Salmon P. Chase, the former Ohio senator and governor who was Lincoln's Secretary of Treasury originally inhabited a Northwest residence, where his daughter, Kate Chase, was married here to Captain William Sprague, former "boy governor" of Rhode Island. When Sprague became a senator, he and Kate moved to the Northwest address and Kate turned it into a political salon. Salmon Chase moved to the country and build himself a mansion on the hill over looking the Glenwood Cemetery. He called his new 50-acre estate, Edgewood located at 4th and Edgewood Street. NE.

Some years later, at their vacation home in Rhode Island, Kate was caught in the arms of Roscoe Conkling, a senator from New York, when her husband returned home unexpectedly. Angry, Sprague kept Kate as a virtual prisoner at the summer place, until she eventually fled back to Washington to live at Edgewood.

Here she continued a correspondence with Conkling and the once admired belle of the ball was shunned by DC society. Nearing the end of her life with Edgewood in shambles she resorted to chicken farming. Upon her death at age 58 she was allowed to be buried in the nearby Glenwood Cemetery for a brief period before President McKinley had her body shipped back to Ohio. (Oman, Anne H., "Passion on the Potomac," Washington Post, Weekend Section, pp. 30-1, February 12, 1982)

Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.