This is typical of what many of Washington’s early Federal style houses once looked like before they were modified into grander styles. Begun as a two-room dogtrot by James Alexander, James Shepard enlarged it soon after he purchased it. In her iconic 1865 book, War Time Journal of a Georgia Girl , Eliza Frances Andrews refers to it as “Mrs. Cooper’s House”. The same passage cites the indignation that “Fanny Andrews” expressed due to the commandeering of Mrs. Cooper’s house as a convalescent home for a Yankee soldier.