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| History of Klingle Valley | ||
For thousands of years, Klingle was a natural forested stream valley. The stream recently reclaimed parts of Klingle road. Klingle road began life as Joshua Pierce's Road and was first laid out in 1831 as a connection between the owner's estate, Linnaean Hill, and Pierce's Mill Road (now Tilden St.) on the east. Four hundred years ago when Captain John Smith first spied Rock Creek, second and third order tributaries spread out from the mainstem like tree branches. Its mouth was a quarter mile wide across the tidal Potomac; Algonquin Indians settled on its banks, spearing eel, shad, and herring. A quartz quarry up the Piney Branch tributary marks some of the only remnants left from these tribes (sixteen quarries also have been found along the valley, but were used by white settlers to build the city).
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Today only the Peirce Mill remains. The patriarch Isaac Pierce provided generously for his eighth child and youngest son, Joshua (1795-1869), giving him 82 acres of land adjacent and south of his own farm. This large stone farmhouse was originally constructed by Issac Pierce in 1823 and was later re-built with Joshua as the Klingle mansion on Linnaean Hill.
Joshua Pierce-Klingle became a prosperous nurseryman and landscape gardener who specialized in the cultivation of camellias and other exotic plants. He named his estate "Linnaean Hill" in honor of the famous Swedish botanist Carl von Linne, inventor of the system of binomial nomenclature for biological species.
His arboretum at Linnaean Hill provided botanical specimens for the grounds of the White House, U .S. Capitol, and many of the national capital's other federal reservations. The expansive landscape surrounding his mansion also included fruit trees and ornamental plants.
The Pierce holdings were acquired by Rock Creek Park after Joshua's death, who had no children. The Klingle mansion currently houses the Rock Creek Park headquarters.
Even as Klingle Valley and Rock Creek were turning into parkland, there were increasing pressures as the small ports became cities and George Town prospered; Klingle and Rock Creek increasingly became sewers for the communities growing up around them, and they were targets for new highways to serve a growing Washington.
