Georgetown and the City of Washington the Capital of the United States of America
J.H. Colton & Co.
[New York], 1856
Similar to Austin, Texas, Washington, D.C., was a planned city constructed specifically to serve as its nation’s capital. Congress passed the Residence Act on July 16, 1790, which created a permanent seat of government for the United States to be situated on the Potomac River.[1] Again like Austin, the idea of westward expansion played a role in the capital’s location. President George Washington personally selected the site, calling it “the gateway to the interior” because he aspired to link the expanding U.S. western territories to the East Coast.[2]
Land for the capital was ceded to the federal government by Maryland and Virginia to create the District of Columbia. Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker, a free Black man, surveyed the city, a ten-mile square as prescribed by the Residence Act. The government entrusted the task of designing the capital’s layout to Pierre L’Enfant, a French-born artist and engineer who became an American citizen. Washington described him as a “‘scientific man,’ of taste, whose ‘professional knowledge’ for directing large-scale public works was unsurpassed.”[3] Writing to Washington in an attempt to earn the commission as the city’s designer, L’Enfant proposed that the capital “Should be drawn on such a Scale as to leave room for that aggrandisement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.”[4]
This map appeared in J.H. Colton’s Atlas of the World, the notable mapmaker’s first attempt at producing an atlas that had a print run of over thirty years.[5] Several landmarks familiar to modern viewers appear on the map, including the White House (labeled President’s House), Lafayette Square, and the National Mall. It also locates the National Observatory and the Navy Yard; numerous government agencies; and an arsenal, penitentiary, asylum, hospital, “poor house,” and statues of famous Americans. The map is surrounded by an intricate, decorative border familiar to Colton’s work, with illustrations of the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, and the Smithsonian Institution in three of its corners.
Despite the original plan for a ten-mile square, Washington’s limits in 1856 stretched only to the banks of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, covering an area of 69 square miles. The 31-square mile portion of the District that Virginia had ceded was returned to the state in 1846 after citizens in Alexandria voted to leave, and a retrocession agreement was brokered.[6] To the northwest of the capital sits Georgetown, which was established in 1751. It merged into the District of Columbia in 1871 and was annexed by Washington, D.C., in 1878.[7]
The city is divided into seven numbered wards for administrative purposes. It includes a distinctive road system modeled after great European cities that stands out on Colton’s map. L’enfant designed the roads within the constraints of Thomas Jefferson’s grid-like plan, with a nod to his own Baroque training. His addition of diagonal streets helped to both highlight and link the most important federal buildings. The most famous of these is Pennsylvania Avenue, which provides a direct route from the White House to the Capitol. Invoking his predictions of “aggrandisement and embellishment” that would come with the city’s growth, these roads also served to bridge the earliest settlements with those that came later, stimulating future expansion.[8]
[1] A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875, Statutes at Large, 1st Congress, 2nd Session, 130. (https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=253, accessed March 30, 2021.)
[2] Jeanne Mason Fogle, “Washington, D.C.,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 17 January 2020. (https://www.britannica.com/place/Washington-DC/History, accessed March 30, 2021.)
[3] C.M. Harris, “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream: Politics, Design, and the Founding of the National Capital,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 56, №3 (Jul. 1999): 539. (www.jstor.org/stable/2674560, accessed April 1, 2021.)
[4] Colton’s Atlas of the World…, Stanford University Libraries. (https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10449321, accessed March 30, 2021.)
[5] Mark David Richards, “The Debates over the Retrocession of the District of Columbia, 1801–2004,” Washington History Spring/Summer 2004, 55. (https://www.dchistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Debates-over-Retrocession-of-DC-1801-2004-by-Mark-David-Richards-16-1.pdf, accessed March 30, 2021.)
[6] Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Georgetown,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1 May 2017. (https://www.britannica.com/place/Georgetown-district-Washington-DC, accessed March 30, 2021.)
[7] C.M. Harris, “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream,” 541.
