During the War of 1812, Reuben Daw, a Georgetown merchant, loaned the War Department money to help defend the Capital during the British invasion. Following the War, when the Department was unable to re-pay the loan, Daw and other creditors were offered surplus military gear as payment in kind. Daw wanted to build a fence around his four homes on P and 28 Street. While rummaging through the equipment stored at the old Navy Yard, he came across a cache of old flintlock muskets left from the Revolutionary War. Those muskets would become his wrought iron fence. A century later, the fence became a Georgetown tourist attraction.
There are other versions: A 1911 issue of Popular Mechanics reported on the decision “to let those who so desired to go to the navy yard and take anything in the way of castings that they could use. Reuben Daw took advantage of this opportunity and asked for a consignment of antiquated flintlock muskets which were rusting in a neglected pile in an old warehouse. He received permission to remove them and took them to Georgetown.”
Apparently, the aging hoard of firearms had its provenance in a British surrender during the Revolution, and by 1814 the Brown Bess muskets were only worth their weight in scrap.
The gun barrel fence is significantly more robust than other neighborhood fences, with each upright measuring about an inch in diameter. And upon close examination, stubby iron sights are visible on some, but not all of the posts. One final bit of supporting evidence is the pointy spiked tops, which are clearly separate inserts rather than wrought from the same piece of metal as the tubes.
A dive into newspaper archives reveals that the first mention of the gun barrel fence appears in an anonymous submission to the Washington Bee on September 21, 1907, nearly a century after the fact. Verbatim copies of the same article were also subsequently picked up in the Washington Evening Star (1907), the Washington Herald (1911), Popular Mechanics (1911, the only version online without a paywall), and the Washington Post (1921). So there is the possibility that this entire thing is the invention of one writer who shopped the same piece around to all the local publications.
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