September Events, November Exhibition at Woodrow Wilson House
By • August 14, 2025 0 849
A half-dozen miles apart in distance — but worlds apart in other ways — the Washington, D.C., neighborhoods of Kalorama and Deanwood have a presidential connection.
When, in March of 1921, Woodrow and Edith Wilson moved out of the Executive Residence and into a Georgian Revival house at 2340 S St. NW in Kalorama, a Black couple, Isaac and Mary Scott, moved in as household staff, living on the fourth floor.
Ten years later, the Scotts bought their own home in Deanwood at 4434 Hunt Place NE, initially spending one night a week there and the other six nights on S Street. They later commuted between Ward 7 and Ward 2 by streetcar, continuing to assist Edith Wilson, widowed in 1924, into the 1950s.
On Wednesday, Sept. 10, at 6 p.m., the President Woodrow Wilson House will host “From the Woodrow Wilson House to Deanwood: An African American Perspective.” Admission is $15.
At the event, preservation activist and filmmaker Michelle A. Jones and Dr. Robert Cosby of Howard University will use the Scotts’ story as the starting point for a discussion of Deanwood’s history, its experience of gentrification and displacement, the legacy of African American architects in D.C. and the current state of Black homeownership in the District, focusing on Deanwood’s elderly residents.
The President Woodrow Wilson House at 2340 S St. NW was designed in 1916 by Waddy Butler Wood. Courtesy Wilson House.
The event is something of a warm-up for a provocative new exhibition opening at the President Woodrow Wilson House on Veterans Day, Tuesday, Nov. 11: “Wilson’s Washington, America’s Struggle: Race and Civil Liberties in the Capital.”
The accomplishments of the 28th president, whose two terms ran from 1913 to 1921, include initiating the Federal Reserve System and the income tax, outlining his influential “Fourteen Points” to end World War I in a speech to Congress in January of 1918 and, in that speech, proposing the creation of a League of Nations (which the U.S. did not join and which was later superseded by the U.N.).
But in recent years, those accomplishments have been overshadowed by the Wilson White House’s implementation of segregation in federal agencies. Wilson has been characterized as a racist; his name was removed in 2020 from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton — his alma mater, where he taught and served as president — and in 2022 from the D.C. high school renamed Jackson-Reed (for Edna Burke Jackson and Vincent E. Reed, the school’s first African American teacher and principal, respectively).
Offering “a nuanced view of President Woodrow Wilson’s legacy,” the exhibition “Wilson’s Washington, America’s Struggle” will display rare artifacts, share personal stories and make use of interactive media.
“This exhibition is an honest reckoning with our city’s and our nation’s history,” said Wilson House Executive Director Elizabeth Karcher. “We ask: What did liberty mean in Wilson’s Washington? Who had access to power, and who was denied? And how do those struggles resonate in our capital today?”
The opening-day programming on Nov. 11 will include guided tours, a panel on civil liberties in America today and a community dialogue event.
“This is not just a story about the past,” said Karcher. “It’s a story about who we are now, and who we aspire to be.”
Designed in 1916 by prolific Washington architect Waddy Butler Wood — also architect of what is now the National Museum of Women in the Arts — the President Woodrow Wilson House is furnished as “a time capsule of 1924,” the year of Wilson’s death at age 67, five years after he suffered a stroke in office.
Wilson’s second wife, Edith (who he married late in 1915, after the death of his first wife, Ellen, mother of his three children), lived on until 1961, bequeathing the house and its contents to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The house opened as a museum in 1963.
Some highlights of the beautifully preserved rooms: a century-old Steinway piano from the White House, a framed mosaic given by Pope Benedict XV to Wilson on his 1919 visit to Italy and a Gobelin tapestry presented by the people of France following World War I.
Inspired by the Roaring Twenties, a Prohibition Tour and Vintage Game Night will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 30, with 1920s attire welcome. Tickets for the one-hour Prohibition Tour at 5 p.m. and general admission to the Vintage Game Night (including two drink tickets and snacks) is $40; general admission to the Vintage Game Night only, with entrance at 5:30 p.m., is $20.
Other than for events, admission to the house is by advance registration only. Visitors can choose from a menu of ticketed scheduled tours, including a self-guided Garden Tour and guided General, Museum Highlights, Architecture and Prohibition Tours. Also available are the guided tours “The Struggle for Liberation: Three Generations of Wilson Women” and “Under One Roof: Living & Working at the Wilson House,” in which participants learn about the Scotts.
The President Woodrow Wilson House
2340 S St. NW
Closed Sundays and Aug. 15, 22 and 29
202-387-4062
