In 1892, Jesse Stevenson McDaniel was born to Samuel Beugard McDaniel, a farmer, and Rose (Adams) McDaniel, aka Rosa, according to the Virginia birth registry, Jesse’s death certificate, and census information. Jesse was the first of Samuel and Rose’s children. As of the Civil War, Jesse’s grandfather, the elder Samuel McDaniel, owned 200 acres that now encompass Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, according to the Fairfax County History Commission’s map of 1860 landowners. In 1891, after the elder Samuel’s death, his property was partitioned among family members, according to Fairfax County property records. Jesse’s father, the younger Samuel McDaniel, received 52 acres. This parcel included the land for today’s Barns of Wolf Trap, a portion of the the Dulles Toll Road right-of-way, and part of the Filene Center portion of Wolftrap. Jesse grew up on this land, judging from census information, property records, and his attendance at the Clarke School.
Jesse continued his education after Clarke. He attended school in the 1909-1910 school year even as he also helped at home as a farm laborer, according to the 1910 census, taken when he was 17. He completed four years of high school, according to the 1940 census.
In April 1915, Jesse married Nellie Orr of Washington in Rockville, according to the Evening Star. Nellie may have been the Alabama-born Nellie G. Orr who was living with her mother and sister as boarders in the District as of the 1900 census. The marriage was short-lived and ended before mid-1917, judging from military records.
1917 was a year of great significance for Jesse. Early on, he had what must have been a frightening experience. He was working for the Washington Railway and Electric Company as a streetcar conductor—streetcars were to be his life occupation—on the Eckington line, according to a newspaper account of Jesse’s report to the police and his draft registration. The Eckington Line ran from the White House to Catholic University and had originated as the District’s first mechanized streetcar line and its first electric trolley line, according to DC streetcar historian John DeFerrari. In early April, while at roughly the midpoint of the line, several men assaulted Jesse. Jesse suspected that his assailants were strikers or their sympathizers. The attack left him with cuts and bruises that required treatment at Sibley Hospital. Several months later, he had the pleasure of a much happier experience. In November 1917, he married Alice Lorraine Robinson of Fauquier County, according to Washington, DC marriage records. In the meantime, however, the United States had drafted Jesse for service in the First World War.
Jesse registered for the draft in June 1917. He was tall and had a medium build and light brown hair. At the end of August, the District’s draft board selected him as among the first 50 soldiers to fulfill Washington’s initial quota for draftees, according to the Evening Star and marginalia on his draft registration. On 5 September 1917 he entered into service in the United States Army. And thus whereas in 1906 Jesse McDaniel was on the Clarke School honor roll, in September 1917 he was on the “Honor Roll of First of District Soldiers to Fight For Democracy,” as the Evening Star headlined it on the front page.
“The first of the National Army went into uniform today,” the Evening Star reported on 5 September, 1917. “Into fourteen cantonments poured groups of recruits, the first 5 per cent quota of the draft army. Each group on its arrival was stripped of civilian clothing and supplied with khaki uniform, army hat, shoes, leggings, blankets, rifle, ammunition belt and other accoutrements of a solider. Training will start tomorrow.”
The cantonment for Jesse and the District’s other soldiers was at Camp Meade, but the facility was not ready to receive the recruits until late September. Jesse was featured prominently in a newspaper report of the eventual arrival at Camp Meade. From the Evening Star on 27 September:
“Selected men from divisions 2 and 3 of the District of Columbia reached camp about 10:30 o’clock this morning and before noon were in their quarters in barracks 35, block 8, the home of the District’s quota. Jesse Stevenson McDaniel was in charge en route of the men from division 2…on the way from Washington to Disney station. After the usual hike through ankle-deep dust from Disney to block 8, the men were sent to the showers to remove as much as possible of the Camp Meade dust. The preliminary instructions were given them, and during the afternoon the men were rushed through the physical examination, etc.” In 2017 at Camp Meade, a training day ran from 7:30AM to 4:30PM, according to a US Army research paper. Another soldier wrote of training at Camp Meade in 2017, “The training days is as follows: marching, physical exercises, bayonet charging, war games then marching before mess, the afternoon is devoted to chiefly semaphore, bomb [grenade] throwing and manual of arms.”
