The Obelisk that Almost Wasn’t
It’s one of the most iconic sights in our nation’s capital. A 555 feet and 5-1/8 inches obelisk that–per Washington D.C. law–is the tallest structure in the city.
The Washington Monument.
But did you know this testament to our first president was decided upon before he became our first president?
In 1783, the Continental Congress voted to erect a statue of George Washington, commander-in-chief of the American army during the Revolutionary War, in the nation’s yet-to-be constructed permanent capital city. However, after Washington became president in 1789, he scrapped the plans for it; money was tight for the newly formed nation, and he didn’t believe public money should be used for something so trivial when there were other, pressing needs. It wasn’t until after his death in 1799 that the plan was brought up again. Congress considered building him a pyramid-shaped mausoleum to be housed in the Capitol rotunda; however, the plan never came to fruition. Instead, the geometric layout of Washington, D.C.’s streets and green spaces, originally designed by Pierre L’Enfant, reserved a prominent space for a monument at the intersection of lines radiating south from the White House and west of the Capitol.
However, years went by before any progress was made. In 1833, a small group of Washingtonians, upset that nothing had yet been done to memorialize the first president, formed an organization known as the Washington National Monument Society, which solicited both designs and private funds to complete the project. It took ten years for the group to settle on a design: a pantheon (a temple-like building) featuring 30 stone columns and statues of Declaration of Independence signers and Revolutionary War heroes with a statue of Washington driving a horse-drawn chariot residing above the main entrance and a 600-foot-tall Egyptian obelisk rising from the pantheon’s center, which was submitted by Robert Mills (who would later go on to design the U.S. Treasury Building and the U.S. Patent Office, now home to the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum).
Despite difficulties raising funds, construction began on the Washington Monument in 1848. On July 4 of that year, the monument’s cornerstone (embedded with a box containing such items as a portrait of George Washington, newspapers, U.S. coins and a copy of the Constitution) was laid in a ceremony attended by a crowd of over 20,000 including President James K. Polk; former First Lady Dolley Madison; Eliza Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton; and future presidents Buchanan, Lincoln, and Johnson. Construction commenced, but in 1854, with the structure at about 156 feet high, funds ran low and work came to a standstill. This was due in no small part to a new group aligned with the controversial Know-Nothing Party, which was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, which gained control of the Washington National Monument Society in the Society’s periodic board election in 1853. In 1853, a new group aligned with the controversial Know-Nothing Party gained control of the Washington National Monument Society in the Society’s periodic board election. The group was angry that Pope Pius IX had donated a block of stone from the ancient Roman Temple of Concord for the monument. They confiscated the stone, seized possession of the monument project, and then slowed construction to a meager pace. Having always struggled to gather funding, the Society’s change in administration alienated donors and drove the Society to bankruptcy by 1854. Without funds, work on the monument came to a complete halt.
For more than two decades, the monument stood only partly finished, doing more to embarrass the nation than to honor its most important Founding Father. Congressional attempts to support the Washington National Monument Society failed as attentions turned toward the sectional crisis, then civil war.
By a joint resolution passed on July 5, 1876, Congress assumed the duty of funding and building the Washington Monument. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, led by Lt. Col. Thomas Lincoln Casey, was responsible for directing and completing the work. But, to continue building upward, the masons needed stone. And, after so many years, the quarry near Baltimore used for the initial construction was no longer available. Seeking a suitable match, the builders turned to a quarry in Massachusetts. However, problems quickly emerged with the quality and color of the stone, and the irregularity of deliveries. After adding several courses of this stone from Massachusetts, still recognizable by the naked eye today as a brown-streaked beltline one-third of the way up the monument, the builders turned to a third quarry near Baltimore that proved more favorable, and used that stone for the upper two-thirds of the structure. The stone never matched exactly, and the three slightly different colors from the three quarries are distinguishable today.
After its many hiccups and false starts, the Washington Monument was finally dedicated on a February 21, 1885–140 years ago today and over a hundred years are the idea’s original inception. It remains one of the most iconic and recognizable structures in all of the United States, almost as much so as the man to which it is dedicated.
