In 1979, the National Museum of African Art became part of the Smithsonian Institution and opened on the Mall in 1987. Warren M. Robbins founded the Museum in the Frederick Douglass House in Washington, DC and collected over 8,000 pieces of African…

Popularly known as "the Castle," the Smithsonian Institution's original building opened in 1855 and was the first museum on the Mall. James Renwick Jr designed the building in a Gothic Revival style with red sandstone from Seneca Creek, Maryland. The…

Founded in 1906, the Freer became the first Smithsonian museum dedicated to Asian art. Charles Freer donated his collection of nearly 10,000 works of Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Indian objects and American art for this new museum.…

Established in 1966 as part of the Smithsonian Institution, the Hirshhorn collects and exhibits modern and contemporary art building on founder Joseph Hirshhorn's collection of 6,000 art works. Hirshhorn was a Latvian immigrant to the United States.…

Opened in 2004 after nearly 15 years of planning and negotiations, the National Museum of the American Indian holds nearly 800,000 objects of cultural and historical significance. A photographic archive holds an additional 125,000 images. Congress…

Originally opened in 1964 as the Museum of History and Technology, the National Museum of American History holds more than three million culturally and historically important objects on display and in its archives, including the original…

Robey's slave pen, like its neighbor at the Yellow House, was a holding pen for slaves intended for auction. Brought in from surrounding areas, the slaves were subjected to brutal conditions before their sale and were marched through the streets of…

A private home owned by William H. Williams, the Yellow House was one of two notorious slave holding pens in Washington, DC. The two-story home housed slaves temporarily in the basement; traders removed them to the yard on auction day for the…

Built between 1904 and 1908 to house the US Department of Agriculture, the Whitten Building is the only non-public structure on the National Mall. The Whitten building is joined to the South Building by a pedestrian bridge over Independence Avenue.…

The Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station was built in 1873, over the old Tiber Creek and Washington City Canal waterway on the present-day site of the National Gallery of Art. Building contractors sank 35-foot piles to secure the foundation of the…