In 1870, Newlands moved to San Francisco, California. He married Clara Adelaide Sharon, the daughter of future Nevada senator William Sharon, in 1874. They had three daughters. Newlands helped William Sharon to reopen the Bank of California, and supervised the management of the Palace Hotel, San Francisco. When Newlands’ wife died, he inherited the Sharon estate. Newlands married Edith McAllister and moved to Nevada in 1888.
Land developer
In the late 1880s, Newlands and his partners began to acquire farmland in northwestern Washington, D.C., and southern Montgomery County, Maryland, in order to develop a residential streetcar suburb for the nation's capital. On June 23, 1888, Newlands chartered the Rock Creek Railway for a single-track streetcar. Two years later, Newlands and his partners purchased more than 1,700 acres and formed the Chevy Chase Land Company. Between 1890 and 1892, the Land Company built two bridges, constructed five miles of road, and laid streetcar tracks along the road. The Rock Creek Railway opened in 1892. To supply the electricity to the streetcars, the company dammed Coquelin Run, a small tributary of Rock Creek, just east of Connecticut Avenue; the resulting Chevy Chase Lake supplied water for an electric generating plant. From 1894 to 1936, the Land Company operated an amusement park on the lake as a means to draw prospective buyers to the development and to keep the streetcars supplied with evening and weekend passengers. Newlands created the Chevy Chase Springs Hotel. Newlands ensured the community included schools, churches, country clubs, tree-lined streets, a water supply and a sewage system. Groceries and daily purchases were brought from Washington, D.C., on the railway at no charge to residents. In 1893, Newlands began to subdivide some property he inherited in Burlingame, California. He started with the Burlingame Country Club and five cottages. The following year, he added the Burlingame train station.
U.S. Representative
Newlands represented Nevada in the United States House of Representatives from 1893 to 1903 as a member of the Silver Party. In 1898, he created the Newlands Resolution, which annexed the Republic of Hawaii, creating a new territory. He supported a greater federal role in conservation and pushed for federal funding of western arid land irrigation projects. He helped pass the Reclamation Act of 1902, also called the Newlands Act, which created what would become the Bureau of Reclamation.
U.S. Senator
Newlands entered the United States Senate in 1903 as a Democrat. He supported the protection of the National Forests under the United States Forest Service in 1905, and the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. He was a member of the Senate subcommittee that investigated the 1912 sinking of. In 1916, he was the only Democratic senator to vote against the nomination of Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. Newlands held white supremacist beliefs and spoke publicly in favor of restricting the rights of African-Americans. He served until his death in Washington, D.C., on December 24, 1917. He died of heart failure in his home.
Legacy
The Francis Griffith Newlands Memorial Fountain is in Chevy Chase Circle, a federal park that divides D.C. and Maryland. In 2014, a member of the Chevy Chase advisory neighborhood commission proposed a resolution calling for the removal of Newlands’ name from the fountain because of his white supremacist views on race, including his desire to remove the vote for African-Americans. Others believe that Chevy Chase should not alter the monument because the change would belittle Newlands' legislative accomplishments. Newlands' former mansion in Reno is one of six properties in Nevada designated as a National Historic Landmark. Many notable people, including Barbara Hutton in 1935, stayed at the house while waiting for their divorce paperwork to be finalized by George Thatcher, a local divorce lawyer who purchased the home in 1920.
