This photograph was taken from the roof of the Smithsonian Castle around 1886. The small building on the left between the Smithsonian and the Washington Monument is the old Department of Agriculture Building, with its formal garden to the right…

This photograph was taken from the top of the Washington Monument in 1942. The Smithsonian Castle and National Museum of Natural History are visible in the middle of the picture. In the 1930s, the trees on the Mall were removed and rows of American…

This team made up of workers from various garages in the city had just won a baseball game against the Employee's recreation association team when their photo was taken. They were one of many teams who played baseball on the National Mall during…

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…

This baseball game was probably a match between women who worked for various government offices related to World War I. An organization called the War Camp Community Service organized sports activities and teams for soldiers and for government…

The Philadelphia Athletics Baseball Club played the Washington Nationals Baseball Club on the Ellipse, just south of the White House, in a special game on August 28, 1865. Thousands of locals, including President Andrew Johnson and his family, paid…

In August 1865 the Washington Nationals Baseball Club invited the Philadelphia Athletics and the Brooklyn Atlantics to come and play in what was billed as a tournament. The Nationals constructed stands for spectators on their home turf just south of…

Walt Whitman regularly visited wounded soldiers recovering in hospitals during the Civil War in the Washington area. While consoling patients, Whitman also wrote down many observations during his hospital visits. This article publishes excerpts from…