EARLY WASHINGTON
While Major L’Enfant drew the plan of the Federal City, it was Andrew
Ellicott who afterward carried it out. The building of the city
attracted many speculators, who invested heavily. Robert Morris, James
Greenleaf, Thomas Law, John Nicholson, and Samuel Blodgett were among
those who lost thereby.
When Washington became the seat of government in 1800 there were 109
brick and 263 frame houses, sheltering a total population of about
3,000. The early years of the city’s development were difficult and
too much praise cannot be given the men who carried the burden. The
departments of the government that existed then were State, Treasury,
War, Navy, the Office of the Attorney General, and the Postal Service.
They employed a total of 137 clerks.
We have brief accounts of the appearance of Washington written by
travelers who visited the United States during the period from
1790 to 1800. There is an interesting description by Duc de La
Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who wrote an account of his “Voyage dans
les États-Unis d’Amerique fait en 1795-97.” The accounts of several
inhabitants in Washington of the period is well summed up by Albert J.
Beveridge in his Life of John Marshall (vol. III, pp. 1-4):
A strange sight met the eye of the traveler who, aboard one of the
little river sailboats of the time, reached the stretches of the
sleepy Potomac separating Alexandria and Georgetown. A wide swamp
extended inland from a modest hill on the east to a still lower
elevation of land about a mile to the west. Between the river and
morass a long flat tract bore clumps of great trees, mostly tulip
poplars, giving, when seen from a distance, the appearance of a fine
park.
Upon the hill stood a partly constructed white stone building,
mammoth in plan. The slight elevation north of the wide slough was
the site of an apparently finished edifice of the same material,
noble in its dimensions and with beautiful, simple lines, but
“surrounded with a rough rail fence 5 or 6 feet high unfit for a
decent barnyard.” From the river nothing could be seen beyond the
groves near the banks of the stream except the two great buildings
and the splendid trees which thickened into a seemingly dense forest
upon the higher ground to the northward.
On landing and making one’s way through the underbrush to the foot of
the eastern hill, and up the gullies that seamed its sides thick with
trees and tangled wild grapevines, one finally reached the immense
unfinished structure that attracted attention from the river. Upon
its walls laborers were languidly at work.
Clustered around it were fifteen or sixteen wooden houses. Seven or
eight of these were boarding-houses, each having as many as ten or a
dozen rooms all told. The others were little affairs of rough lumber,
some of them hardly better than shanties. One was a tailor shop; in
another a shoemaker plied his trade; a third contained a printer with
his hand press and types, while a washerwoman occupied another; and
in the others were a grocery shop, a pamphlets-and-stationery shop, a
little dry-goods shop, and an oyster shop. No other human habitation
of any kind appeared for three-quarters of a mile.
[Illustration: THE SIX BUILDINGS
_Courtesy of National Photo Co._]
A broad and perfectly straight clearing had been made across the
swamp between the eastern hill and the big white house more than a
mile away to the westward. In the middle of this long opening ran
a roadway, full of stumps, broken by deep mud holes in the rainy
season, and almost equally deep with dust when the days were dry. On
either border was a path or “walk” made firm at places by pieces of
stone; though even this “extended but a little way.” Alder bushes
grew in the unused spaces of this thoroughfare [the present notable
Pennsylvania Avenue], and in the depressions stagnant water stood in
malarial pools, breeding myriads of mosquitoes. A sluggish stream
meandered across this avenue and broadened into the marsh.
A few small houses, some of brick and some of wood, stood on the edge
of this long, broad street. Near the large stone building at its
western end were four or five structures of red brick looking much
like ungainly warehouses. Farther westward on the Potomac hills was
a small but pretentious town with its many capacious brick and stone
residences, some of them excellent in their architecture and erected
solidly by skilled workmen.
Other openings in the forest had been cut at various places in the
wide area east of the main highway that connected the two principal
structures already described. Along these forest avenues were
scattered houses of various materials * * *. Such was the City of
Washington, with Georgetown nearby, when Thomas Jefferson became
President and John Marshall Chief Justice of the United States--the
Capitol, Pennsylvania Avenue, the “Executive Mansion” or “President’s
Palace,” the department buildings near it, the residences, shops,
hostelries, and streets.
