Brookland Bed and Breakfast

The neighborhood of Brookland owes much of its character to Catholic University, founded in 1887 on 65 acres of land purchased for $27,000. The university set an academic tone for the area and inspired other religious organizations and institutions to settle nearby.

The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur founded Trinity College in 1897, and the Dominicans built their House of Studies in 1901. The Marist Brothers bought the former Brooks mansion in 1901 and sold it to the Benedictine Sisters in 1906. The sisters would teach generations of Brookland children there and, later, at St. Anthony’s Catholic School on 12th Street. A different sort of education was provided by the Sulpicians, a society devoted to priestly formation, which built Theological College in 1917 and further cemented the area’s reputation as a premier site for Catholic higher education. In 1899 the Franciscan friars opened their monastery on a hill. Built in the style of Hagia Sofia, the great Byzantine church in Istanbul, the monastery featured replicas of Holy Land shrines and marked Brookland as a place of pilgrimage and contemplation.

 

Although Brookland still has a strong clerical presence, in its religious heyday between the world wars the neighborhood housed more than 50 orders — Carmelites and Ursulines, Claretians and Josephites — and earned the nickname “Little Rome.”

 

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