Henry Latrobe, an architect of the US Capitol, was also the chief engineer of the Washington City Canal. He prepared drawings of the canal locks in 1810, before construction began. The Canal was about one mile long and passed in front of the Capitol.…

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 lockkeeper's house at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue is a reminder that canals once flowed through Washington, DC. Between 1835 and 1855, a lockkeeper served the lock that connected the Washington branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to…

This map shows a plan for the National Mall which featured gardens, parks, winding paths, and the existing canal. Before the McMillan Commission's proposed redesign of the Mall in 1902, the space was much more pastoral in look and feel.

Three-quarters of a century of a century after the founding of the city of Washington, Dr. Joseph Toner, an amateur historian of the District of Columbia, decided to find out who had owned the land of the nation's capital before the city was…

During the 1890s, archaeologists, geologists, and paleontologist affiliated with the Smithsonian began extensive excavations in stone quarries dotting the land in the District of Columbia. "The spot now the political center of the nation was, in…

Solomon Northrup, a free African American from New York, arrived in Washington in 1841 in the company of two white men who had promised him a job as a fiddler. After a day touring the Capitol and White House Grounds, the men drugged him and handed…

In September 1888 a tornado, called a cyclone by the press, touched down on Maryland Avenue SW. It damaged the roofs of the National Museum and the Fish Commission buildings. Just north of the Fish Commission buildings, a group of houses and…

In 1607, English colonists established the Jamestown settlement in Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Captain John Smith and a small party of colonists explored and mapped the Chesapeake Bay, its rivers, and the surrounding lands. The map…

A bear, an eagle, badgers, and buffaloes comprised the original exhibition of the Department of Living Animals on the south side of the Smithsonian Institution Building. Opened to the public in 1887, the Department's live exhibits gave Smithsonian…