Building Washington: Engineering and Construction of the New Federal City, 1790–1840

Abstract

Building Washington is a meticulously detailed account of the early construction of the capital city. After an introduction that reviews the decision to place the capital on the Potomac River, the first chapter briefly summarizes Pierre L'Enfant's famous plan for the layout of the city and thoroughly examines his construction plan for the project. The next two chapters look at the financial difficulties surrounding the undertaking and the challenges of assembling materials and workers. Harbor, bridge, canal, and aqueduct initiatives take up three of the ten chapters, two centered on the period from the early 1790s into the 1820s and one beginning with breaking ground for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1828. Another chapter turns to military installations. Three chapters that together are almost 40 percent of the book chronicle the year-by-year progress of the Capitol and the President's House under a set of commissioners from 1791 to 1802, under Benjamin Henry Latrobe as surveyor of public buildings from 1803 to 1811, and in the postwar rebuilding from 1815 to 1824. Robert J. Kapsch's interest is less the political implications of this complex process than the technical problems it presented. He reports that the Capitol “was the largest single building erected in the country at that time” and “the President's House was the largest single house in the country” (p. 257).