The N. Webster Chappell House Washington, D. C.

The first decade of the twentieth century brought new city services to Tenleytown: a firehouse, a water tower and reservoir and a telephone exchange. By 1909, the streetcar connection operated between Friendship Heights and downtown. Web Chappell, a member of one of Tenleytown’s oldest families had designed one of the original American University Park houses. With projecting bays and a wrap-around porch, this two-story house, which he designed for himself is similar in style and massing to the AU Park house. Chappell designed and built several other houses in Tenleytown and at least one commercial establishment. Chappell was a past Most Worshipful Master of the Singleton Masonic Lodge in Tenleytown, and is thought to be the first in Tenleytown to own a motor car, a Maxwell one-seater!

The land on which the Chappell House sits was once part of the Murdock tract that became the nineteenth-century Dunblane estate. It is situated in a swath of historically significant Tenleytown sites, from Eldbrooke (now Citizen Heights) Church to Janney Elementary School on the north, the Convent of Bon Secours on the east, and Dunblane/Immaculata and Dumblane to the south.

(Listed in DC Inventory of Historic Sites, 2011)