By 1900, 1000 C Street was rented to a household which reflected the time’s opportunities for women. Maria Betts, listed as the head of the household, worked as a stenographer and lived with her widowed sister, two boarders, a nephew, and a female servant.
By 1910, the house was again home to the Cunningham daughters Anna and Mary, whose “own income” provided for the services of a servant named Daniel Johnson. Perhaps times were different by 1920, when Anna had become active in real estate and the sisters had taken in a lodger named James Heath who worked for the telephone company. By the bleak depression year of 1930, the Cunninghams’ fifty year association with the house had ended and it was owned by a family with no servants and an entire family of renters at $25 per month.
Today 10th and C is a neighborhood of landscaped postage stamp front yards, flowering dogwood, and rowhouses carved into expensive apartments, conscious enough of its own history for "Johnson's Market 1915-1944” to be commemorated in gold leaf on a rowhouse transom. Prosperity can sometimes be a two-edged sword and make a building "wrong" for its location after a hundred years. Hopefully, though, this tide will help the Cunningham’s castle survive to the age of its European inspirations with charm intact.
