Main Street Of America (February 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 2)

Main Street Of America

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Authors: Mary Cable

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February 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 2

O n cold, foggy morning in March, 1791, a young French military engineer in the service of the United States government rode out on horseback to a stretch of farmland between the Potomac and Anacostia rivers to contemplate the wide sweep of boulevard he would cut through alder and blackberry bushes as the great ceremonial way of a nation. It would be, he wrote later in his imperfect English to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, ”… a grand and majestic avenue … as grand as it will be agreeable and convenient … and all along iicle of which may be placed play houses, room of assembly, ;iccadeinies and all such sort of places as may be attractive to the learned and afford diversion to the idle.” The young Frenchman, Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a veteran of the American Revolution, had been commissioned by President Washington to plan a Federal City on the banks of the Potomac, and this majestic: and convenient street was to be the grand thoroughfare of the new national capital.

The site, which was handsome in its natural state, had belonged to one Ffrands Pope, Esquire, who had received it from the English Crown. It was a large acreage on the site of the present city of Washington. Hc called his property Rome, and the creek that ran through it the ‘Filier. According to tradition, he also called the highest hill in the region the Capitoline, but this seems too pat to be true, particularly since it was not his hill but his neighbor’s. After he died and his land fell into the hands of persons not named Pope, his little joke no longer had a point. The plantation called Rome was broken up, and the Tiber came also to be known as Goose Creek because of its wild geese and other birds. The hill, in honor of some now-forgotten Mr. Jenkins, was called Jenkins’ Hill or Jenkins’ Heights; so it was still known in 1790, when Congress decided to build a new capital city somewhere between the falls of the Potomac and Alexandria, Virginia. George Washington, who was asked to choose the site, decided on the place where Pope had owned Rome oxer a hundred years earlier.

Although the notion of planning a brand-new capital city AVas unprecedented, there was already an applicant for the job. Two years before, while Congress was still mulling over the qualificaticns of various established cities, L’Enfant had written Washington:
No nation perhaps had ever before the opportunity offerd them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their Capital city should be fixed; or of combining every necessary consideration in the choice of situation; and altho’ the means now within the power of the country are not such as to pursue the design to any great extent it will be obvious that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandisement &