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Lecture By: Hayden Wetzel

Farm animals – pigs, cows, geese – found pleasant pasturage in the parks, streets, empty lots and front yards of Capitol Hill until about 1880. The September Overbeck lecture by independent researcher Hayden Wetzel will relive those exciting days when the police and later the District pound crew battled local residents to get these largish but, to their owners, valuable nuisances off public property, including the Capitol grounds. As one newspaper reported: “She rescued her porker from a lightweight policeman and then not content with this tossed both officer and pig into the muddy sty.”

Wetzel is the author of Mangy Curs and Stoned Horses: Animal Control in the District of Columbia from the Beginnings to about 1940 and Two Studies on the History of Southwest, D.C.: Buzzard Point, and Urban Renewal Parks.  Both publications will be available for sale at the lecture.

Admission to the Overbeck Lecture is free but a reservation is required. Seating will begin at 7:00 for those who hold reservations. Available seats will be released to guests on the waitlist beginning at 7:15 pm. If you hold a reservation and find that you cannot attend, please contact us so that others can use your unclaimed seats, haviland@hillcenterdc.org. Overbeck Lectures are sponsored by the Capitol Hill Community Foundation.

As this lecture is in-person, we require all attendees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. 

Please click here for our COVID-19 protocols.

Sponsored by Capitol Hill Community Foundation