A Portrait of Old George Town

Grace Dunlop Peter returned to the town that made her, and what she found was a whole world condensed into brick and waterway. A Portrait of Old George Town captures Georgetown, Maryland in the years before modernization swept the old neighborhoods into forgetting: a port town where tobacco sloops docked alongside fishing boats, where free Black communities and Irish immigrants and tidewater gentry all traced their days along the same muddy streets. Peter's grandmother had lived here, and that inherited memory haunts every page with the particular tenderness of someone who knows a place is vanishing. She traces the town from its founding through land grants and trade, through the rhythms of river and season, rendering not just buildings and boundaries but the invisible architecture of tradition: who married whom, where the funerals walked, what the old women remembered. This is local history as love letter, written in an era when you could still taste the 18th century in the air.