Three Years After a Fire Gutted a Historic DC Mansion, Its Owners Have Brought It Back to Life
The house has been in the same family since 1954. They weren’t about to give up on it now.
On a hot July morning in 2017, Bonnie Davis and her mother, Alice Davis, were getting ready to go to a funeral when a notification appeared on the screen of their home security system: Smoke. First floor.
The women were on the upper levels of the 5,000-square-foot Mount Pleasant house that had been in their family more than 60 years. Bonnie didn’t yet see or smell any sign of fire, but she hustled her 94-year-old mom out of the bathroom and started down the stairs. As they descended, says Bonnie, “I could see smoke billowing from the basement.”
Safely out front, on a typically tranquil stretch of Park Road, mother and daughter watched helplessly as firefighters battled the three-alarm blaze ravaging their home. “It was indescribable,” says Alice, now 97. “All my memories were [there].”
The 1907 mansion—on the National Register of Historic Places, and so beautiful that it was pictured in a book about Washington neighborhoods—was nearly gutted, its destruction sparked by old wiring. No doubt it would have been simpler for the Davises to pull up stakes and move their mother into someplace lower-maintenance, like a new condo. Alice, though, wouldn’t hear of it: “I couldn’t have walked away.”
