The Washington Monument: How a Tribute in Stone Finally Got Built

The monument today. CC0.

The Washington Monument stands near the centre of a cross formed by the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial on one axis, the White House and the Jefferson Memorial on the other. It is one of the country's most recognisable structures, partly because it honours George Washington, still among the most admired American leaders more than two centuries after his death. Its history, a National Park Service lesson shows, is also a long argument about how a nation should honour its great citizens.

Why Washington

Washington (1732–1799) was in military and political life long before independence was on most colonists' minds. In 1754 Virginia's governor sent him, at 21, to the Ohio Valley to warn the French off lands Britain claimed; the French and Indian War that followed gave him military experience. He sat in Virginia's colonial assembly, went to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and the next year was chosen to lead the new Continental Army; his upright character and moderate politics could bring Virginia behind a fight led from New England.

After the war no one in the country commanded more respect. Americans admired him for winning with scant supplies and green troops, for refusing a salary and taking only his expenses, and for turning down some soldiers' proposal to make him king. Abigail Adams described him as "polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good."

He was reluctant to leave Mount Vernon for the 1787 convention, but worried for his reputation and his country, and wrote that "to see this nation happy...is so much the wish of my soul." The delegates chose him to preside, and the Constitution they wrote created a presidency no one seemed better fitted to fill. In two terms from 1789 he lent his prestige to the new office while trying to calm fears that a president would become a king; he backed a national bank, taxes to pay the government's costs, and a stronger Army and Navy. In 1797, though many wanted a third term, he went home. He died two years later.

A monument that kept not happening

The Continental Congress had resolved in 1783 to put up an equestrian statue of Washington wherever it settled. When Pierre L'Enfant, a French engineer who had served in the American Army, laid out the new capital, sited on the Potomac by Congress in 1790, his plan marked the spot with an "A": "THE equestrian figure of GEORGE WASHINGTON, a monument voted in 1783, by the late Continental Congress," at the end of a Grand Avenue 400 feet wide.

The L'Enfant plan for Washington. Library of Congress.

Nothing was built. Ten days after Washington's death a congressional committee proposed something else: John Marshall, then a Virginia representative and soon Chief Justice, suggested a tomb inside the Capitol. Lack of money, disagreement about the right kind of memorial, and the family's reluctance to move his body stalled that too. For the first three decades of the 19th century nothing went up at all.

Samuel Blodgett's broadside, 1801. National Archives.

In 1801 Samuel Blodgett's broadside asked why, two years on, there was still no national monument. The only obstacle, he argued, was disagreement over its form. His remedy: a subscription open to citizens only, at no more than one Eagle — ten dollars — each, with the design left to three trustees, Bushrod Washington, John Marshall and Benjamin Stoddert, and any surplus going towards the national university Washington's will had set out to found.

The Monument Society and Robert Mills

Progress began in 1833, the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, when citizens formed the Washington National Monument Society and began collecting donations much as Blodgett had proposed. By the mid-1830s they had over $28,000. In 1835 the society's managers asked for a monument "unparalleled in the world," blending "stupendousness with elegance," built of marble and granite from every state.

The 1836 competition went to Robert Mills, who had designed Baltimore's Washington monument — a Greek column topped by a statue — and had just been named Architect of Public Buildings for Washington. He proposed a 600-foot obelisk, a four-sided pillar tapering as it rises, with a nearly flat top, ringed by a circular colonnade crowned with Washington in a chariot and sheltering statues of 30 Revolutionary War heroes.

Robert Mills's design. Library of Congress.

Criticism, and an estimate above $1 million, made the society hesitate. In 1848 it decided to start the obelisk with the $87,000 in hand and settle the colonnade later, hoping the sight of work would bring more donations. Congress gave 37 acres; L'Enfant's spot was too swampy to carry so heavy a structure, so the site moved slightly south and east, to high public ground in view of the Potomac and of Mount Vernon. The cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848, in a ceremony hosted by the Freemasons, to which Washington had belonged.

The Pope's stone and the Know-Nothings

Money ran out in 1854. The trouble had begun with a policy adopted in 1849: at the request of some Alabamians, the society invited states and territories to send memorial stones for the interior walls, to give citizens a share in the work and to save on stone. Blocks arrived from American Indian tribes, professional groups, societies, businesses and foreign nations and many bore inscriptions with nothing to do with Washington, such as a temperance society's pledge against alcohol.

In the early 1850s Pope Pius IX sent a block of marble. In March 1854 members of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, the "Know-Nothings," stole it in protest and supposedly threw it into the Potomac, then rigged an election to take over the society. Congress, which had just voted $200,000 for the work, took the money back. The Know-Nothings held the society until 1858 and added 13 courses of masonry so poor they were later removed. Short of money and public support, they gave up and returned the records — but the work stayed stopped through the Civil War.

"Beef Depot Monument," 1862, from Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Library of Congress.

Finishing it

Interest returned after the war. Engineers checked the foundation more than once, and in 1876, the centennial of independence, Congress voted another $200,000. The stump had stood for nearly 20 years at less than a third of its planned height.

The design argument flared again. Many thought a bare obelisk would look too plain; Mills was said to have warned that without the colonnade it would resemble "a stalk of asparagus." The society weighed five new designs and praised William Wetmore Story's; Congress weighed those and Mills's original while ordering work on the obelisk to go on. In the end the society dropped the colonnade and reshaped the obelisk to classical Egyptian proportions.

Alternative designs submitted after the Civil War. Library of Congress.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas L. Casey of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took charge in 1879. He strengthened the foundation to carry a structure that would weigh more than 40,000 tons and, though many people mocked the memorial stones, set all 193 into the interior walls. With enough money at last, the work went fast. The 3,300-pound marble capstone was set on December 6, 1884. The finished monument stands 555 feet 5⅛ inches, faced with white Maryland marble and lined with Maine granite.

The monument today. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Crowds came before it officially opened: 10,041 people climbed its 893 steps in the six months after the dedication. Once the construction elevator was adapted for passengers, numbers climbed quickly — an average of 55,000 people a month went to the top as early as 1888 — and the lesson reports more than 800,000 visitors a year.

Visiting

The monument, run by the National Park Service, stands on the National Mall between 15th and 17th Streets and between Constitution and Independence Avenues, and opens every day except December 25. More at nps.gov/wamo.

For the classroom

The lesson, by Stephanie A. Kopin, a park ranger at the National Mall, covers the 1760s to the 1880s and suits units on the Revolution and early republic, national identity and memory, art, architecture and urban planning. It asks students why Washington was so revered, what the memorial was meant to say, and how ideas of a fitting design changed. Its activities have students list Washington's qualities and ask whether the monument reflects them, design a purely symbolic memorial to an American of their choice, and research a local memorial — who it honours, who pushed for it, how its design and site were chosen, and whether the person is still seen as a hero.

Sources

Based on "The Washington Monument: Tribute in Stone," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Stephanie A. Kopin, published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson draws on the National Register nomination for the monument, the park's visitor guide, Frederick L. Harvey's History of the Washington Monument and Washington National Monument Society (1903), House Report no. 485 (43rd Congress), and Louis D. Torres's history of the Corps of Engineers' work on the monument (1984).

• The source spells the pope's name "Puis IX"; corrected to Pius IX.
• The source's transcription of the 1783 resolution's inscription reads "liberty, sovereignty, and liberty"; it is not quoted here.
• The visitor figure of more than 800,000 a year is the lesson's, as of its writing.