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Mayflower Hotel

hotel in Washington, DC

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ6797227 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Mayflower Hotel is a historic hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., located on Connecticut Avenue NW. It is two blocks north of Farragut Square and one block north of the Farragut North Metro station. The hotel is managed by Autograph Collection Hotels, a division of Marriott International. It is charter member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Mayflower is the largest luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., the longest continuously operating hotel in the Washington metropolitan area, and a rival of the nearby Willard InterContinental Washington and Hay–Adams Hotels.

The Mayflower has been called the "Grande Dame of Washington" and the "Hotel of Presidents", President Harry S. Truman, a frequent guest of the hotel, called the Mayflower Hotel the city's "Second Best Address" after the White House. It ranked a four-star hotel.

History

Construction, sale, and renaming

The site on which the Mayflower Hotel sits was, after the organization of the District of Columbia in 1792, initially owned by the federal government, which finally sold the property to Nathaniel Carusi for $5,089. Carusi, in turn, sold the site to the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary in 1867 for $50,000. The order built the Convent of the Visitation on the site, a structure that occupied the land until the construction of the Mayflower Hotel itself.

The Mayflower Hotel was built by Allan E. Walker, the land developer behind Brookland and other residential neighborhoods of Washington.

Editorial summary

“Mayflower Hotel” enters the record as hotel in Washington, DC. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mayflower, Hotel and hotel can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1792, 1867—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Mayflower, Hotel and hotel.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Mayflower Hotel” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mayflower, Hotel and hotel provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6797227. VIAF identifies the subject as 145482720. The Library of Congress control number is n85149839. Authority coordinates are 38.904, -77.040. 5 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1792 and 1867.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Three-step research path

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  2. Expand the search: follow Mayflower Hotel primary sources, Mayflower Hotel archive and Mayflower research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mayflower Hotel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.