Before the National Mall: Tiber Creek and D.C.'s Buried Landscape

The first article in the National Park Service's series "History and Archeology of the District of Columbia Monumental Core", by Charles LeeDecker; paraphrased here.

West Potomac Park from the air. NPS.

The Monumental Core of Washington, D.C., holds some of the country's most iconic landscapes, landmarks and memorials. Today its formal public grounds draw tourists and host countless celebrations and demonstrations — but the landscape beneath them looks nothing like the natural setting, or even the nineteenth-century city, and its history is little known.

Tiber Creek

Before the city was laid out, much of what is now the Monumental Core was open water in the channel of Tiber Creek, also called Goose Creek, one of the District's natural inland waterways.

• Its course: the creek rose more than 3 miles north of the Capitol, drained about half of today's downtown, and meandered west towards the Potomac roughly along present-day Constitution Avenue (once B Street).
• Its mouth: near 17th Street it widened to some 700 to 800 feet, opening into a broad, shallow tidal estuary.

From creek to sewer to parkland

After the City of Washington was founded in 1790, the creek became first a canal, then a foul sewer carrying the city's waste into the Potomac. During the nineteenth century its open water and low banks were filled in, mostly as part of efforts to keep the Potomac navigable.

Seven thousand years of use

For thousands of years before the city, Native Americans camped along the tidal creek. Evidence of Native occupation has turned up across the city, especially along its major waterways. The tidal marsh here offered shellfish, waterfowl, crabs and fish. The Smithsonian Institution holds 147 specimens from a place known as the Monument Grounds archeological site, collected at the Washington Monument site in the 1880s; they show people used the area on and off for at least 7,000 years.

The series continues with the L'Enfant Plan.

Sources

• Charles LeeDecker, "Uncovering the history of D.C.'s Landscape", in History and Archeology of the District of Columbia Monumental Core, National Mall and Memorial Parks, National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/history-archeology-of-dc-intro.htm
• The source's photograph of the Washington Monument site artifacts, credited to a Smithsonian photographer, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.