During World War II, the U.S. Navy took over the Colonial style red-brick campus of Mount Vernon Seminary at 3801 Nebraska Avenue for secret essential wartime activities, and soon more than 5,000 workers occupied the site. Among them were WAVES, women responding to President Roosevelt’s call to take on non-combat duties, and most WAVES there operated cryptoanalytic equipment designed to break German and Japanese communications codes. Because discussing the work with outsiders was considered treason, WAVE Elizabeth Butler told her family only that her work was “very secret, one of the most in the Navy,” and Jennifer Wilcox later said that “Breaking the Japanese code was our finest hour.” While the Navy used the campus, Mount Vernon Seminary held classes nearby at Garfinckel’s department store on Massachusetts Avenue and its students boarded with local families. After the war, the Navy kept the facility, so Mount Vernon Seminary moved to Foxhall Road, and in 1999 it became a campus of George Washington University. Before the seminary stood there, the property was Grassland, the 250-acre estate of Nathan Loughborough, who in 1820, while comptroller of the U.S. Treasury, brought a lawsuit arguing “no taxation without representation.” Like many prosperous neighbors, Loughborough enslaved people, making it ironic that in 1946 Georgetown Day School, Washington’s first consciously integrated private school, rented Grassland for its second location. The Grassland house was razed for NBC’s studios in 1956.