WEST GEORGETOWN — In a devastating blow to the Georgetown neighborhood association’s movement to restrict the University’s growth, the last Georgetown resident older than the University passed away at the age of 247.

Martha Copperfield passed away peacefully early this evening from complications of a case pneumonia contracted after the end of the Great War.

While friends and neighbors said they will remember Copperfield’s “warm smile” and “miraculous longevity,” they expressed serious concerns that her death would be a major set back for Georgetown neighborhood association’s efforts to stem the University’s growth and roll back student off-campus housing options.

“Copperfield was really our rallying cause for the association and our cause,” said Burlieth resident Michael Douglass. “She was kind of our moral high ground because the University has been here about 190 years longer than the next oldest resident.”

“We’ll find a way – we always do,” added resident Veronica O’Shamsky.

Gathered neighbors fondly remembered how instrumental Copperfield had been in pushing through the 2010 campus housing plan – a plan widely formulated despite the objections of the university and student body officials.

“Even at 243 years old she sat for hours in the deposition box and gave great testimony about the blissful 22 years she spent living in Georgetown before she was terrorized by the existence of college students.”
A noted critic of the University, Copperfield had just turned 22 years old when the University opened its doors in January 1789. Copperfield fold reporters in 2009 that she was protesting the University’s existence at its inception because of her “natural mistrust of Catholics after the religious wars in Europe.”

Copperfield also said she was “suspicious of the enlightenment period” during her childhood.

Occupying her family’s farmhous

Copperfield’s memorial service will be held on Saturday at Dahlgren Chapel: a place Copperfield called “the center of papal dictatorship.”

e turned N Street townhouse for nearly 250 years, Copperfield had been a bastion of anti-University during her life.

“Without Copperfield we may have lost the momentum we needed to keep forcing the University to squeeze more and more of its student body on campus,” said resident Yolanda Dietrch.

Coppefield is survived by her great-great-great-great-nephew Arthur, 68, who said he has “no plans” to move into his family’s N street home because “it’s by a university and what adult would want to move into a neighborhood surrounded by young people.”

“You can’t expect them to be on the same schedule as everyone else,” he added.