a gorgeous Victorian garden cemetery along Rock Creek. Georgetown University anchors the western end of the neighborhood — walk up for the view of Healy Hall's spires, which is the building everyone actually means when they picture the campus.

Here's the thing every visitor learns the hard way: Georgetown has no Metro station. It's the only major DC neighborhood without one. The closest stops are Foggy Bottom–GWU (Blue/Orange/Silver), about a 15-minute walk from M Street, and Rosslyn (same lines), a walk across Key Bridge from the west end. Since the DC Circulator shut down at the end of 2024, Metrobus covers the gap — the D80 runs through Georgetown along Wisconsin and K Street toward Union Station, and the D6 connects to Dupont Circle. Routes get renamed and rejiggered, so check WMATA's trip planner for the current picture.

Honestly, the best approaches are on foot or on two wheels: Capital Bikeshare has docks along M Street and the waterfront, and the walk from Foggy Bottom is painless. Driving is the worst option — parking is scarce and the M Street crawl is real. For the citywide transit basics, see Getting Around DC.