The neighborhood, outside the original boundaries of Washington City, was originally part a 30-acre farmland estate called Metropolis View, part of Washington County. In 1863, Salmon P. Chase, then U.S. Treasury Secretary under Abraham Lincoln, purchased the estate and attenuated another 20 acres of land nearby, built a mansion, and renamed the newly expanded estate Edgewood. The mansion itself was at what is now the corner of Edgewood and Fourth Streets NE. When Chase died in 1873, his daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, moved onto the crumbling estate and lived a reclusive life with her mentally retarded daughter, farming pigs until she died in poverty in 1899.