George Peter (September 28, 1779 – June 22, 1861) attended Georgetown College in the 1790s, was a member of Congress, and was Georgetown’s first veteran.
George enrolled in April 1792 at the age of 13; his father, Robert Peter, was the first Mayor of Georgetown. In the fall of 1794, he ran away and joined Maryland troops sent to Pennsylvania to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. George’s family managed to discover where he was and dispatched a messenger after him; George Washington sent him home. He re-enrolled at Georgetown in 1796 and entered the Army as second lieutenant in the Ninth Infantry in July 1799. After fighting in the War of 1812, he was elected to Congress in 1815. There he joined his old classmate William Gaston, who had been elected to the House of Representatives from North Carolina in 1813. He then served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1819 to 1823. Elected to the Nineteenth Congress in 1825, he served until 1827 and later served as commissioner of public works of Maryland in 1855.
Peter died near Darnestown, Maryland in 1861 and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown.
