The Capitol Dome

"Dingy" or "Very Handsomely Furnished"? A Glimpse at a Congressional Boarding House, 1801 by Pamela Scott F rom First Lady Abigail Adams to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a handful of New Englanders—all Federalists—wrote family and friends about their early impressions and experiences in Washington. Between 1800 and 1805 fledgling communities were still developing around the President's House and Capitol to accommodate part-time legislators. Some of these correspondents were disenchanted with the city while others reassured their kinsmen that civilization was alive and well in the southern clime maligned in so many newspaper accounts. While all agreed on the capital city's beautiful setting, none realized its major faults as the national capital—wide-spread habitations and halting development—were largely caused by the actions of north- erners, including a Bostonian. 1 Capitol Hill's earliest major property developers—local resident Daniel Carroll of Duddington and English investor Thomas Law—lost fortunes in the collapse of the private real estate developments initiated in 1793 by James Greenleaf (fig. 1), a relative of Adams. Greenleaf took as partners Pennsylvanians Sen. Robert Morris and John Nicholson; their financial syndicate was bankrupt by 1795. Carroll and Law (also Federalists) largely ignored the pleas of federal officials in the mid-to- late 1790s to build private accommodations and services on Capitol Hill or Congress would not leave Philadelphia. In the view of these Washing- tonians, until Congress agreed to guarantee loans to complete the public buildings—and to appropriate monies to continue their erection—the future of the Federal City was uncertain at best. Neither Carroll nor Law was about to throw good money after bad. At the same time, Congress was monitoring the progress of both public and private build- ings in Washington. Although the Residence Act of 1790 decreed a site on the north shore of the Potomac River would become the national capital in December 1800, the law could be repealed. Congress did act, and so did Carroll and Law. Together they immediately built a large hotel directly east of the Capitol while Carroll independently erected substantial boarding houses and a hotel—Carroll Row—on the site of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Law turned his own house on New Jersey Avenue SE into a hotel and quickly built several structures, some to accommodate small businesses. 2 On 4 July 1800, Wolcott wrote his wife that unless Members of Congress "will consent to live like scholars in a college, or monks in a monastery, crowded ten or twenty in one house, and utterly secluded from society" to be near the Capitol, they had better find lodgings in Georgetown. Fig. 1. James Greenleaf by Gilbert Stuart, 1795. The painting, owned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has hung in the Pennsylvania Capitol for many years. 24 THE CAPITOL DOME DETROIT PUBLISHING COMPANY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPH DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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