These young Pages participate in a snowball fight on the Capitol grounds. The Congressional Page program began during the 20th Congress (1827-1829). In the early 1900s, Pages, also called messengers, were generally local Washington children, many of…

Although most of the office buildings constructed on the Mall to house war department offices during World War I and II had been removed by the 1960s, a row of buildings from 1918 still stood in the space between Constitution Avenue and the…

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson had flocks of sheep on the White House lawn. Although previous presidents had kept farm animals as pets, these sheep were part of a Presidential initiative to support the war effort. The sheep grazed on…

This photograph was taken around 1890, when the Mall was landscaped according to a design by Andrew Jackson Downing. Rather than the wide open lawn edged with trees we see today, this section of the Mall was covered in small evergreens with a winding…

The same storm system which contributed to the Johnstown Flood in June 1889 also caused flooding in Washington, DC. This map detail shows the extent to which the flooding affected the National Mall. The dark blue lines show the edges of the flooding;…

This program cover for the 1913 March shows a woman dressed as a knight, carrying the banner of "Votes for Women" upon her white steed. The Capitol is shown in the background. On the day of the Suffrage Parade over 5,000 mostly female marchers…

The first airplane carrying US mail left the Washington Polo Grounds, now in West Potomac Park, on May 15, 1918. The US Post Office Department created air mail service to speed up the delivery of mail traveling between Washington, Philadelphia, and…

Even before the Tidal Basin was constructed, planners proposed to use it as a recreational bathing beach. On August 24, 1918, the Tidal Basin bathing beach officially opened with a water carnival. Diving competitions, swimming competitions, and canoe…

In 1902 the Senate Park Commission announced a plan to renovate the National Mall. Named after the committee chair, Senator James McMillan, the McMillan Plan redesigned the layout of the Mall from a system of informal gardens to today's streamlined,…

The first performance at the Sylvan Theatre on the Washington Monument grounds took place on the evening of June 2, 1917. Artist and philanthropist Alice Pike Barney Hemmick founded the theater, believing that Washington needed a nationally supported…