Washington D.C. may be America’s capital but it was designed by a French man. It wasn’t always our nation’s capital either. In fact, there are nine other cities that bear that honor. In 1774, representatives from the 13 colonies met in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress. Baltimore; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; York, Pennsylvania; and College Hall in Philadelphia were also places that Congress met to handle the country’s business. Congress convened in Princeton, New Jersey; Annapolis, Maryland; Trenton, New Jersey; and New York, as well.
On July 16, 1790, Washington D.C. came into being when an act establishing the temporary and permanent seat of the Government of the United States, was signed into law. It was then President George Washington who chose its location and Pierre-Charles L’Enfant who designed the framework of the city.
L’Enfant was born in France in 1754 and grew up to be an architect and an engineer. He came to America when he was 22 and served as an officer in the Corps of Engineers of the Continental Army. In 1790, Washington asked L’Enfant to survey the land that would become the seat of government and get back to him. L’Enfant arrived in March of 1791 and by August he had a plan, which he presented to Washington. The plan was approved but there were many disagreements about how to acquire the land and how big the lots of land should be. L’Enfant eventually resigned from the project.
For more than 100 years, Washington D.C. remained a work in progress – very slow progress. So slow that cows could be found grazing on the mall (which was basically nothing more than a park) well into the 1800s. In 1901, the Senate formed the McMillan Commission, a team made up of architects and planners, to finish the job. They stuck with L’Enfant’s original framework to create the capital of the United States as it stands today.
