One day in 1868, a 27-year-old writer named George Alfred Townsend walked with a friend from D.C. to Bladensburg to see the dueling grounds, around the time that the last recorded duel was fought there.

Though hardly a household name today, Townsend was the youngest reporter to cover the Civil War, a highly quotable DC correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and friends with the likes of Mark Twain.

The piece that he wrote about that visit, which appears in Chapter 24 of his 1873 book, “Washington, Outside and Inside,” is a dryly humorous piece criticizing the place where “men of honor” went to settle disputes with pistols. (Note: Racially offensive language is used throughout the piece, though not included here.) It’s about as close to reading Twain himself on the dueling grounds.

Townsend wasn’t a fan of Bladensburg, which he described as a “cross-roads Sodom” full of gamblers, cock-fighters and drunks and built on the “low-lived wickedness” of importing tobacco, rum and enslaved people.

Like Sodom, the town had by that time been struck down, as the river silted in, trains overtook tall-masted ships and enslaved people were emancipated:

Of course the merchants subsided into retailers of candles and chicory. The very old houses grew older with poverty. Had it not been for a chalybeate spring just above the town it would have been totally forsaken. This spring brought now and then an idle carriage load of ladies to taste the water, and as the village laid just over the district line, dueling parties of politicians came now and then to put up their horses before they aimed at each other’s hearts.

In the chapter, Townsend runs through some of the more memorable duels, repeatedly poking fun at the vanity, the insanity and the “manliness” of participants. One “spent the night before the duel in quoting poetry and playing whist, while his will was being amended.” Another “apologized in a manly way, but would not humiliate himself” after two rounds and then died quickly in the third. Two others dueled because they had “called each other blackguards, and both were probably correct.”

After walking through town on another visit, Townsend lays into it:

At present day this tavern is the undisputed Capitol of Bladensburg, and Bladensburg is the worst town possibly in the United States. There are more desperate and more mercenary towns on the verge of human exile, but I should say that Bladensburg is altogether the most heathen place we have.

He then quotes at length an old-timer to blame the dueling grounds, in essence, for the town’s ills:

“There was a sossy Methodist preacher here,” replied the old man, “who undertook to say, just after the war, that our people and town were abandoned. He said the (dueling) ground had been the academy of our boys, and the tavern their (water) pump. I tell you, sir, between us, as Marylanders, that (dueling) ground has been bad for a good many of us. Strangers come to see it. It’s the sight and park of the village. It fills our boys’ heads with ideas of taking the chances, and handling weapons, and resenting insults. As they can’t (duel) no more, they fight cocks behind the tavern now, and skin a stranger, if he comes along, with a game of cards. A standing gibbet or gallows couldn’t have been (worse) for us than that (dueling) ground. It’ll haunt this neighborhood for ever.”

Townsend’s book of essays on Washington isn’t easy to find anymore, but a collection of his first-hand reports on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, “The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth,” has been reprinted as recently as 2014.

Reading from this era doesn’t always hold up, but apart from a few dated references, this chapter feels like a modern day article in the New Yorker. And you can see why Mark Twain was friends with Townsend. Check out the full chapter here for free on Google Books.