Word: dumbarton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...price is low, but as she has no need of it, I fear she will find it dear," wrote John C. Calhoun of his mother-in-law's $10,000 purchase of Dumbarton Oaks in 1822. At that time, twenty-one years after the estate had been built, it was called Oakly and was surrounded by thirty acres of graden and woodland. Calhoun, himself, soon found that Oakly was an expensive commodity...
Oakly, however, stayed put and prospered. From its location on a hill in the town of Georgetown, it watched every event that occurred in Washington from the time of Jefferson's first administration to the present. In 1940, however, Dumbarton Oaks lost its domestic magnificence and became a part of Harvard University. It was donated to Harvard by its owners since 1920, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, who specified that it be made a center for the study of early Christian and early Byzantine antiquities. To further this end, the Blisses donated their own collection and library...
Starting with the 10,000 volumes given by Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, the Dumbarton Oaks collection has grown to a library of 50,000. The museum, itself, has been augmented by acquisitions of Byzantine coins, seals, and other relics, mostly purchased with funds from the Bliss endowment. The library and collection are the nucleus for the studies of Byzantine scholars, junior fellows on renewable appointments, resident profesors, who are members of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and visiting professors, mostly from the European centers of Byzantine studies. The administration of the Research Library is handled by the Trustees...
...lighter side of Dumbarton Oaks is the gardens surrounding it. The part of the property owned by Harvard covers nearly two city blocks in width and extends over a mile in length. The grounds run from Georgetown, the oldest section of Washington, to the newer but equally plush Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue. The grounds around the main building, which houses the library, museum, and study rooms, are covered with the most beautiful formal gardens in Washington. Not an American Versailles, Dumbarton Oaks, with its fountains, box hedges, and old shade trees, does manage to retain an aristocratic aura...
Coolidge said that the villa could be used as "a research institute for all the humanities." He pointed out that although the University had many scientific outposts, Dumbarton Oaks was the only one devoted to the humanities. He said that the Berenson villa would give the University "an opportunity of creating a center of study in a place where much of our civilization was begun...