The south lines of the 10-mile square--the Federal district in which
the new Capital lay--were to run from the intersection of the Potomac
River and the Eastern Branch, but, as has been related, by the act
of March 3, 1791, these boundary lines were moved south to include
Alexandria and part of Virginia within the Federal territory. The
land lying within the bounds of the proposed city was given by the
proprietors to trustees appointed by the Government under an agreement
by which the Nation received the land necessary for streets without
charge, purchasing the areas for parks and building sites at the rate
of £25 per acre. The remaining land was divided equally with the
original proprietors. The first settlements were made on grants given
chiefly to retired naval officers who named their holdings after their
camps--Mexico, Jamaica, and Port Royal. There were two settlements on
the site--Carrollsburg, named after its founder, and Hamburg, an early
real-estate development near and south of Georgetown. A stream of
considerable size known originally as Goose Creek ran through the city.
It later became known as Tiber Creek, because a resident named Pope,
whose estate he facetiously called Rome, contended that if there was a
Pope in Rome, his residence should be situated on the Tiber.
As is noticed by reference to the plans, a canal extended from the
point about where the Lincoln Memorial is located, along B Street, now
Constitution Avenue, east to the Capitol; thence along James Creek,
known to-day as Canal Street. In those days Pennsylvania Avenue was a
dusty road, lined with poplar trees, and often so flooded that it was
not an uncommon sight to see boats floating on it. For a long time an
isolated group of buildings known as the Six Buildings at Twenty-first
Street and Pennsylvania Avenue stood halfway between the Capitol and
Georgetown.
[Illustration: EARLY WASHINGTON, SHOWING THE JEFFERSON POPLARS]
[Illustration: THE ELLICOTT MAP]
Washington as the infant city appeared in 1800 is best described by
John Cotton Smith, Member of Congress from Connecticut, in a letter
written by him at the time, as follows:
Our approach to the city was accompanied with sensations not easily
described. One wing of the Capitol only had been erected, which with
the President’s House, 1 mile distant from it, both constructed with
white sandstone, were shining objects in dismal contrast with the
scene around them. Instead of recognizing the avenues and streets,
portrayed on the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we
except a road, with two buildings on each side of it, called the New
Jersey Avenue. The Pennsylvania Avenue, leading, as laid down on
paper, from the Capitol to the Presidential Mansion, was nearly the
whole distance a deep morass covered with alder bushes, which were
cut through to the President’s House; and near Georgetown a block of
houses had been erected which bore the name of the “six buildings”
* * *. The desolate aspect of the place was not a little augmented by
a number of unfinished edifices at Greenleaf’s Point.
There appeared to be but two really comfortable habitations, in all
respects, within the bounds of the city, one of which belonged to
Dudley Carroll and the other to Notley Young. The roads in every
direction were muddy and unimproved. A sidewalk was attempted, in one
instance, by a covering formed of the chips hewed for the Capitol. It
extended but a little way and was of little value; for in dry weather
the sharp fragments cut our shoes, and in wet weather covered them
with white mortar. In short, it was a new settlement.
Newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and New England and satirists
everywhere cracked many amusing jokes at the expense of the embryonic
city. The Capitol was called “the palace in the wilderness” and
Pennsylvania Avenue “the great Serbonian Bog.” Georgetown was declared
“a city of houses without streets” and Washington “a city of streets
without houses.”
The Abbe Correa de Serra, the witty minister from Portugal, bestowed
upon Washington the famous title of “the city of magnificent
distances,” referring to the great spaces between the scattered houses;
while Thomas Moore, just then coming into prominence as a poet, visited
the city in 1804, and contributed to the general fund of humor by the
composition of this satire:
In fancy now beneath the twilight gloom,
Come, let me lead thee o’er this second Rome,
Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davi bow,
And what was Goose Creek once is Tiber now.
This fam’d metropolis, where fancy sees
Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees;
Which second sighted seers e’en now adorn
With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn.
During the administrations of Adams and Jefferson the city improved
considerably. Jefferson secured money from Congress for public
buildings. In 1803 he appointed Benjamin Latrobe as the Architect of
the Capitol, and by him the construction of the Capitol was carried on
so energetically that he gave form to the old portion of the Capitol
that Thornton had simply planned.
Thomas Jefferson also secured money from Congress for the improvement
of Pennsylvania Avenue, which was then a dusty highway in the summer
and swampy place in winter; planted poplar trees and did what he could
to redeem that thoroughfare from its lamentable condition. He applied
his artistic taste and skill to the work of beautifying the city.