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.
Courtesy of National Photo Co.
THE SIX BUILDINGS
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.
EARLY WASHINGTON, SHOWING THE JEFFERSON POPLARS
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:
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.