One of the most recent and most impressive monuments in Washington, D.C. is in fact nearly two centuries old. Three miles east of the Capitol, the U.S. National Arboretum’s 444 densely planted acres fall away from Mount Hamilton to open out into a great meadow, and there, silhouetted against a curtain of dark, blue-green beech trees, stands a choir of 22 massive sandstone pillars. Mysterious and beautiful, the 30-foot-high, ten-ton shafts might be some relic of classical antiquity. But they were born right near here, for a while they held up the east front of the Capitol building, and for nearly 30 years, they were rubbish.

William Thornton’s original 1793 design for the Capitol called for a dozen columns to front the east-central portico. His successor, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, redesigned the east front and doubled the line of columns, but it wasn’t until the 1820s that the stone for them was quarried on a government-owned island in nearby Aquia Creek, Virginia. They went up between 1824 and 1826 and formed a suitably stately backdrop for presidential inaugurations from Jackson to Eisenhower.

In 1958, the Capitol underwent extensive restoration. In the process, the columns were removed, examined—and declared too fragile to return to their duty. Instead, they were dumped in a plant nursery in southeast Washington and left to molder.

These derelict pillars of history eventually attracted the attention of Ethel S. Garrett, who was prominent in the city’s social and cultural circles. She embarked on what became a 25-year crusade to see the columns properly restored and put on display. The arboretum, founded in 1927 to conduct research on trees and shrubs as well as to educate the public, seemed a natural home for the columns, and a government commission authorized their transfer there in 1973. Even so, it was slow going; it took Garrett eleven years—and the help of Vice President George Bush, whose parents had been friends of her family when he was a child in Washington—to secure the private financing necessary to move them.

The task of designing the columns’ new setting fell to the English landscape designer Russell Page. His first choice was atop Mount Hamilton, the arboretum’s highest point. But this would have meant the wholesale removal of trees, and in the end he discovered that the great meadow setting would be even more dramatic.

The pillars stand today following Page’s final scheme. Cleaned of 35 layers of old white paint and reinforced with 18-inch steel pins, 22 of them are arranged on a simple stone platform at the crest of a low hill, echoing their original arrangement on the Capitol and very white and strong against their backdrop of seventy-foot-tall beeches.

Marble slabs that were once the steps up the Senate side of the Capitol now are a set of stairs descending from the columns to a reflecting pool. Additional slabs form the floor where Page had thyme planted