What were the original names of Rosemont streets?
Russell Road and Commonwealth Avenue – the primary north-south arteries through Rosemont – both originally were known by different names. Commonwealth Avenue started out as Washington Avenue; the name was changed in the early 1940s to avoid confusion with Washington Street in Old Town. The segment of Russell Road that runs through Rosemont briefly was known as Mount Vernon Boulevard; it was hoped that the street would be chosen as the route to the Mount Vernon estate, but that did not occur and the name was changed by the 1920s to avoid confusion with the Mount Vernon Avenue in Del Ray (which itself was later was extended into East Rosemont).
Additionally, in 1938 there was a mass renumbering of houses in Alexandria, to establish a uniform system; in Rosemont, numbers increase by block running east and west from what was then Washington Avenue. The 1941 Sanborn insurance maps (excerpts from which are available from the Gallery on the RCA website) list both sets of numbers, which can be useful in performing historical research.