The following is one of a series of excerpts we’re featuring from Robert Madison’s book, “Walking with Washington”.
The next time you are drinking coffee at Starbucks on the southeast corner of King and Union Streets, look around. You are in an eighteenth-century warehouse built by John Fitzgerald. A former aide-de-camp to General George Washington, John Fitzgerald (d. 1799) moved to Alexandria in 1769 and returned after spending the winter at Valley Forge. He purchased the south side of the 200 block of King Street with Valentine Peers, and the town trustees granted them the “sunken ground” on the south side of King Street east of Lee Street in September 1778. They filled in the area east of Lee Street, and this building was John Fitzgerald’s warehouse. It is typical of the Alexandria waterfront in George Washington’s day. Fitzgerald was Alexandria’s leading Catholic layman, one of the first directors of the Potomac Company and its president from 1793 to 1796, mayor from 1786 to 1787, a member of the Alexandria committee to ratify the U.S. Constitution in 1788, commander of the Alexandria Independent Dragoons, a founder of the Bank of Alexandria in 1792 and the Alexandria Library in 1794, and collector of the port. In his 1793 letter appointing Fitzgerald Collector of Customs of the Port of Alexandria, President Washington slipped from his general policy of not taking personal advantage of his public position and wrote “I am now about [to] give you a little trouble on my private account.” The President wanted Fitzgerald’s help in selling flour and tobacco that he had stored in Alexandria warehouses.
George Washington’s diary shows that he and Fitzgerald met together frequently. Fitzgerald’s home was on the southeast corner of King and Fairfax Streets where the Burke & Herbert Bank is today. Since there was no Catholic church in Alexandria at that time, services were sometimes held in Fitzgerald’s home. According to tradition, while dining there on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1788, George Washington contributed to a fund to build Alexandria’s first Catholic Church. St. Mary’s is the oldest Catholic parish in Virginia.
To learn more about the Fitzgerald Warehouse, read Diane Riker’s “The Fitzgerald Warehouse” in the Summer 2007 issue of the Alexandria Chronicle at:
http://alexandriahistorical.org/upload/warehouse%20plus%20web%209-24-07.pdf
(Adapted from Walking with Washington, available in Alexandria museum gift shops)
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