Decatur House

Decatur House sits at the northwest corner of Lafayette Square, one block north of the White House. The house was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect best known for his work on the U.S. Capitol, and completed in 1818 for naval officer Stephen Decatur Jr. and his wife Susan Wheeler Decatur. Decatur, already a celebrated hero of the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, paid for the house with prize money from his naval career.

The Decaturs lived there for only fourteen months. A long-standing dispute with Commodore James Barron, whom Decatur had testified against in a court-martial following the Chesapeake-Leopard affair, culminated in a duel at Bladensburg, Maryland, on the morning of March 22, 1820. Both men fired at eight paces; Decatur was struck in the abdomen and carried back to the Lafayette Square house, where he died later that night.

After Decatur's death the house was rented to a series of prominent political figures, including Secretaries of State Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, and Edward Livingston. Clay brought his household staff with him during his 1827-1829 tenure, including an enslaved woman named Charlotte Dupuy. In 1829, Dupuy filed a freedom suit against Clay in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. Although the court ruled against her, she eventually obtained her freedom in 1840.

In 1872 the house was purchased by General Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and the Beale family added the H Street wing and Victorian-era interior alterations that visitors see today. Beale's descendants donated the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1956. The site is now operated by the White House Historical Association as a museum interpreting both the Decatur and Beale eras and the lives of the people enslaved on the property.