As of early 1918, Jesse was serving in Company A of the 312th Machine Gun Battalion at Camp Meade. The 312th was part of the 79th Division. The Army’s practice in the machine gun battalions of the First World War was for a corporal to lead a gun squad of one machine gun and nine men, with a cart and a mule to transport the weapon and its ammunition, according to an online account of machine gun battalions in the war. In March 1918, the Army promoted Jesse to corporal, according to the Sunday Star. Two more promotions soon followed for Jesse; by July 1918, he was a staff sergeant, according to the records of the US Army Transport Service. He was assigned to Company B of the 312th MG Battalion.
On 9 July 1918, Jesse and his unit sailed from Hoboken on board the S.S. France, a four-stacker transatlantic liner serving as a wartime troop transport, according to the transport service’s records. Jesse, the 312th MG Battalion, and much of the 79th Division disembarked at Brest on the Brittany peninsula in northwestern France. Over the ensuring weeks they engaged in more training and made their way to the Western Front, where they took position in mid-September, judging from an official history of the division and an analysis of its performance in the fighting.
Jesse almost certainly saw heavy action in the final weeks of the war, by virtue of his role as a non-commissioned officer in one of the machine gun battalions of the 79th Division. The 79th Division attacked at the start of the Meuse-Argonne offensive on 26 September and over the next five days participated in some of the worst fighting of that terrible battle. About Meuse-Argonne, historian Edward G. Lengel writes in his “To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918”:
“No single battle in American military history, before or since, even approaches the Meuse-Argonne in size and cost…. Fought over a period of forty-seven days, from September 26 to November 11, the Meuse-Argonne sucked in 1.2 million American soldiers, leaving 26,277 of them dead and 95,786 wounded. Almost all of these casualties came in a period of three weeks of heavy fighting, and they amounted to about half of the total American casualties for the war….”
After the armistice in November 1918, Jesse remained in Europe with the Army for another six months. In May 1919, he sailed from St. Nazaire to New York, and at month’s end, he was among the men of the 312th MG Battalion awaiting delousing at Camp Dix, New Jersey before onward movement to Camp Meade and demobilization, according to articles in Washington newspapers. After Jesse returned to civilian life, he maintained contact with his wartime comrades. According to the Sunday Star, in 1921 he was elected the finance officer for the 312th Machine Gun Post of the American Legion.
With the end of his military service, Jesse returned to work for Washington’s streetcar system, and that remained his occupation for the rest of his working life, judging from census records from 1920 to 1950. As of 1942, he was a streetcar operator at the Eckington Car House on 4th and L Streets NE, employed by the Capital Transit Company, according to his WWII draft registration. At the time he was 5’11’’ and 160 pounds. In 1944, he was among the representatives for the Streetcar Operators Union in negotiations with Capital Transit, according to the Evening Star. The War Labor Board had rejected a five percent wage increase that the union and company had negotiated, instead suggesting a bonus. This prospective bonus was the subject of renewed negotiations between labor and management.
In the meantime, in 1940 and 1954, Jesse was party to a lawsuit within the family over the 52 acres where Jesse had grown up in Fairfax County as well as two parcels on Wilmar Place in Vienna, according to the Fairfax Herald. In 1957, a court-appointed special commissioner conveyed the property to Catherine Filene Shouse of Wolftrap fame on behalf of Jesse and other family members, according to Fairfax County property records (1533:24).
Immediately after WWI, Jesse and wife Alice were still renting, but by 1930 they owned a house on Decatur Street in the District, according to census information. This remained their house at least into the 1950s, if not beyond. They did not have any children, according to census information. In 1963, Alice Lorraine McDaniel died, leaving Jesse a widower, according to the Evening Star. At a time that I have been unable to determine, Jesse remarried. Pennsylvania-born Sarah Dobbius Schaffer was his second wife, judging from death certificate and census information. Jesse’s final place of residence was Midland, Faquier County. Jesse Stevenson McDaniel, 88, died of arteriosclerosis in 1980 at Faquier Hospital in Warrenton, according to his death certificate. He and Sarah are buried in Andrew Chapel Cemetery.