The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry (Landmarks)

by Garrett Peck

battlement,

“reverse façademy.

This is the story of the once famous Seneca quarry that brightened the Washington skyline. It is the story of a preservationist who pursued a Sisyphean task, single-handedly restoring the quarry master’s house. It is the story of a publishing family who put philanthropy first to preserve the Seneca Historic District’s bucolic nature.

President George Washington chose the site of the nation’s capital in 1791, a city that would bear his name. He hired Pierre L’Enfant to design the District of Columbia. L’Enfant grasped that the new city needed a solid supply of building materials for the stately buildings he planned. He purchased an existing quarry along the Potomac River near Aquia, Virginia—a place that became known as the Public Quarry on Government Island. The stone quarried there was Virginia freestone, a pale yellow sandstone that was used for most of the early public buildings in the capital, including the Boundary Stones, the Capitol and the White House. Sandstone is easy to carve.

But a problem soon developed: Aquia sandstone tarnishes. Much of it had to be painted over or replaced. Builders began looking elsewhere for more durable stone. They found it nearby,

twenty-three miles upstream from the new capital, in a red sandstone outcropping overlooking the Potomac River. Seneca red sandstone would become a popular building material, nearly as ubiquitous as brick, for...

first major public use for Seneca stone was the Great Falls Skirting Canal (better known as the Potowmack Canal), which the Potowmack Company opened in 1802. George Washington chartered the company in 1785 to make navigation improvements on the river. Still visible on the Virginia side of Great Falls, the mile-long canal had five locks, but it lacked the scale to carry heavy traffic. Canal builders decided they needed something bigger—a continuous waterway f...

C&O Canal boat manned by African Americans traverses the Seneca Aqueduct. Behind it is the turning basin, and beyond to the right is the Seneca quarry. Courtesy of C&O Canal National Historical Park. The C&O soon began constructing the three-arched redstone aqueduct crossing Seneca Creek, the turning and loading basin and the canal bed westward.

The twenty thousand cubic yards of soil removed from the Peter property, as stipulated in the settlement, could have only been for the turning basin, which lapped at the base of the quarry and made it convenient for Peter to ship his sandstone. Now he had a harbor right at his doorstep, its retaining walls built with stone from his quarry (as was the nearby redstone culvert for Bull Run).

Awesome

Aqueduct No. 1, better known as Seneca Aqueduct, was begun in 1829 and completed in 1832. A unique structure on the C&O Canal, Seneca Aqueduct is the only aqueduct that is also a lock (Lock No. 24, also known as Riley’s Lock; it is named after John Riley, who ran the lock from 1892 until the canal closed in 1924). Seneca Aqueduct is doubly unique in that it is the only aqueduct made of Seneca redstone. The adjacent lockkeeper’s house was finished in 1830.

begrudged

Even

THE ARCHITECT The board of regents of the Smithsonian Institution got to work in September 1846. One of their first responsibilities was to solicit architectural proposals for the Smithsonian Institution Building, a task they took up just two days after their first meeting.

Robert Dale Owen and Robert Mills drafted the requirements for the building. They wanted a medieval revival structure, a multipurpose facility with collection and exhibition space, laboratories, lecture rooms, libraries, living quarters and offices. The building committee (Robert Dale Owen, Washington mayor William Seaton, George Dallas, William Hough and Joseph Totten) issued a public invitation for proposals and then traveled to the Northeast to drum up interest. Architects had until December 25, 1846, to submit their designs.

nation’s capital in 1846 was still a small town with just a handful of public buildings, mostly built with white sandstone from the Aquia quarry in Stafford County, Virginia. The main public buildings were the Capitol, Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum), Post Office (now the Hotel Monaco), the Treasury Department and White House.

eclecticism.

habeas corpus

Union quartermaster

fickle

moribund

Shallow

capitalized

In 1870, the partners raised the company’s capital to $800,000 but without actually raising any funds. They simply issued stock as a dividend to the shareholders (a congressman later called this “a monstrous fabric of credit”), claiming that it showed the appreciated value of the Seneca property.

Trouble was brewing at the bank, in part because of the shady loans that Henry Cooke had issued. The bank engaged in loose accounting, made very questionable investments and loans that earned no interest and had more in liabilities than assets. It was overextended.

exacerbated

Panic

cheekily

Quartermaster General

aide-de-camp