Georgetown
Capital and main port of Guyana, situated on the east bank of the Demerara River at its mouth on the Atlantic coast; population (2002 est) 225,800. There are food processing and shrimp fishing industries. Principal exports include sugar, bauxite, rice, and diamonds.
History
The settlement, formerly named Demerara, was founded in 1781 by the French and subsequently developed from 1784 by the Dutch, who drained the marshy land using a canal system and renamed the site ‘Stabroek’. Control of the settlement was ceded to Britain in 1812. In 1831 it was renamed Georgetown and became the capital of British Guyana. Part of the city was destroyed by fire in 1945. British Guyana became an independent member of the British Commonwealth with the name of Guyana in 1966, and in 1970 it became a cooperative republic.
Features Landmarks include old wooden buildings built on brick stilts; St George's Cathedral, built in 1892 from Guyanese ‘greenheart’ hardwood in the Gothic style, one of the world's tallest wooden buildings, at 43.5 m/143 ft high; and botanical gardens. It is the home of the University of Guyana, founded in 1963. |
Georgetown
| District of Washington, DC, situated about 3 km/2 mi northwest of the White House. It has many colonial buildings and is an affluent residential section of the capital. |
| As a settlement Georgetown predates Washington. It was a small but flourishing town in Maryland when in 1790 George Washington selected the area for the District of Columbia which was to contain the nation's capital. Georgetown maintained a separate municipal existence until 1895, when it was incorporated into Washington. Georgetown University is the oldest Jesuit school in the country (1789) and is built in Gothic Revival style. |
