Soon, the development across the street from Sidwell Friends’ Wisconsin Avenue campus will open. The School community will likely begin to swarm the new Wegmans and other shops across the street—from teachers squeezing in some quick shopping to students grabbing a snack. But did you know our students used to make that same trek across Wisconsin Avenue for… sports practice?

After Thomas and Frances Sidwell turned their home at 3901 Wisconsin Avenue into a second campus in the 1910s, they rented the grass fields across the street from real estate magnate and brew-master Christian Heurich. Following Heurich’s death in 1945, the School had an opportunity to acquire the land. To help finance the $225,000 purchase, the Board of Trustees sold off a small section at the northwest corner of its property to a correspondence school planning to erect an office building. (Seventy years later, the School would end up purchasing that very building, too, at 3939 Wisconsin.) Sidwell Friends now owned 10 acres to the west of Wisconsin Avenue and nine to the east.

Still, a major road cutting through the middle of campus was far from ideal. Security officers did their best to control traffic on Wisconsin Avenue, with students dodging automobiles and streetcars to get to their games on time. Thomas Sidwell even tried to get the city to allow him to build an overpass bridge, allegedly offering a contractor free tuition for his daughter if he could make it happen.

What the School really had its eyes on was the Highlands estate to the south of campus. During World War II, the School was able to rent the old stone house, and for years tried to purchase it from the owner, Gertrude Harrison, the wife of the late Admiral Cary T. Grayson Jr., but she wouldn’t budge.

Finally, an opportunity came along that couldn’t be passed up. In 1954, the Equitable Life Insurance Company offered the School $750,000 for the 10-acre tract they had purchased from Heurich (whose granddaughter Connie Heurich graduated from Sidwell Friends that same year). With the proceeds from that sale, the School could not only buy the Highlands and surrounding acreage from Harrison for $600,000; it could cover the costs to turn that land into athletic fields to replace the ones they had just sold and finally consolidate the School safely on one side of Wisconsin Avenue. “Though it was often in his vision,” Board Chair J. Austin Stone mused, “it is doubtful whether Mr. Sidwell ever thought that the School might really acquire this fine property.”

The Board of Trustees went on to name this historic structure after a woman who had served the School since 1919 as the Sidwell Friends’ assistant, business manager, dean of girls, and eventually founding trustee. Some called her “Helen,” others “Zartie,” but now we know her mostly by her last name: Zartman.

Today, we can hardly picture Sidwell Friends without that old stone house and its surrounding land. Whether entering through the front door for an admissions interview, or walking down the rear steps at graduation, generations of students have Zartman House etched in their memories. As we undergo another transformation of the footprint of the Wisconsin Avenue campus, we can hardly imagine how our future students will reflect back on those decades long ago when the Lower School was all the way in Bethesda, and the campus ended at the tree line behind the Fox Den.