In September 1937, Vernon Tancil stayed on in Hillsdale to attend fourth grade at Birney School because he loved summers on his grandfather Horace Hansborough's small farm along Douglass Road. On less than three-quarters of an acre, Hansborough grew potatoes, string beans, corn, fruit, and cosmos, and kept chickens, pigeons, and a few hogs. Born in Culpeper, Virginia, a few years after the Civil War, he was the son of a farmer who had owned his mother and many of his older siblings. Widowed in the early 1900s, he moved with his five children to Washington, worked as a gardener at the Naval Hospital on Capitol Hill and as a Navy Yard laborer, and about 1918 rented a place on Bowen Road with his second wife Lula. He sold produce from his truck and saved enough to buy the Douglass Road property. Like their neighbors, the Hansboroughs lived without electricity or running water, using a wood-burning kitchen stove, hauling water from a pump at the bottom of the hill, and relying on an outhouse even at the end of their lives in 1949. In the early 1960s, Hillsdale still had barns, chickens, and fruit trees, but its rural character was disappearing as much of Anacostia was rezoned for apartments, and in 1965 the 525-unit Stanton Gardens replaced the farm. Matthew Memorial Baptist Church, one block north, was founded in 1921 by former members of Bethlehem Baptist Church.
