John Hays Hammond made a fortune in mining, first in South Africa, and subsequently in Mexico and California. He also drilled for oil in the Southwest. He is the author of such nonfiction books as The Milling of Gold Ores in California (1887), A Woman’s Part in a Revolution (1897), and Great American Issues: Political, Social, Economic (1921), and the two-volume memoir The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond (1935).
Hammond moved to DC in 1879 to take his first mining job with the U.S. Geological Survey. He remained for only a year. By 1893, he had moved to South Africa, where he developed deep-level gold and diamond mines in the Transvaal, and got involved in a controversial anti-government Reform Committee. He was tried for treason and jailed and sentenced to death by the Boer government. After the U.S. Senate petitioned the South African president for clemency, his sentence was commuted, and he returned to the U.S. in 1900, now a celebrity.
Hammond was active in the Republican Party and a close friend of President William Howard Taft. He returned to DC in 1908, and Taft appointed him a special ambassador. In that capacity, he attended the coronation of King George V and was an engineering advisor to Nicholas II of Russia.
The Homes
2221 Kalorama Road NW, Washington, DC (French Ambassador’s Residence)
This mansion, originally built as a single-family home with 19 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms, is a combination of Tudor Revival and Jacobean Revival styles. It was used as an ambassador’s residence and chancery beginning in 1936. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
Also home to: Hervé Alphand Henri Bonnet
1500 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Washington, DC (Brodhead-Bell-Morton Mansion)
Taking up a full block, this Beaux Arts mansion is the former home of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and U.S. Vice President Levi Morton. It also served as the Russian Embassy, and the headquarters of the American Coatings Association. Bell installed the city’s first electric burglar alarm system in the house, who expanded the house to a third floor and added a two-story addition to the southeast corner. While serving as Vice President under Benjamin Harrison, Morton rented the mansion to Congressman Charles Franklin Sprague and the Russian ambassador, Count Arturo Cassini. When he returned to the house, Morton converted it from a Queen Anne style to a neoclassical Beaux-Arts design. He retained Pope, who removed the Victorian-era rounded bays and the Mansard roof, and cladded the building in limestone. After Morton’s death in 1920, the house served for twenty years as the National Democratic Club. The American Coatings Association (originally under the name the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association), owned the mansion from 1940 until 2015. It is now the Embassy of Hungary. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
John Hays Hammond
2221 Kalorama Road NW
Located in Sheridan/Kalorama neighborhood, Northwest- West of Rock Creek
John Hays Hammond
1500 Rhode Island Ave. NW
Located in Shaw/Logan Circle neighborhood, Northwest- West of Rock Creek