In this passage, Margaret Bayard Smith describes the Mall as it was when she first arrived in Washington in 1800, a plain covered in trees, shrubs, and flowers. By the time she wrote this passage in 1837, the banks of the Tiber had been transformed…
This elm tree, called the Jefferson elm, is one of the original 300 elm trees planted on the National Mall in the 1930s. At the same time these trees were planted, Dutch Elm disease appeared in the United States and infected native American elms.…
In the 1930s, the National Park Service moved forward with a plan to remove trees on the Mall and replace them with rows of American Elms. Katherine Rowland worked in an office near the Mall and wrote to the editors of the Washington Post to protest…
Andrew J. Downing presented this proposal for a landscape design of the National Mall to President Millard Fillmore in February 1851. He incorporated the Capitol's western front (left) and White House grounds (right), fulfilling Pierre L'Enfant's…
In 1840, Secretary of War Joel Poinsett commissioned Robert Mills to create a plan for the recently proposed Smithsonian Institution's building and the grounds from the Capitol to the future site of the Washington Monument. Mills broke the Mall into…
One of the highest floods to hit Washington, DC, occurred on March 20, 1936. Flood waters crested at the Key Bridge at 18.5 feet. Around the Mall, much of East and West Potomac Parks were underwater, and some cherry trees were killed. Advance warning…
In 1870 the Army Corps of Engineers, headed by Major Nathaniel Michler, began dredging the Potomac to remove silt and improve ship traffic. Dredged material was dumped into the tidal flats along the Washington waterfront. In 1875 the project was…
On Saturday, September 16, 1843, a violent storm caused the rivers feeding into the Potomac to rise dramatically. The resulting water levels were higher than anyone could remember. When the Potomac River and Washington Canal overflowed their banks,…
The mud flats and marshland to the west of the Washington Monument (on the left side of this image) were called the Potomac Flats for most of the 1800s. In 1870, the Army Corps of Engineers began dredging the Potomac to remove silt and to deepen the…
The Babcock Lakes, located west of the Washington Monument, served as spawning pools for the US Fish Commission. Mandated to remedy decreases in the availability of commercial fish in America, the Commission used Babcock Lakes to breed Eurasian Carp,…