BGuthrie Photos: MD -- Forest Glen Seminary

MD -- Forest Glen Seminary:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] SEM_970803_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] SEM_970803_02.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] SEM_970803_03.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] SEM_970803_06.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] SEM_970803_07.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] SEM_970803_08.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[7] SEM_970803_10.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] SEM_970803_11.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[9] SEM_970803_12.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SEM_970803_01.JPG: Walter Reed Medical Annex; Indian Statue This is a picture of the Walter Reed Medical Annex at the National Park Seminary in Forest Glen Maryland. The 23.5 acres and its various buildings are owned by the US Army. The buildings were built in 1887 as part of the Forest Glen Inn, a summer resort for Washingtonians, and represent a variety of architectures (an English castle, a Dutch windmill, a Japanese pagoda, an Indian mission, and an Italian villa). The hotel failed seven years later and it was sold in 1894 to the National Park Seminary, a finishing school for young women that later became an accredited four-year college for women. In 1942, the US Army bought the property and used it as a hospital for soldiers returning from World War II. All but one of the buildings is now empty. The site has lots of problems. The Army's budget is $400,000 and that doesn't allow for much maintenance. It spent $40,000 in 1990 to replace a gymnasium floor only to have to close the building two years later due to water damage. The army estimates that basic repairs would cost $9.7 million which it doesn't want to spend. Demolition would run around $10 million.
2. SEM_970803_02.JPG: Walter Reed Medical Annex; Fountain Here's a broken fountain that's in the middle of the sprawling castle complex.
3. SEM_970803_03.JPG: Walter Reed Medical Annex; Pogoda A tree that sprouted near this pogoda pushed the building off its foundation.
Multi Column: Number of columns of thumbnails to appear per page (normally defaults to 3): [1 col] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Wikipedia Description: National Park Seminary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

National Park Seminary (later National Park College) was a private girls' finishing school open from 1894 to 1942. Located in Forest Glen, Maryland, it was named for nearby Rock Creek Park. The historic campus is to be preserved as the center of a new housing development.

College:

The campus began in 1887 as "Ye Forest Inne," a summer vacation retreat for Washington, D.C. residents. The retreat did not succeed financially, and the property was sold and redeveloped as a finishing school, opening in 1894 with a class of 48 female students. The architecture of the campus remained eclectic and whimsical. In addition to various Victorian styles, exotic designs included a Dutch windmill, a Swiss chalet, a Japanese pagoda, an Italian villa, and an English castle. The campus also featured covered walkways, outdoor sculptures, and elaborately planned formal gardens. In 1936 it was renamed "National Park College" and its focus was realigned with more modern educational trends; it remained one of the most prestigious women's schools in the country.

Walter Reed Forest Glen Annex:

With the onset of World War II, the United States Army began planning for the medical needs of returning soldiers. In 1942, the property was condemned by Walter Reed Army Hospital as a medical facility for disabled soldiers, thus closing the college. The Army paid $890,000 for the land and buildings that became the Forest Glen Annex.

Preservation:

The U.S. Army abandoned much of the property in the 1970s. On September 14, 1972, a 27 acre (0.11 km�) National Park Seminary Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the following years, the historical integrity of the property was threatened by neglect and vandalism. The Greek Revival Odeon Theater was lost to arson. Local preservation groups took action and "Save Our Seminary" (SOS) was formed in 1988. In the late 1990s, Senator Paul Sarba ...More...
Atlas Obscura Description: National Park Seminary
Silver Spring, Maryland
A girls' boarding school inspired by the Chicago World's Fair, once abandoned, now restored to strange and scenic glory.

Not far from the Capital Beltway is a cluster of formerly dilapidated structures, now integrated into a beautiful condo development. These are the remains of the National Park Seminary.

The development dates back to 1887, when Ye Forest Inn was built as a tourist resort. In 1894, the buildings were turned into a girls’ boarding school called the National Park Seminary. The ornate, classically-inspired architecture on campus was based on plans brought from the Chicago World’s Fair. Girls lived in eight unusual sorority houses, one modeled on a pagoda, another on a Dutch windmill, another on a chalet.

The seminary thrived the first decades of the 20th century as a finishing school for society girls, with 300 students including Hersheys, Chryslers, Krafts, and Maytags. By the Great Depression, only 40 students remained. During World War II, the Army took over the Forest Glen campus and used it for recovering amputees. It was also employed to house wounded soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as for animal research.

By the 1970s, the place was in a state of decay, and by 1978 all patients were gone. The Army planned to tear down the campus, but it was spared by the Save Our Seminary association. Arson destroyed one structure in 1993, and in 2003 a private developer took over the property and since then it has been reborn as a residential community, with the historic structures repurposed into houses and condos. As of summer 2018, only a handful of decaying buildings have yet to be restored, and they seem to be under construction.

Because the buildings are private residences, it’s impossible to see the interiors of the restored buildings, including the famously splendid ballroom, outside of monthly guided tours led by the Save Our Seminary organization. There is also a ...More...
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Structures]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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