By Hayden Wetzel, East of the River

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“Twining City” was a planned housing development in 1888, at a time when most of this area was still occupied by farms, but it was south of Pennsylvania Avenue, not north, and it wasn’t built. The name Twining seems to have migrated northward over the years.

“Twining” was Col. William Twining, the first official of the Army Corps of Engineers to serve as a District Commissioner, who had died in 1882. Twining remained mostly farmland until the 1920s when the bungalow-style houses along G Street SE were built. Ft. Dupont at that time only covered about the eastern third of its present acreage, but land purchases brought it to its present size by the mid-1930s, when Pope’s Branch Park was also laid out. In the late 1940s Ft. Dupont was extended westward to the Anacostia (eliminating F Street) and Minnesota Avenue was sliced through the center of Randle Circle (named for local developer Arthur Randle). The brick houses in Twining date from the 1940s and later.